Best 109 quotes of Dan Savage on MyQuotes

A certain tiny percentage of everyone is gay.

Actual gay people can make many others feel uncomfortable and paranoid because they don't know and can't articulate what makes a person gay, and they worry that maybe they themselves are gay.

A huge part of what animates homophobia among young people is paranoia and fear of their own capacity to be gay themselves.

A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It's often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied.

A lot of people are living their lives online in much more public ways with Facebook and Twitter.

A lot of people think that telling people you're gay is something someone might say just to get attention.

A lot of young people regard a threat against one person's sexual freedom as a threat against all of them, and that's absolutely how they should regard it. But it's heartening to look at the polls on young people on gay people, gay marriage, and sexual-freedom issues. They're terrific, and that's why the religious right is so desperately trying to lock in their current bare majority for prejudice: because their constituents are dying. They're losing votes every time the ambulance pulls up to the old folks' home. Let's hope it pulls up a little more frequently.

And that really captures the difference for the bullied straight kid versus the bullied gay kid, is that the bullied straight kid goes home to a shoulder to cry on and support and can talk freely about his experience at school and why he's being bullied. [...] And I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.

Children have a right to some stability and constancy from the adults in their lives.

Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials.

Don't move to Seattle and write a stupid sex advice column. That's a waste of time and you need to grow up and get serious.

...even if gay marriage were legalized there would still be gay men who didn't want to marry, gay men no other gay men would want to marry, and gay men who didn't want to leave the priesthood in order to marry.

Every American may have equal access to ice cream, but there's no guarantee that the outcome of eating ice cream will be equal.

First off, LARDASS, you neglected to include a sign-off, forcing me to create one for you. I tried to create one that captured the spirit and tone of your letter, and I think I did pretty well. []  I am thoroughly annoyed at having my tame statements of fact-being heavy is a health risk; rolls of exposed flesh are unsightly-characterized as “hate speech.”

For me, my discomfort with gay weddings was articulated by a close friend, who observed that gay people getting married is like retarded people getting together to give each other PhDs. It doesn't make them smarter, and it doesn't make us married.

I always kind of divided the gay guys I met up into two groups when I first started coming out. There were the guys who thought there was something fundamentally wrong with them and hated themselves and were so burdened with shame and internalized homophobia. It just really paralyzed and shredded them. And then there were guys like me who thought, "I'm fine, everybody else is crazy. My church is sick and the family's crazy, but me? I'm fine.

I believe it's in the best interests of a child to be in a stable environment.

I didn't want kids to think that to be happy, they had to be famous or rich or live in the big city.

I do know this, though: I’m done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there—and they’re out there, and I think they’re scum—are a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color…I’ll eat my shorts if gay and lesbian voters went for McCain at anything approaching the rate that black voters went for Prop 8.

I don't think that gay and lesbian relationships are identical to heterosexual relationships. I do think that heterosexual weddings, or at least most of them, are sort of camp pantomimes about male and female sex roles, even if the couple is marrying as individuals and equals.

I don't think that sin and pursuing happiness are not necessarily the same thing.

I don’t understand how real Christians let that little f--ker get away with that.

I don't write about my life in my column.

I feel like I'm a compassionate guy, but I also feel if somebody's grip on life or sanity is so tenuous that a joke in an advice column that usually is nothing but jokes pushes them over the edge, then if not me, it would have been a leaf blowing past them that did it, or something else. You almost have to feel that way, doing this.

If kids got raped at Denny's as often as they get raped at church it would be illegal to take your kids to Denny's.

If sex isn't an important part of your marriage, you can't beef if your wife or husband does this unimportant thing with somebody else every once in a while, if you have no interest in it.

I get letters every year from women who think Valentine's Day is an empty exercise, but are ironically pretty exercised when their boyfriends neglect or forget it.

I got picked on a lot, even by teachers too. I liked to listen to musicals and bake, and my homeroom teacher found out and mocked me in front of the whole class for baking.

I have a thick skin, but I have a heart.

