The Three Questions with Andy Richter - Dan Savage

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

Writer, podcaster, and activist Dan Savage ("Savage Love") joins Andy Richter for a funny and moving conversation. They discuss the columns that inspired "Savage Love," his unique approach to giving advice, his Catholic upbringing, his memories of hearing Harvey Milk speak as a thirteen-year-old, his coming out story, the challenge of keeping up with new celebrity names, and more.Do you want to talk to Andy live on SiriusXM’s Conan O’Brien Radio? Leave a voicemail at 855-266-2604 or fill out our Google Form at BIT.LY/CALLANDYRICHTER. Listen to "The Andy Richter Call-In Show" every Wednesday at 1pm Pacific on SiriusXM's Conan O'Brien Channel. 

Hey everybody, welcome back to The Three Questions. I am your host, Andy Richter, and this week I am here with Dan Savage. You all know Dan, he's a writer, podcaster, activist, and advice giver. He's a real know-it-all. His Savage Love column has been read across the world since 1991. I've been reading it since then. And along with his husband, Terry Millard, Dan began the It Gets Better project to help prevent suicide among LGBT youth. His Savage Love cast is available wherever you find your podcasts. And before my conversation with Dan,

I wanna thank everyone who's called in to the Andy Richter Collins show so far. If you wanna be a part of this new show, it's really fun and you should. You can find more information in the description of this episode. And now, here is my conversation with the wonderful Dan Savage. Can't you tell my love? This is a, this is a quid pro quo sort of podcast today because I am talking to the, the wonderful and insightful and funny and wise Dan Savage, who has been gracing us all with his filthy, filthy knowledge for years and

years. And I was, I was, I was lucky enough to be on your podcast just recently dispensing advice, which I fucking love to do. It's like that for anyone with even the slightest bit of ego problem is just like the most delicious candy there is. I have been writing Savage Love, my advice column for 33 years and like Anne Landers, they're going to have to pry it out of my cold head and dead hands one day, I'm going to write it on my deathbed.

It's a sweet, sweet gig. Yeah. Given sex and relationship advice. Now, do you think, because I, you know, I of course project myself into everyone else's shoes because I'm very Christ-like. Or is that reverse Christ-like? I'm not sure. But at any rate, do you feel like sometimes it gives you an unrealistic view of your own sort of wisdom and savvy?

Oh, no, because advice columns were kind of the original interactive media. Advice columns were doing what blogs and social media now do, a hundred years before blogs and social media came along. You write some advice and instantly everyone who disagrees with you would jump in and write you a letter and tear you a new asshole. And you know, I really did model my column consciously on Anne Landers in the Southern Times where I grew up in Chicago and Xavier Hollander's column in Penthouse Magazine.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like she would print letters from people who disagreed with her and every once in a while she would say, you know what, you guys are right, I'm wrong. And she would retract it. And it was this dialogue with the readers that you wouldn't see in the media and it was this dialogue with the readers that you wouldn't see in the media in a big way anywhere else, but this kind of low brow genre writing of the advice column that was kind of an embarrassment. Really, like the New York Times 30 years ago had no advice columns.

Now they have 40 advice columns in the New York Times. So the genre really came into its own, I think, and became sort of legitimized after blogging and that kind of interacting between the writer and the reader directly, as opposed through the like, the tongs of the editorial page and the letters to the editor, which was, you know, the writer was insulated from the opinions of the readers,

really, and didn't get to respond. And in a vice column, you have to engage and respond. So no, I don't get full of myself. So you don't get full of yourself because you don't get full yourself. My second, my first column, I got a letter saying, oh my God, you're such a fucking dumb ass. That would be the time to do it at the first one. Not, you know,

Oh yeah. Let me tell you about the time I put the clitoris in the wrong place. It happens all the time. And then it's like for weeks, my wife can't find it because we've put it in the wrong place. It's not on the soft palate. I it's like for weeks, my wife can't find it because we've put it in the wrong place. It's not on the soft palate. I that's where mine is. I just assumed that was true for everybody.

That's, that's a plot point from Deep Throat. I'm sorry. That's a, that's a different thing altogether. No, did, I'm just curious because you said she would, uh, accept when she was wrong. Was that just Xavier Hollander or did Ann Landers ever admit? Oh no, Ann Landers all the time. Her catchphrase.

Actually, let me grab a book. I have it right behind me. I literally have the complete works of Ann Landers. Wow. Ann Landers' Encyclopedia A to Z. It's in three volumes. Her catchphrase when she was wrong was 50 lashes with a wet noodle that she was going to take her wax. And yeah, she printed letters all the time from people who disagreed with her. And where do you fall on the Ann Landers versus Dear Abby?

Because Dear Abby was the one that was in our paper. Chicago sometimes was the Democrat working class paper, the tabloid. Yeah, see, we were Tribune and I think Dear Abby was in the Tribune. And Dear Abby was in the Tribune, the tabloid. Yeah, see, we were Tribune, and I think Dear Abby was in the Tribune. And Dear Abby was in the Tribune, the Republican Tribune, so... Yeah. It was Anne Landers for me and my family. But, I mean, did you have any opinion of Abby,

or was it just that you didn't... weren't exposed to Dear Abby? Well, I didn't imprint on Dear Abby in the same way. Like, Anne Landers was what I was reading when I was learning to read as a child. Right. Kids would look at the paper and you'd read the funny pages and then you kind of graduate to Anne Landers, which gave you this window into the world of adult relationships.

Right. Not as like completely x-ray a window as the window I give people into the world of adult relationships and on the love cast., yeah, I don't know. I began to read Abby, but it didn't imprint on Abby. Abby was a much archer, her tone, Abby was slayer and wittier and probably the better writer, but it was Ann Landers who, you know, I'm team Ann Landers.

Yeah, yeah. A brighter dark. I just remember being blown, It was Ann Landers who, you know, I'm team Ann Landers. Yeah, yeah. Rider Dive. I just, I was, I just remember being blown, my mind being blown that they were sisters, that have all that, you know, like two sisters could somehow finagle a cornering of the market on this kind of stuff, you know. They really did. And people now forget, because the minute you stop writing and you're dead, people forget you existed. Like nobody remembers Mike Greico anymore.

Studs Terkel. Studs Terkel and Landers. Her column was in like 2000 daily papers across the United States. When every little town had its own daily paper, residents would come to her apartment to like try to get her endorsement, get her on board. She was hugely politically and culturally important in a way that no one ever will be again because of the fracturing media. And I think that's to the better, like more voices are heard, more people are served by our atomized media now. But to think of the kind of, and the and landers and her sister, I heard years ago that Nicole Portman was making a movie about them where she played both of them.

So they were identical twin sisters, but I never heard about the movie coming out. Wait, you said Nicole Portman. Do you mean Natalie Portman? Or Natalie Portman, I'm sorry. Yeah, Natalie Portman. Cause I thought maybe you meant Nicole Kidman. No, Natalie.

