Dan Savage Quotations

One man's blasphemy doesn't override other people's free-speech rights, their freedom to publish, freedom of thought.

I don't think it's the responsibility of gays and lesbians to reinvent the family.

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 have a thick skin, but I have a heart.

Ultimately life is disease, death and oblivion. It's still better than high school.

Really, when it comes to gay rights, there's two wars going on. The first war is political. But the culture war is over.

Every question is a hypothetical question for everyone but the person who asks it.

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

The cultural expectation should be if there's infidelity, the marriage is more important than fidelity.

The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified 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.

School is very conformist, and one of the very first conforming that goes on in preschool and kindergarten is gender.

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.

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.

I wouldn't say that holidays are manufactured by corporations, but they're certainly exploited and mined by them.

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.

Like it or not children are being raised by gay and lesbian parents all over America - as many as 10 million children. And it does nothing to make their lives more stable and secure to attack their families, to attack their parents to prevent us from marrying each other.

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

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

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

Sometimes I talk to religious people about my column or what I do, and I ask them to, you know, read 20 or 30 of them and then come tell me that the message at the heart of every column isn't, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' In every possible sense.

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

The mistake that straight people made was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous.

The successes of the LGBT civil rights movement and the more prominent role openly gay people are playing in the public eye has actually turned up the temperature in middle schools and high schools for queer kids.

To be gay is nothing to be proud of. It's in how you are gay that you have something to be proud of, considering the obstacles placed in your path if you are gay.

Preaching to the choir actually arms the choir with arguments and elevates the choir's discourse. There's a reason the right does it and does it well and triumphs.

A certain tiny percentage of everyone is gay.

You want to help gay kids, you have to reach them in middle school and high school, when they're being bullied.

Mother's Day is a torment if your mother is dead. Valentine's Day is a torment if you don't got one. And at some point in our lives, we will be tormented by Valentine's Day even if we're relatively lucky in love.

When I was a kid, and I was odd, the default assumption was that I was odd, not that I was gay. Now when a kid is odd in a Greensburg, gay or straight, the default assumption is gay.

I own a lot of my house, because I'm Irish and from people who never owned anything.

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

Books are magic: you never know where they're going to end up.

But it doesn't matter what you're doing, it matters how you're doing it.

How can you tell somebody whose is pursuing happiness that they're somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made?

There are so many people out there with less shame talking about their problems.

To be a straight person and discover you're infertile is almost like discovering you're not a straight person.

When you're young and queer and closeted, you can end up in this place where you regard your straight peers as the enemy.

You know, my problem is I can't say no to people, especially people who want to write me checks to do things.

My dad was a homicide cop in the gay neighborhood in the city when gay neighborhoods were desperate, depressing, sad places run by the mob. The only gay people he'd met when I came out to him were corpses.

The only way to get gay issues off the front pages of Canadian newspapers is to grant gay and lesbian people our full civil equality and leave it alone.

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.

When I was in high school I got involved in the fringe theater scene in Chicago, and I met some openly gay people. I could see that it got better, that they were happy and loved and supported. I saw with my own eyes that it got better.

Straight couples don't have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn't compulsory and its absence doesn't invalidate a marriage.

Women can go on marrying and pretending that their boyfriends and husbands are Mr. Darcy or some RomCom dream man. But where's that going to get 'em? Besides divorce court?

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

If what you want is a life where your homosexuality is not an issue, move, as many have done.

I am not an idiot, and I'm not a Pollyanna sort of kumbaya type.

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 don't like to think about what school was like for me.

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

I think the 'South Park' guys are brilliant.

I wanted to be a priest when I was a kid.

So I don't feel particularly wealthy-but, you know, I pay my taxes and I know that I am.

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. I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.

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.

I don't think people should do things that make them miserable. And if being an in-shape, sober, monogamous heterosexual makes you miserable, don't do it. And if being an in-shape, sober, monogamous heterosexual makes you happy, do it.

I felt a sense of loss and dislocation.

He got married today?!? To the girl he cheated on you with??? We're gonna call him.

It hasn't changed the way we live or relate to each other, ... But there is this intangible, hard-to-pin-down sense of permanence that is hard to describe.

Our people have been so important to us. We thought it was important to help them find their next job.

Our people love this product. They put their heart into their work every single day.

Don't mistake being an asshole for being a man.

We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people. The same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation.

One person simply can’t be all things to another person – sexually or otherwise—and unmet needs, unfulfilled desire, and unexplored possibilities are prices we pay to be in LTRs (long –term relationships). Monogamous, polyamorous, Femdom, or whatever: All couples people walk around feeling a little unfulfilled. (Single people, too). Because no one gets everything they want.

There's always something new with sex. We lived in a world without Viagra, now we live in a world with Viagra. We lived in a world without blowjobs and anilingus in the Oval Office, and then it happens and you get to write about it. We live in a world where now the government is screwing with contraception and holding back vaccines that could save 4,000 women's lives a year, and you get to write about that. It's not as much fun as anilingus in the Oval Office, but what are you going to do? If you pay attention, there's always something new, and it's always really invigorating.

I think abortion should be mandatory for about 30 years,

every relationship you are in will fail, until one doesn't

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.

Bisexuals need to recognize that their being closeted is a huge contributing factor to the hostility they face.

Today's unspeakable perversion is tomorrow's kink, is next week's good clean fun

Take me to the driest county in the most conservative state, and in two hours this determined hedonist will find you all the drugs, whores, and booze you'll need to pass an eventful weekend.

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.

We all have our scars. That's what falling is love is all about: revealing your scars to somebody who then loves you anyway.

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'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 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.

Outing is brutal and it should be reserved for brutes

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

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.

Relationships are monuments build on lies

Kids are like heroin, a little heroin addiction. When it’s bad, you’ve never been so miserable, but when it’s good you’ve never been so high.

The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H.

the truth is often a mixed message

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

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.

One man's piss-soaked sadomasochistic orgy is another man's poetic ecstasy.

Only someone obsessed with sexual fidelity to an unhealthy degree places a higher value on preserving the ideal of monogamous marriage over preserving an actual marriage.

No one has ever gone broke underestimating the insecurities of the gay and lesbian consumer.

So while gun owners are always saying that owning guns is about defending freedom, the only freedom gun owners seem interested in defending with their guns is the freedom to defend their freedom to own guns.

Natural isn't something I get called a lot in Texas.

The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that each of us is free to go our own way, even if the ways some of us may choose to go seem sinful or shocking to our fellow citizens.

You can't pray away the gay, but you can torture a conflicted closet-case to death.

You know, my problem is I cant say no to people, especially people who want to write me checks to do things.

There's going to be some places where you're treated with respect and dignity and some places where you'd have to be a fool to live, .. So, there will be places where people can get their hair done well and places where they can't.

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

...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.

Parenting is about being competent and responsible. It's not about gender, necessarily.

the Bible is only as good and decent as the person reading it.