I'm 52, which means I don't really... I was never a person who celebrated birthdays to begin with. At this stage, it's certainly something that someone who made a big deal out of their birthdays in their 20s and 30s kind of hangs that up. Not because you're sad to be getting older. I'm thrilled to be getting older. I have so many friends who died when they were 25 and would be ecstatic to be here with me turning 50. It's a thrill and a privilege to still be alive.

I'm allergic to dogs, so I couldn't even adopt what gay men typically adopt when they have that maternal gene.

I'm always telling people who say two men can't make a baby: 'Anything is possible for God. I'm going to keep inseminating my husband and keep my fingers crossed.'

I'm an agnosto-theist. I cross myself on airplanes. I pray when I'm sick. When you're sick I'll keep you in my thoughts; when I'm sick, I'm entreating a higher power.

I'm not a Pollyanna sort of kumbaya type.

I'm not good looking. I'm very strange - a very bony face on an enormous skull, and I don't like to be naked because I don't like how I look naked. And - no, no. I own a lot of my house, because I'm Irish and from people who never owned anything. So I could have a lot more trappings of wealth if every time I had 20 extra dollars I didn't pay off more of the mortgage.

I'm one of those gay people who's constantly reminded of how fortunate I am to live now and not to be Ennis and Jack [from Brokeback Mountain] or whatever - not that I'd mind being Ennis for half an hour. But it's been so much worse recently. It still is terrible. In Iran, they're hanging gay teenagers. I'm grateful for how far the United States, even with its crazy Christians, has come on a lot of issues. And the fact that I get called a faggot occasionally by a crack addict, while annoying, certainly isn't a lobotomy and prison.

I’m searching for some exit poll data from California. I’ll eat my shorts if gay and lesbian voters went for McCain at anything approaching the rate that black voters went for Prop 8.

In an open adoption agreement, you agree to a minimum number of visits - a floor, not a ceiling. It's enforceable.

I really enjoy doing theater, but doing theater in Seattle is like dropping a brick in a bottomless well. It's gratifying, but it's almost like doing radio. It's ephemeral.

Is it adultery if I’m committing it at one end of a guy and he’s committing it at the other end of that same guy?

I started doing drag in Seattle because I started doing my column before I moved here, and then moved here and wanted to be able to go out and do things as Dan Savage without being recognized the next day, because the column was just in Seattle and it was kind of a sensation and I was beating people up. I was really worried and I didn't want to beat somebody up in a column and have that person know what I look like when I didn't know what they looked like.

I think abortion should be mandatory for about 30 years.

I think astrology is annoying bullshit-which is so Libra of me

I think it's better to have limits. My limits are different from other people's limits. I'm all for freedom, I'm all for people doing what they want. I'm also all for people shouldering the consequences of their behaviors, and not being assholes, and not lying unless they need to, and being honest except when you shouldn't, and being faithful except when it's okay to cheat. I guess I'm just a mass of contradictions.

I think it's going to take three or four generations of gay people being able to get married before it starts feeling less like we're going through these motions, that we're aping a heterosexual institution.

I think the best thing for you to do is just live your life. Live a life that's worth living, one where you do what you want to do, pursue your passions. That way, if you meet someone, they'll be joining a life that's already really good.

I think the 'South Park' guys are brilliant.

It really did take Billy Lucas's suicide to wake me up to, kind of, the damage of the success of the LGBT civil-rights movement - higher-profile LGBT people - has done to LGBT youth who are trapped out there in those shitholes. But I don't think we need Pride. I am still opposed, on philosophical grounds, to the flap of the rainbow windsock and the damage that does to us intellectually.

I treat people who write me the way my friends and I all treat each other when we go to each other for advice, which is sometimes with supreme cruelty. I think that's what helps the advice sink in. If somebody comes at you with both barrels, the first shot opens your head, and the second shot allows the advice to get lodged inside.

It's going to take generations of gay people marrying before these things start to feel natural. We haven't had it long enough to remake it as our own, so it does feel like you're getting dressed up in straight drag to do it.