Yeah, Natalie Portman. That would be awesome. 50 Lashes with a Wet Noodle, I got that wrong. But Anne, there was an advice column in the Sun Times named Anne Landers and she was quitting, whoever was writing it on staff left and the Sun Times invited people to audition and send in like some sample columns

and Anne Landers sent them in and got the job. And then her column took off. And then her sister decided to like start a rival column that would run because every day every paper every city had multiple daily newspapers that were in competition so her sister created a column and for decades they didn't speak to each other. Wow oh and I also want one question that crossed my mind is because it's something that I've noticed about just the internet and just social media,

it has empowered people to be much more sort of grounded in their self-assuredness that they're right. You know, like you just, there's so many people online who just make these pronouncements where you're just like, who the fuck are you to be saying this stuff? And you have a track record, like you've been doing this a while

and you've been doing it thoughtfully. And I'm sure that you, you know, it's not like you just make stuff up off the top of your head. You are well-researched, you know, you take this seriously. Do you think that that kind of undercuts somebody like in a position like yours where you are meant to dispense learned advice, you know, when there's just like everybody spouting off everywhere?

Yeah, there's an expression, uh, the right, uh, God, what is his name? Neil from Chicago sometimes, he's a terrific columnist. If he was a columnist, like New York Times, he'd be a national figure. The internet means every, and this is something Samuel Johnson said about newspapers 300 years ago, and letters to newspapers and blind items and anonymous stories that the print gave every kitten a whip.

And it wasn't until social media came along where everybody suddenly had the whip hand in this way that you gotta, you gotta tune it out. Yeah, that's all you can, that's all you can do about it. And with it, I've been through the ringer a few times and been the main character on Twitter a couple of days in a row once or twice. And my advice, I always reach out to people that I know or I'm friends of friends of friends. And I know them like two or three degrees of separation

when it's their turn in the barrel and they're getting attacked on Twitter. And I always just tell them, go to a movie, take a day off. Don't reach your mentions where people are blowing up at you and being assholes. If somebody says when you're in fourth grade, meet me on the playground. I'm going to beat the shit out of you. You don't go to the playground. And when everyone's turning up on social media and saying, meet me on social media,

I'm going to beat the shit out of you. Don't show up to get punched in the face. Yeah. Yeah. Like it'll be over in 48 hours. To beat me. Yeah. Yeah.

Go to a movie, go to a movie, turn off your mentions. People are like, Oh, my mentions. Look, everyone's being so mean to me. It's like, you're carrying the ball, the final 50 yards. Right. By reading your mentions today. Yeah. Don't read your mentions today.

And I learned that writing my column and doing my podcast pretty early on when to turn it off and not pay attention. And a lot of people, yeah, like social media has really empowered some of the worst people in the world to be the most, to be the loudest and most frequent posters. Yeah. And trolls. Well, I think, I think, oh yeah, absolutely. And I think too that it's different now. Like I know, like when Twitter was the thing, and then there were, and especially it was like a few

election cycles ago, there were either, and they were all comedians who sort of turned politics into kind of a gimmick for them, whether they were right-wing or left-wing. And I would, they would, because I'm, you know, I used to be more political online than I am now, but they would try and pick fights with me and people would say,

hey, did you hear what so-and-so said about you over? And occasionally I'd go listen to what they said, but I just realized like, oh, they just want me to provide them, like they have to do this every day for at least an hour. And they're just looking for some, they're basically, this is how they book guests by insulting people on Twitter and saying, you know, you're, you know, you're a, a Neo lib or you're, you know, you're a communist or, you know, Can I name check really quickly the columnist for the Chicago sometimes that I sure I smoke

a lot of pot brain farted Neil Steinberg. He's a great Metro columnist in the style of Mike Royko and the old Metro columnist. And again, and he every, every goddamn day is his website and he's great. And I just wanted to like get that on the record. If you've already sent the email, sorry. You and I are both Chicagoans of a similar age. And in fact, I think we may have been at U of I

at the same time, because I was there from 88 to 90, which sounds like maybe when you were closing out your time. I think I'm a little older than you because I was there from 84 to 88. Oh, okay. Yep. Then yeah, because yeah, you're two, I think you're two years older than me. But so I was, that's what I was thinking.

We're that age though, where we're both upset constantly when we find out we're older than people that we thought were older than us. Oh, I can't stand it. I can't stand it. And now it's like, now, I mean, all goes well. We're going to have a president that's only two years older than me. And for you, I guess, probably the same age. Yeah.

Wow. I don't like that. I don't like that. I don't like it. I don't like Supreme Court justices who are younger and terrible. Conservatives are going to be there for 40 years. I don't like that. I don't like, I don't like Supreme Court justices who are younger and terrible. Conservatives are going to be there for 40 years. I don't like that. My doctor now is 30 years younger than I. Like I just, this stuff makes me nervous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. And that's also too, the thing. And it, you know, and it's boo-hoo for us, but because it happens to everybody, but

it's like the people that give me work now are a lot of them are 20 years younger than me. And that's where I'm kind of like, Oh my God, this is, you know, because especially when you're, you're dealing with sort of like what's funny and it's kind of like, Oh, you know, what's funny. You little fucking pipsqueak. You know what I think is constantly like, you see these memes go around where somebody shows their parents, their boomer parents, pictures of people who are famous right now. And they don't know who they are. And it's like, Hey, I'm still carrying like Hathorne Hepburn around in my head and Jimmy Stewart. Like I have all these famous people.

I think your brain has a certain capacity for remembering famous people. And then you hit a certain limit and there's no room for more. My celebrity brain memory storage space can't take in the Kardashians. It can't take in, I don't know. I can't even name the people I can't name. Reality stars.

Like there's all these reality stars and I'll see a picture of someone online and there'll be like some cryptic comment that gets nine million likes. I'm like I don't even know who the fuck that is and I find out it's you know Joey from Paradise Cove or something like that. Every time I see one of those memes where they're showing the parents the pictures of like Kim Patrice they have no idea who she is. I want the parents to turn around and show them a picture of Joan Fontaine. Yeah, Gavin McCloud.

You're the idiot, Gavin McCloud, you're the idiot. Gabe Kaplan, who's this? Yeah, no, Conan and I started to notice it towards the end of the TBS show, where we just, you know, in bullshitting around, would mention somebody like Gavin McCloud and the audience would just be like crickets. Like, oh my God, they don't know

who fucking Gavin McCloud is. Okay, you know. Mary Tyler Moore show. I know who Gavin McCloud is. Poor Gavin McCloud, but you know. I know why Gavin McCloud was bald. Why is my, why do I remember that? And I'm always having to ask my husband what our goddamn zip code is.

Cause how often do you send mail to yourself? But I know why Gavin McLeod is bald or was. Why is he bald? Because he was in a college production of some show where they put this like goo in his hair to make it slick and lie down. And it, he liked how it looked so much. He left it on for a few days and it killed his hair follicles and all his hair. No shit.

That's crazy. Wow. That's amazing. Be careful, folks. Yeah, be careful. Yeah, yeah. Like the opposite of Rogaine, whatever that was he put on his head. I mean, that's what, you know, whenever any, because I've done well on Celebrity Jeopardy,

which first of all is easy Jeopardy. It's like the, you know, the softball Jeopardy. And people will compliment me and I'm just like, that just means I have lots of, I have a breadth of knowledge that's about an inch and a half deep. Like I know all kinds of ridiculous nonsense, but it's does no good. You know, it's not really that useful for anything. I can't, you know, I can't even have an advice column. Uh, anybody can have an advice column.

