Dan Savage

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“I'm an agnosto-theist.”

“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 don't write about my life in my column.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”