The barrier to entry now is non-existent. You just start a sub stack, hang out your shingles, start an advice column or an advice podcast. Well, now you grew up Catholic in Chicago. Yeah. And, um, and was that, I mean, I, you know, I imagine that can be a very difficult thing for a gay man to do.

Uh. Yeah, it was, um, it was decades and it was a very long time ago and it was a different world. Um, my dad was an Irish Catholic cop. Um, my mom, uh, was a, was a, was a it was a very long time ago and it was a different world. My dad was an Irish Catholic cop. My mom was a housewife and they had four kids in four years. I've probably heard of Irish twins, which is two kids in a calendar year. And we were Irish quadruplets. Jesus Christ, slow down folks.

Yeah. My mom and dad actually went to a priest who said the Pope isn't going to pay for your Catholic education for all your kids. So you should probably start using birth control. And it was only that priest going rogue that convinced my mom to start using birth control. So my little sister was the end of that. That dynasty. Yeah, right.

And it was, you know, it's, it's hard. Now, one of the things I had to do is I, you know, came, went into my twenties and thirties was forgive my parents for not knowing what they couldn't know, because there was no information available to them. And when I was a little kid, decent, kind, loving, compassionate parents thought homosexuality was something a kid could drift toward. And if you thought your kid was drifting that way, you just kind of gave your kid a shove in the hopes your

kid would drift away from that. And so I got shoved a lot because they thought that that's what they were supposed to do. And like towards sports and- Towards sports are just- Outdoorsy things, manly things. I was just faggy. Like I was an effeminate little boy who wanted to let like hang out with my mom and didn't like sports or boys and wanted to hang out with the girls. And yeah, and they kind of would kind of shove me and toward like little league, which was incredibly traumatic. And I cried my way off little league finally.

And Boy Scouts where I just thought all the boys were so gross and mean and horrible when the adults weren't paying attention that I didn't ever refuse to go. Like that boy universe of competition and aggression and demonstrating affection for each other kind of by putting each other down or challenging each other, like gorilla stuff. Like I don't, I wanted to listen to musicals and dance around the living room, um, to manna la mancha. And yeah, there was a lot of, um, worry on their faces that I could see without being able to understand what they were worried about, what they were seeing in me that I wasn't seeing or understanding. And yeah. seeing in me that I wasn't seeing or understanding. And yeah, yeah. So like there wasn't Lee, there wasn't Google, there wasn't, you know, any online resources for parents of gay kids. There wasn't any information. Um, my dad thought Anita Bryant was right and was very vocal

about it. She was an anti-gay crusader. I remember. And so by then I was like 12 or 13 and I kind of knew I was gay. And what I was hearing was my father saying that gay adults are child rapists. And I'm sitting there at the dining room table and I'm a gay 13 year old and no one's touched me, so I wasn't raped or seduced into it. And at that, you know, there was that five years between like 13 and 18, where my parents would say, I love you to all the kids and to me, and I would think, no, you don't, you've told me you don't. And not so many words.

And to be like 13 at the moment, you most kind of need like the home base and your parents support and love and be able to take it for granted in that way that teenagers do where they push against it and to not have it or to doubt it every minute and to hide in this way was really kind of devastating. And then, oh my God, like 16 years old in Chicago and sneaking into gay bars at a time when Chicago cops like my dad were still raiding gay bars and not being able in the way my brothers and sister could do and fight in my parents about the things the people that I was dating or meeting were telling me. My sister could go to my mom and say, my boyfriend says if I really loved him, we wouldn't have

to use a condom. And my mom would tell my dad who would then go kill my sister's boyfriend. And I couldn't go to my mom and say, I'm 17 years old and this 28 year old man I met in a bar that I've been dating dot dot dot. And so I didn't have my parents there to say anybody who's dating you when you're 17 years, 27 doesn't have your best interests at heart. What are you doing? And that's how a lot of queer kids can get into trouble when they don't have a supportive, involved, interfering parent that all kids kind of need at that age. Yeah. It's very hard because, I mean, not in this

particular instance, but looking back on just different, you know, 50s parents and the mistakes that they made. And, you know, in my own sort of life, there's things that I just think I can't, and especially when I became a parent, that's when your eyes are just pried open to a bunch of stuff that you just think, holy shit, they, you know, how did anybody let that happen? Yeah. And, and there is a part of me that, that says

like, you, like, you can't fault people for information they didn't have. But then again, there were other parents at the time who were ahead of the curve, who were pressured, were ahead of the curve. And I, you know, and I guess it's possibly not fair to expect fifties people who are fairly unexam, self-examined to be ahead of the curve. But boy, it would have been nice, you know, for you, for sure.

You know, there come, did you ever feel acceptance? Like when you came out? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My family has been great. My mom, you know, had the summer of her discontent about it and came around and came out swinging. We were Jesuit-educated Catholic kids, went to Jesuit schools, and my parents

were raised in very, very dysfunctional homes where children were to be seen and not heard. And together, one of the things to their credit was they encouraged their kids to talk. And we would all talk at the dining table and we could disagree with our parents and arguing was what we did. And you had to like muster the argument. You had to make the argument to make the case, but you could disagree with mom and dad. And I remember screaming fights, the dining table about Richard Nixon, uh, because my dad was, us kids were like, we hate the president.

My dad's like, you have to respect the president. My dad's an Irish Catholic. Yeah. And so when I came out, I came out fighting for myself in the way that I had been raised to like, make my case. And that was hard for my mom in particular, because her big ask of me was like, I never wanted me to boyfriend.

And that was hard for me because our- That's a huge ass. Yeah. It's a, or not now. I can't not yet. I'm not ready. And that was awful because our house was the center of the universe. Like my parents had a big house, even though we rented and we were poor, we rented this house, but it was the Easter house, the Christmas house, the every confirmation, every christening baptism, it was our house, was the house. And we were by the church every morning when we went to, so it was our house. So to like have your boyfriend like not welcome was for yourself to feel not welcome. And I remember having, cause we were also,

when we were with our longer parents, we could be, we could use rough language from a place of love and respect, but rough. I had this screaming fight with my mother where my sister's boyfriend could come over and I, my boyfriend couldn't come over. And I was like, it's the mental images. Like my boyfriend, you're gonna meet my boyfriend and you're just

going to see me sucking his cock. But you Laura's boyfriend comes over and you don't see that. So whatever it is that you're doing in your head where you don't see Laura sucking her boyfriend's cock, even though you know, she does do that for my boyfriend. Why can't you do that for my boyfriend? And my mom said, uh, this was 40 years ago, the blow jobs your sister gives could lead to marriage and family and children. And the blow job you give leads to exactly nothing. And I said to my mom, and whose fault is that? And who made that

rule? It wasn't us. It was you. So, and like we had this screaming fight, which is actually on the Chicago L platform in front of other people. Wow. She came around like, because I won the argument. Like the boy, the problem with my boyfriend wasn't my boyfriend. It was her. It was her filthy mind. It was her inability to do that thing parents have to do and suspend your disbelief when you're interacting with your children's romantic partners, which is you just don't see it. You don't imagine what they, this person fucked me the shit out of your kid, right? Yeah. Like you can meet my boyfriend without thinking this man is sodomizing my son.

Like you don't have to think that. Yeah, right. Like this man is being nice to me and taking me out and we're hanging out. And he's kind to me and la la la la. And she got there, but she got there because I, and the sodomizing is lovely. It is. It's, it is lovely. Yes.

And she, but she got there because I insisted, and this is something I've said to a million queer people who've read my columns or listened to my podcast over the years that you, your parents, when you come out often will have a tantrum. My mom kind of had a tantrum. And the thing about all parents, as you know, yourself as a parent, tantrums never stop if they work. If you cave to tantrums, your kid is incentivized to keep having that tantrum to control you.

And when you come out as an adult or a teenager, like I did, and your parents have a tantrum to control you. Yes. And when you come out as an adult or a teenager, like I did, and your parents have a tantrum, you have to parent your parent at that moment and you can't give into the tantrum. And what I did when I was a teenager with my mother is like, I didn't give in to the tantrum she was having about me being gay and her worries about me being gay. You know, it was the eighties. Yeah. And it's a different time. Well, it's know, it was the 80s. Yeah. And it's a different time.

Well, it's a different time. And also, I mean, you know, for different reasons, I'm familiar with that concept of a tantruming parent. And it is really hard, though, sometimes because you have to, I should say, you know, when I've been in that situation, there definitely have been times. And as I've gotten older and less patient with, you know, like without, I become less patient with treating adults like children because I have actual children.

And, you know, and I, it's like, there's real kids around here, so fucking grow up and cut it out. Um, but they're, they're definitely part of the tantrum and part of what works is. While they're tantruming, they're also kind of giving off the message of, this is a lot of work to undo this. Like if you're going to try and dismantle this, it's going to be a lot of work on your part. Do you want to do that?

Or do you just want to shut up and get past this? And for so many years, it seemed like, you know what, I'm just going to shut up and get past this. And it seems like self preservation because you're, you're conserving your own energy, but then you are just, you're just subscribing to a recurring service. And there's a sword of Damocles hanging over your head because you just, you know, this is unresolved. And that anytime you attempt to resolve it, you think, ah, the opportunity costs here are so great

and it's not worth it. So I'm going to, you think, I mean, you're, I'm not going to deal with it, but what you're doing is I'm not going to, I'm going to delay having to deal with it. And it gets worse and worse and bigger and bigger over time. Can't you tell my love's a crow? I'm curious about something, you know, as it from parent to parent, because you guys were clustered, four kids clustered so close, I would, because my older kids are five years difference. And I was very glad that I, there was that

five year gap because it encouraged better and higher quality attention given to each individual. Yeah. Do you think that the clustering in those kids affected like the amount of sort of individual attention you got or was everything just kind of a group, you know, sort of, you know, processing activity? I want to thank the Chicago police department for requiring Chicago cops to live in the

city because it meant my family didn't white flight out to the suburbs with the rest of the Irish Catholic families for the most part from our neighborhood in Chicago when I was a kid. Right. And because we didn't white flight out to the suburbs, we didn't wind up isolated in some suburban tract home where it was just my parents having to like relay race through four kids. I grew up in a multi-generational household in a two flat apartment building on Glenwood Avenue in Chicago. And downstairs on the first floor, my grandparents and their

younger children who were some of them still teenagers, lived and then upstairs, my mom and dad and the four of us and others of my great uh, grandma's sisters and brothers had moved away, but stayed in the neighborhood and their older children who'd moved out had moved to other apartments down the block. So there were aunts, uncles, grandma's, uh, grandpa's great aunts, great uncles. And so we did not want for adult attention. And my parents were not overtaxed by having four kids who were, you know, at one point my mom had like two, three toddlers and an infant basically. Yeah. Like when the oldest was five, they were three other babies probably. Five or six, you know, like. And I've watched with kind of fascination as, you know, during the pandemic, but also during the economic crash, uh, 2008, as people moved back in with their parents and kind

of multi-generational household, which are still really normal for, you know, people of color and Latino and Hispanic people, but like not something that white ethnic people were really doing anymore or white people. As that came back by necessity, people rediscovered the value in that, in that parents having more hands, kids having more adults around. And that's how I grew up. So no, I didn't feel neglected because when my mom was like overtaxed, I could pop downstairs

and talk to my grandma, grandpa, even when I was two or three years old and, uh, see my aunts and uncles who were always around. And we felt very, like we were very protected and in this bubble and very well taken care of, even though we were, we didn't have much, nobody had much, but we had, we had a lot of, uh, love and a lot of hands on deck. That's really nice. Yeah. Because you do, it does kind of give you a feeling of safety, you had a lot of, uh, love and a lot of hands on deck. That's really nice. Yeah. Because you do, it does kind of give you a feeling of safety.

You know, I mean, I have a four, uh, you know, I have a four year old and she, and she's hasn't, you know, she's been very well loved her whole life, but she's still, if I were in the den and I go into the kitchen for more than 15 minutes, she starts to yell, you know, daddy, are you still home? You know, it's like, and I go into the kitchen for more than 15 minutes, she starts to yell, you know, daddy, are you still home? You know, it's like, and I will just, of course I can't, I'm like, no, I'm at the mall. You know, I have to be an asshole about it. Well, at least she's passed the object permanence problem. Like she knows daddy still exists. Right, right.

He's at home right now. Yeah. I am somewhat, well, you were in Germany for a little bit for a couple of years. Yeah. My ex-boyfriend, um, got a fellowship with the Western Montgomery in 1989 and we moved to West Berlin like nine months before the wall fell and we were there for six, seven months after it fell.

So I was in Berlin when the wall came down. Um, it was a crazy time to, to be in Germany. It's a little bit like being at the center of the. It was a crazy time to be in Germany. It's a little bit like being at the center of the universe. What a hopeful time that was too. Yeah. Things were going to be turned out. Did you work while you were in Berlin? I worked at the US Army School.

Oh really? I mean, I worked a lot of weird odd jobs with the expat black economy, but I applied to the US Army School and I had a residency permit because Germany was really far out in front on same couple rights then. So just because I was Peter's boyfriend, I got a residency. We had to go to an office and I had to look at Peter and say, okay, I'm sucking his dick. Can I have a residency permit and a work permit? They were like, yes, you can in German.

And I went to the US army school and they assumed I could speak German because of my work permit, which I could not do. And they, US army hired me to teach German to American kids at the US army school, a language I did not speak. Wow. So did you just fake it? Yeah. I would do my boyfriend spoke German.

So we would work on lesson plans every night and I would go in the next day and teach them as if I knew it. And I was teaching the kids and myself at the same time. Right, right. That's great. Well now tell people how Savage Love came about, how you writing,

cause it's such a great story about how you writing an advice column happened. And it's such a great story just in terms of how an off-handed remark can turn into something. Tim Keck, who was the founder of, co-founder of The Onion in Madison, Wisconsin, which is where Onion got started, had just sold The Onion and him and his girlfriend

and a few people from The Onion were moving to Seattle to start a newspaper. And I met him, he was a friend from work and he was telling me about the paper. and a few people from Union were moving to Seattle to start a newspaper. And I met him, we were a friend from work and he was telling me about the paper. And I said, you should have an advice column because everybody reads those. You see that Q&A format, you can't not read it.

And he said, great advice, write the advice column. And then we started joking because it was gonna be a straight newspaper, straight Alt Weekly. It became a really big Alt weekly with a national presence. But we began to joke before the paper even had its first issue. So I would be a gay guy giving sex advice in a straight newspaper to straight people. And I thought I would do it for like six months or a year. And the joke was I was going to treat straight people and straight sex with the same contempt and

revulsion that straight advice columnists had, you know, treated gay sex and gay relationships with historically. You know, Anne Landers wasn't great about gay stuff when I was a kid and I read that stuff growing up. Um, and I read, you know, Xavier Hollander, who was always great about gay stuff and Penthouse, but I also read the Playboy Advisor and my brother's Playboy magazines that I read for the articles. They did not. And they were very- You knew so much about stereos and cars back then.

I did, I did. Um, and, uh, yeah. And so the Playboy Advisor was really awful about gay people. And I thought, oh, I'm just going to be mean to straight people. It as a joke in this column and act like straight sex is disgusting and unnatural. And I wrote it as a joke. And then like straight people who'd never been treated like this in print

before loved it and really savage love. This is 35 years ago now was the first kind of sex in relationship or sex column where I let people use the language they actually use when they talked about sex with their friends in print. Cause it used to be, we're decades ago, you're going to write something in a newspaper about sex you had to kind of switch into kind of Sanskrit, a kind of, you know, very handily with, yeah. And you know, you could say in print and like some out there publications, you know, to perform fellatio or to explore all sex.

In Savage Love, you could say cock sucking or sucking dick, which is what people would say to each other, but not in print. And that's kind of what made the column explode at first was like, this was, no one had ever done something quite like this before in a daily or a weekly print publication. And yeah, I thought I would do it for a year. And I moved to Seattle for a little bit while my then boyfriend, now ex-boyfriend got a job on the road and we were going to move back to Berlin. And then we broke up and I got marooned in Seattle and then 35 years, but really fast. And yeah, I think that's one of the things that carves me out or makes

me feel very Irish Catholic. Like I stumbled into something that worked and something that paid the bills and you don't walk away from that thing just because it wasn't the thing you wanted to do like, Oh, this is like a going concern. Okay. This is what the universe is telling me I need to do. And it worked out. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know if you can believe this, but I did not dream of being a talk show sidekick when I was a little boy. Yeah, that sort of snuck up on me. But it worked out. It worked out and it was fucking awesome. And it's still, you know, I mean, it's still great. It's still, you know, I mean, it's still great. It's still, you know, it was absolutely magical.

You know, while you're doing it, you know, I'm a bitch all the time. So it's, you know, while I'm doing it, there's plenty of excuses, you know, excuses to be crabby about it. But now I'm just, it was such a wonderful thing to be able to do. Can I ask you a question about it?

Sure, of course you can. I love the show, I love to do on the show with Conan. Sometimes I would watch you and I think, this is an ironic, very like zoomed out, distant commentary though on the talk show sidekick we both grew up with, which was Ed McMahon, right? And there was a sly ironic reference in your performance to Ed McMahon.

Was that... I always just thought that was conscious and obvious. I'm just curious. I've never gotten to ask you this. I wanted to know if it was a conscious riff on your part. It wasn't... Uh, well, I... I mean, it kind of ended up being that. And that's... Most things that I do, I kind of go into them with the notion of, I'm not sure what this is,

but it will tell me what it is as I do it. And that was sort of what happened with that. I was asked to do that kind of role. And initially there was a part of me that was just, and I mean, I was young and ambitious and excited to be able to do television and then I would say I don't want to be Ed McMahon. Because to me Ed McMahon was just like he didn't get to do a lot.

He got to do Alpo commercials and sort of play within this very narrow definition of what he was. Kind of the slightly slow drunk, you know, was kind of, and people, and there was a lot of, a lot of the pattern in the comedy would be set up that there'd be somebody, a guest, a wisecracking guest, who would be talking to Johnny, who was clever and an equal, and then he'd point, you know,

and then there's this guy over here, this fucking clown, you know, this idiot. And early on, there were some people that, and mostly older people that kind of still would do that. And, and it was funny because the audience, you could just like whenever, and like Larry King used to shit on me and the audience would be like, no, no, no, no, don't do that. And, and I never was offended by it because my goal was to just be funny, you

know, to take the skills that I had and to sort of, uh, be grateful to somebody, to Conan for being secure enough to let somebody with a, as I've said before, with a similar skill set, sit right there next to him. That's not, there's not a lot of people. What I mean by this reference to Ed McMahon was this like, wink at his obsequiousness, right? But you weren't the butt of the joke and you held your own and there was this kind of puckishness and you were this chaos agent with your own drive and sometimes your own agency in there that McMahon never had.

And so you transcended the obsequiousness, but you winked at it a little bit. And I always really enjoyed that. If I agree, I'm watching Ed McMahon and Johnny Carson, of course, and I always enjoyed like, and I could see what you were doing there. Oh, thank you. Yeah, no, I'm not like a born troublemaker or anything, but I definitely...

If I get poked, I don't mind poking back is sort of what it is. And I'm just not gonna... And especially, nothing makes me go off like a cartoon thermometer, you know, read all the way up like a dumb person trying to get one over on me. That's like, you know, you dummy. So that's, you know, that's what does that. Now, how soon after you started the column, did it start to syndicate? Like a year of paper and- Cause I remember in Chicago, I think it was in the reader in Chicago.

Yeah, everywhere the column wound up, people in that town thought, oh, this is a, only in Chicago could someone write a column like this. Only in San Francisco. Cause everybody in these cities, it was before, you know, the internet and everything was kind of laterally connected or accessible to all of us everywhere at once. Yeah.

And so, yeah, went to Vancouver paper, picked it up in the paper in San Francisco, picked it up. Interestingly, um, the gay and lesbian Alliance against defamation, when the SF weekly picked up Savage love, we had a campaign to get my column taken out of the SF Weekly and they called my column a hate crime because I used the word faggot in it, in reference to myself. Because every letter would open with that. That's one of the reasons it made the column kind of famous at first was, and I thought,

you know, the idea, the animating idea then was like, queer nation and act up. It was 1990, 91 nation and act up. It was 1990, 91 when the column started. And the idea was we were all about reclaiming these words, using them ourselves, which would strip them of their power to wound. Because if I call myself a faggot and then you call me a faggot, who gives a shit, right? It also demonstrates, you know, some of the letters would be like, Hey faggot,

I love you and you're awesome. And I want some sex advice from you because you're really good at this. And then somebody else would say, Hey faggot, you know, some of the letters would be like, Hey faggot, I love you and you're awesome. And I want some sex advice from you because you're really good at this. And then somebody else would say, Hey faggot, you're a disgusting homosexual and you should be thrown into like a fire. And it just showed that intent made the word hateful, not the word itself. And the word could actually be very empowering. And yeah, but then like nine years after I started to call him, I took a faggot out. But yeah, it took off. It ended up in like all the big, all weekly papers all over the country and Canada ran for 20 years in Hong Kong.

It runs right now in a paper in Italy called Internacional where they translated into Italian every week. I have, I'm Elvis in Italy when it comes to sex advice. Internationale has this annual Aspen Ideas Festival in Italy that they run. And they brought me in for it one year after my column had been running for 10 years and now it's been 20 years. And they brought me in for this big festival and I meet up with the handlers. I'm going to go do a little event. I'm going to speak. And we're walking through this piazza where there's a giant stage and there's 5,000 people and I'm like, Oh God, who's going to talk here?

Holy shit. Look at this crowd. And he looked at me and went, you are going to talk here. I was like, Oh my God. Like, and I got this kind of a, Holy shit. I'm, I'm huge in Italy. Yeah. Yeah.

Do you, do people recognize you on the street in Italy? No, because my picture doesn't run and I'm not ever on TV there. I see. So I'm safe in Rome. And was it in the Onion? Maybe that's where I first started to read it. For many it was in a lot, Onion had different franchise papers in different cities and if I wasn't already in a city, it would be in the onion in that city. Yeah. And yeah, it was in the onion. Well, it was a very, it was, I mean, I was a big fan of it and I read it every week. You know, I made a point to, I made a point to read it every week.

You know, it was like the, the New York Times version of the crossword for me, like, you know, I don't have time for the news, but I have to read this. word for me, like, you know, I don't have time for the news, but I have to read this. Um, and it was because it was so frank, um, and funny and, and, um, well-advised, you know what I mean? It, it seemed, you know, well-informed. And I, I wonder if there's, are you often

presented with things that you feel are like out of your depth? Like, are there- Oh yeah, all the time. Um, you appear to be omniscient when you write an advice column because you only print the questions you have answers for. That's what I was going to say. And then you look like you have all the answers or you get a question

and you don't have an answer and you go find the answer and then pretend you knew it all along. Or one of the things I consciously modeled on Ann Landers was she would always go get an expert. My column has had a million sex researchers, scientists, other authors, people with lived experience, expertise, sex workers, porn stars, and I would bring people in to answer questions that I myself couldn't answer, including, I'm really proud of this, like 28 years ago, I had people like Kate Bornstein, who's a trans woman, who's a writer and an activist and is very important and prominent,

became very important and prominent. And she was in my column giving advice 30 years ago. And I was doing that thing the kids now call platforming, elevating trans voices. I was doing that before you were born in my column, right? And I landed on that without having anybody having to scold me on Twitter to go do that. I went into that because the column was this conversation and I didn't have all the answers and there's nothing more subjective and tied to personal lived experience more than sex, desire, romance, and commitment. We all experienced that very subjectively.

And the column, I said when I started it to Tim, in addition to like, I'm going to be mean to straight people and see how they like it. And it turned out they loved it. The column was going to be a conversation, that conversation you have in a bar with your friends or you've had a couple of drinks about your love life. And I'm really proud that the common then the podcast really became that it became this rolling conversation about sex and love. And I don't know, like going back to like raised Catholic, I read a lot about sex, I read a lot about queer people, gay people. Um, I write a lot about straight people, mostly about straight people.

I have a very, I have a, I have a metric, like 80% of the letters and questions have to be by and from and about straight sex. Cause if it gets above 20% queer, straight people begin to think it's not about them at all. Even if it's like 60% straight, it's like, Oh, this is just a gay column. Um, we're very simple. We're a simple people. Used to being the center of the universe, right? Yes.

Used to running the universe. Exactly. Right. Exactly. That's what, you know, when you get all the attention, it's any sort of, you know, anything else feels like abuse, you know, like being forgotten, you know, any attention to someone that's an other, you know. And the Catholic thing, and like, so I sometimes get grief from religious conservatives.

And I've gone on like Christian radio, especially during the marriage equality debate. And, you know, a lot of people who are sexually conservative will be very reactive to my column, because it's very frank. And it's also, I think, consent matters. And if, you know, how you treat people matters, but what you want to do with the people who want to do those things with you is fine.

What I came to eventually, like defending my column to religious people was like, dump it all in a pot, boil it down to its essence, and all you've got is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You've got the golden rule straight out of Jesus' mouth. It's just that there's more that can be done unto a person in my universe than you realized, right? But it's still, there's a real strong moral and ethical code that plays through savage love, the column, and on the podcast, the love cast, that people who are just shocked by, you know, fist fucking or shocked by threesomes or polyamory don't always perceive.

They can't see past their shock at the kinds of sex that people are having with people that they choose to have sex with, um, to see the, the moral considerations and the ethical things that are constantly being picked apart and debated by me and my readers on my show. Do you think that the basic issues that you see, the sort of themes and the sticking points that happen with people where they're seeking advice from you,

are they the same throughout all different types, through straight people, gay people, trans people, cis people? No, no. Gay people and straight people are really different. And you see that, I think, most starkly in the difference between gay male sexual subcultures and lesbian sexual subcultures. You see that there is something to sex differences that is expressed in how different gay sex is from lesbian and sex or gay relationships often are from lesbian relationships. is from lesbian and sex or gay relationships often are from lesbian relationships. And it does feel like straight people are negotiating sex and relationships across this chasm that gay people don't have to negotiate across that chasm of sex differences because we're all guys.

And so the questions are different and the considerations are often very different. And I think there are things that straight people can learn from gay people, strictly gay men. I also think there's things that gay people can learn from straight people. And we've seen this happen in the last 35 years as I've been writing Savage Love and hosting the Savage Love cast. It used to be, you know, like that argument with my mom,

marriage and kids were for straight people. And the gay lifestyle was this hedonistic lifestyle, you know, no commitment. And, and, you know, me coming out to my parents as a teenager in the eight early eighties, when I said I'm gay, we also bundled with that without having to say it was, I will never marry. I will never have children, which my parents was crushing. It would have been fine if I'd never married and never had children if I'd gone into the priesthood. Like I told them I was thinking about in high school, but that I was never going to marry and never going to have children because I wanted to kiss boys was felt to them like a rejection of everything that they

thought gave life meaning and value that they tried to impart to us. And that's changed. And what we've seen now with the marriage equality movement and this great sort of revolution, this integration, and I don't think an assimilation, I really think if gay people have been assimilated, it's been entirely on our own terms into the broader culture. Because we haven't trimmed our sails. We haven't done anything differently. but we've seen is there was nothing gay about the gay lifestyle and nothing straight about the straight lifestyle. It was about what was fenced off and gay people weren't allowed to marry and have

kids once we were allowed to marry, to have kids, once we fought and won those rights, a lot of us chose to do that. So there's nothing straight about it. And also you've seen now straight people leading what, 40 years ago, Jerry Falwell Senior would have condemned as a hedonistic gay lifestyle, living in an urban area, having multiple partners, serial monogamy, not getting married and settling down

like my parents did at 20. When we were kids, I remember growing up and you would listen, you know, John Updike and his novels and movies you would see where it's just always talking about the midlife crisis. And people have, you don't hear about them so much anymore because people now straight and gay have a life before they settle down. And then they don't have a midlife crisis. They're like, I never lived. I never did anything I wanted to do. And that's what I find so fascinating about having been writing about sex and relationships and teasing out the differences in what straight people can learn from gay people and give them work with straight people during these last three decades is watching this kind of mass cultural realization that

while I did say a minute ago, there are differences between gay people and straight people. Some of them were false and imposed on gay people, not being able to marry, not being able to have kids, but also on straight people as well, that they had to marry, had to have kids and had to have them right away and had to, you know. Yeah. Be satisfied with the domestic life that was about procreation and more procreation. And you look around and my brother Billy likes to joke that of the two of us, if you just looked at us on paper, he's the gay one. He and his partner are not monogamous. They don't live

together. They didn't ever get married. They never had kids. And then there I was married to my husband. Um, and we had kids before we could marry and you know, my life, the basic outline looked a lot straighter and the basic outline of his life looked a lot gayer and the two of us, just the two of us proved that this thing we'd heard called the gay lifestyle are for decades it wasn't gay it was a it was an option but for many gay people through the most recorded

human history was the only option. Yeah what do you because it has been I mean when I when you look at I mean it's kind of no wonder that we're in, we feel like we're in sort of a crazy time because so much has happened. You know, I mean, just like just the fucking cell phone is just crazy, you know, that they didn't, you know, I was an adult and already living in New York City when I got my first cell phone. And, you know, and you could pretty much only make phone calls on it then. But you know, like to think too, and I've talked to gay friends about this, the fact that like Ellen DeGeneres' TV show where she came out, like that's in our lifetime. That's not, you know, 75 years ago. And that gay marriage, which seemed unattainable, again, within just a couple of presidencies, is now the law of the land, as they like to say.

And I'm just curious what you think is the engine behind that? Like what made that all of that change happened so quickly? People coming out to their families. When I was 18 years old and I went to my first pride parade with my teenage friends that I ran with. PFLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, which is the organization for supportive parents of gay kids. PFLAG would come down the street and everybody

came to talk about like what that was like when I was 18. Everybody would cry because it was like seeing a unicorn or a Pegasus or something. One of the things that was a given of being out and gay in 1980 was your family rejecting you. And so everybody was estranged from their parents who was out and gay. It was the price you paid to be out and gay. And it was so rare for somebody to have supportive parents, much less parents would march in a pride parade. So everybody would weep and weep and weep. This is what Harvey Milk said. This is what would change the world for us,

was us coming out to our families and then our friends and then our coworkers. And the secret weapon for gay and lesbian people and bi and trans people is that we're randomly distributed through the population. And so you're in a straight family and you come out and your family faces this choice between loving you or discarding you. And the culture used to encourage discarding, right?

And then there was this shift as more of us came out and our families gradually became more and more supportive where the expectation was your family would support you. And it was weird of the family not to. And the stigma became less and less. And I really think that was our secret weapon that we came out to our family. If, you know, the analogy is tortured and doesn't work perfectly, but if, you know, blackness was randomly distributed throughout the population and you didn't find out if your kid was black until your kid was 14 or 13 or 18, we would have a really different, you know, George Zimmerman would be rotting in jail somewhere right now. Things would be different. Interracial marriage, you know, mixed race kids, I think are changing families

in much the same way that gay people came and coming out changed families, but that was really it. These things moved in lockstep with each other. Gay people getting it in their heads that they shouldn't have to live a life in a closet and that living a warped shell of a life for fear of your family's rejection, there was just this tipping point where people were like, living that warped, pinched life is worse than facing my family's potential rejection. And as more people came out, and this is just, it's crazy, all the different things that

came into play, including the second world war, including homophobic policies that, you know, second world war changed everything for gay people really, because people were dishonorably discharged from the military if they were gay, and thousands were. And to get a job after the second world war, you had to produce your discharge papers. And if you were kicked out for being homosexual, your discharge papers had homosexual stamped on them. So there were thousands and thousands of men and women after the second world war who of men and women after the second world war who couldn't go home after the second world war. And they went to Greenwich village.

They went to Boys Town in Chicago. They went to San Francisco or stayed there. And that was the nucleus for gay and lesbian people being able to find their own families among each other. And then being able to weigh their gay family versus their straight family and be like, if I have to choose one or the other, I'm going to choose the family that loves me. I'm going to give my family of origin the opportunity to love me and to accept me. But if they don't, I'll be fine. And it was really those urban core gay and lesbian and bi people who were kicked out

of the military that kickstarted that process, that jumpstarted it. So we have homophobic military policy in part to thank for the revolution that then you saw play out in your adult life with Alan and gay marriage and everything else. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm so up my ass.

Like, I'm just like so many. No, no, no. I asked and it's very, and I mean, and I had never actually considered that the gay centers became real gay centers in the mid 20th century because of that. And people were so dependent. A little earlier I was extolling the intergenerational household I grew up in. It also could be confining or stultifying to, you know, if you were entirely dependent on your family, you couldn't do something that your family would reject or ostracize you for.

And gay people had to find a way to create our own families and friendship networks before many of us had the courage or many of them 50 years ago had the astounding courage to tell their parents who they really were and stop hiding. And a lot of gay and lesbian people paid an enormous price because they were on the front line of that battle with our families of origin and changed them. That was a process that took decades and decades and decades.

And even today, some people are rejected by their families. But the assumption now is your kid comes out as queer. And even people who are socially conservative think you're a monster if you reject your kid for that. Yeah. And that's yeah, we worked hard to change that. And that's what there was at some point of accelerating returns and a positive feedback loop. I don't want to make myself the hero of the story, but I mean,

it just, to me, it never occurred. I can't even, and I mean, it's, it's not so much now, but as my son kind of aged and got into his teenage years, any story about a parent rejecting their gay child would just destroy me. Would just tear me to shreds because I just could not even fathom that someone could be so petty and stupid and short-sighted. And, you know, absolutely misunderstanding what the whole fucking point of having a child is. So I don't, you know, it just to me, he's, you know, if you're gonna be a parent,

you gotta go all the way. You gotta give them the whole nine yards and you gotta foster, you know, one thing I've always thought about, and I read this once that the notion of when police forces were first Fought up when they first thought the notion of we should have a force that enforces the laws municipally that they were designed

supposedly To be working at all times towards their own obsolescence That they were not just supposed to be taking people, you know, putting people in jail for doing bad things. They were supposed to be, you know, in a way engendering a society in which people no longer did those things. And, and that to me is, is sort of my philosophy of parenting. It's not, it, you don't really want to be

obsolete to your children, but you certainly do want to work to where they don't need you anymore and you want to kind of aim towards them living the life that they're supposed to live and fuck me. What does it matter what I want you to do? You know, go do what you want to do. Yeah.

I think that's my mom said that like having kids is like shooting arrows. Like they're going to fly off and you don't know where they're going to land exactly. Um, and you could point them in the right direction, you hope, but you couldn't control their flight. And so in some ways, you know, my mom used to blame herself for me coming out to her the way I did for being as aggressive as I was about it. But I think it's important to remember now, you know, not to engage in presentism and

judge people by what we know now and find fault in them for not knowing then what we know now. Because I remember in the 70s, you know, when I became consciously aware that I was gay and Harvey Milk was running for office, Harvey Milk gave that speech where he said, you know, it makes you cry, talk about this, somewhere there is a 13-year-old who's realizing he's gay and thinks he has to choose between the closet and suicide. And then he opens up the newspaper and reads about a gay guy getting elected to office in San Francisco. And that child thinks I have one more option, which has moved to San Francisco.

I was that 13 year old. I was 13 years old when he won that election. I read about it. I was exactly who the kid he was talking about. And at that time, almost everyone believed that if a kid was gay, the parents had failed somehow had fucked up, had made that kid gay. My mom, the mother by being smothering made the kid gay, which people said to my mother, like my mother's friends, when she came out to them about me having come out,

like there was this idea that she had done something wrong, which is insane because my two older brothers are straight and practically the same age I am. So how was it my mother targeted me with like bad parenting and my brothers escaped to go out and eat pussy the rest of their lives? Like how did that work? But that's what people thought. And it took time for people to realize like that homosexuality is a randomly occurring phenomenon with genetic and social randomly occurring phenomena with genetic and social causations that reinforce and play off each other and it's not anything a parent does. And so like when I came out, there was still this lingering attitude that the gay kid was a shame on the family, but also evidence of a dysfunctional family in a way that the gay kid coming out publicly was attacking the parents. And that has changed. And so now parents can fucking Google it in a way they weren't able

to Google it. My parents couldn't fucking Google homosexuality. So people who now in this day and age reject their kids for being gay, who won't fucking Google it. Yeah. I get really angry at those, that kind of parental failure, that abuse, because the ignorance about homosexuality and that hatred, that's entirely opt in now. If you hate your kid for being gay, you, that's the choice. People talk about like homosexuality is a choice. No, no, no. Homophobia is the choice. People talk about like, homosexuality is a choice. No, no, no. Homophobia is the choice. And that parents still make it and reject their own children is flabbergasting. Which again is why when P-FLAG comes down the

street, people aren't as devastated. It's still appreciative, especially those of us who know how important P-FLAG was to the movement and the success of the movement and how out on a limb they were 50 years ago. So anyway, bye. Yeah. Well, now you've given so much advice over the years. Is there some sort of main lesson that you've taken away from dispensing so much wisdom? The two, well, I really think there's three, which is the price of admission.

There's always a price to ride the ride. And if the price is too high, don't ride the ride. But if you want to ride that ride and pay the price, don't bitch about the price the entire time you're on the ride. If you want to ride the roller coaster and it's five bucks, enjoy the ride. If it's $5,000 and it seems unreasonable, don't get on the roller coaster and it's five bucks. Enjoy the ride. If it's $5,000 and it seems unreasonable, don't get on the roller coaster and bitch the whole time. So like my husband, he's a bit of a slob and like I clean up after him. I pick up and straighten up all day long. It's what I do. And it's worth it to ride that ride. Right. And so I paid that price of admission. I don't

yell at him to put things away. I just put things away. Um, the other thing is use your words. Like 90% of the advice I give is, well, you need to have a conversation. You need to go, but you just said to me, you need to say to your partner. And the reason. It's astounding. It's astounding how people don't get that like simple, like I'm feeling this way and it's really bothering me. And well, okay. The stakes are really high.

It's easier, you know, to use a Savage Love kind of example. It's easier to ask, you know, a hooker to piss on you than to ask your wife. Because if the hooker is disgusted and leaves you, you didn't lose anything. If your wife is disgusted and leaves you, you didn't lose anything. If your wife is disgusted and leaves you, you wound up in divorce court and your kids are traumatized and like you blew your life up to get peed on, right? So the stakes in relationships can be super high. And I think what people need to prioritize sexual compatibility in the same way that they prioritize emotional compatibility, because so much of my male is everything's great, love, love, love, the sex is terrible, I'm losing my mind or there's no sexual connection

and there never was. And that's because at the beginning of relationship, people feel like they don't, it's dirty pervert stuff to put sexual compatibility on the scale with everything else you look for in a partner. And sex phobia and sex negativity encourage us not to prioritize sexual compatibility or to lie to ourselves and say that's something that can be manufactured over decades and it can't it's their kind of or it's not and The last thing I think I learned is like rejections your friend

like people are afraid to ask for what they want or be honest about who they are or emotionally sexually everything else because they fear rejection. And okay, like at first you might want to go in a few days, let somebody get to know you, but at a certain point you have to reveal yourself. And if they're not down for who you are and if it's really important to your sense of sexual fulfillment to get peed on and they're not willing to do that, then them rejecting you is just going to get you to the person who loves you and wants to be with you and wants to go get DayQuil for you when you have a cold and wants to cook with you and for you and, you know, go on long walks

with you and pee on you. That person's out there. And the sooner the person who wants all those things, but not pee on you, rejects you, the sooner you're going to find the person who wants the long walks on the beach and movies and holding hands and peeing on you, rejects you, the sooner you're going to find the person who wants the long walks on the beach and movies and holding hands and peeing on you. And I know that's the kind of a gross example and it seems really almost ridiculous, but sex is powerful and sex is, we can't pretend natural selection, spontaneous mutation. Sex built us over eons. And right now sex is building whatever is going to come after us. Sex made us. And we like to walk around as human beings pretending we're in charge of sex and we're not. The lie we're told as kids is we will

grow up one day and have sex. And the reality is you will grow up one day and sex will have you. And you have to figure out how to work with who you are sexually in a way where you don't become Jerry Falwell Jr. You don't lose your mind and blow your life up because you haven't integrated your private self and your public self. Not that everyone who wants to compete on needs to be out about it, but that there isn't this conflict between who you are romantically, sexually, and in some way, you know, there isn't hypocrisy. You know, it's like you're old enough to remember Ted Haggard, the fundy Christian creature who was seeing rent boys and using meth.

Like he hadn't integrated himself sexually, emotionally, socially in the way we all need to. And we negotiate with sex from a position of weakness. Sex is powerful. And if you dam it up, it eventually is going to burst through. But you need to create, I don't want to live in a world with 8 billion Caligula's. It's not everybody do whatever you want without any consideration for the other things you might want or the feelings of the people in your life.

But you have to figure out a way to like create outlets and have, you know, whatever those things they build in dams to let some water out every once in a while. You have to figure out how to do that so that sex doesn't build up behind that wall and then wash everything away when it comes bursting out. As it will. Yeah.

All off gassing. That what it's called? You know, just a valve. Yeah. Yeah. Just the valve that you turned just to let the pressure off. That's off. And it is important though, you know, when I say sex is powerful, I don't

mean nothing else matters. I mean, if you don't figure out how to be who you are, to love the people that you're with, to find somebody who loves you for who you are, or find what it is that you need sexually, you're going to get drunk and grab at it sometime in the worst possible way and blow your life up or really hurt somebody else because you were impaired at that time. You just went for it. And yeah. Or just be sad.

Or just be really sad for a long time, yeah. Well, Dan, thank you so much. I've kept you such a long time here, but it's been a really great conversation. And the Savage Love cast releases new episodes every Tuesday. Anything else you wanna plug? Savage Love, my column, 34 years, still writing it every week.

And I do a weekly column called Struggle Session, where I respond to reader critiques of whatever it was that I said that week. And you can find it all at savage.love. Thank you. Well, thank you, Dan. And it's been great talking to you. And thank all of you out there for listening.

And I'll be back next week with more of The Three Questions. The Three Questions with Andy Richter is a Team Coco production. It is produced by Sean Doherty and engineered by Rich Garcia. Additional engineering support by Eduardo Perez and Joanna Samuel. Executive produced by Nick Leow, Adam Sachs and Jeff Ross. Talent booking by Paula Davis, Gina Battista, with assistance from Maddy Ogden. Research by Alyssa Grahl.

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