Weekly Savaging: Goodbye, Dan

Dear Dan Savage,

It would not be hyperbole to say that you are one of the most influential figures I've had in my life.  I discovered you as a teenager, when I'd snag copies of SF Weekly paper on excursions to the glamorous, gay city from the Central Valley cow town where I grew up.  I'd immediately flip to the back of the paper to find your advice column, nestled between escort ads.  Hilarious and scandalous, yet practical and strangely heartfelt, your writing deeply affected my understanding of my own sexuality and how I approached relationships.

I became more of a fangirl as I entered my 20's.  Testament to this is that I own a copy of every book you've written, including one signed by you at reading you gave in the Haight (I was that stammering girl with her gay friend who embarrassed you by going on a bit too long about how awesome you are - I'm sure you remember me clearly).  I still recommend "The Kid" to anyone who will listen.  You were my Gay Best Friend when I was stuck in conservative small towns and flyover states.  Plus, I had an not-entirely platonic crush on you.

During the years, as I've become more politically aware, being a fan of yours has cause some problems.  Quite a few people in the circles I run in, both online and off, have a problem with you.  The first complaint I heard was that you're a misogynist.  This was easily brushed aside for me - sure, you might have compared female genitalia to a canned ham being dropped from a tall building, but so what?  You're a gay man, and your vulvaphobia wasn't a problem for me, particularly since you were also so quick to call out straight boys on theirs, as well as to tell them that they don't deserve to be in sexual relationships if they weren't willing to give women the orgasms they deserve.  To me, the benefit you did as an advocate of female sexual pleasure far outweighed some crass humor. 

But the problems didn't stop there.  Your take on fat people has consistently been simplistic, hurtful, and unnecessary.  Comparing people with race-based sexual preferences to preferring one hair color over another ignores ingrained societal racism.  After Prop. 8 passed here in California, you had a horrible blog post blaming Black Californians for the end of gay marriage in California, while whining that Obama couldn't have been elected if not for gay people, which conveniently erased the existence of Black queer people.   And as anyone who has paid attention to you, like, ever knows, you have consistently said fucked-up shit about bisexual men and women, as well as about trans people.

For starters, you're one of the biggest advocates of the obnoxious "female sexuality is fluid (so male sexuality must not be)" meme, which helps negate womens' queer identities in one sense (we're not really ever straight or queer, just "fluid") and completely makes bisexual men invisible, which isn't surprising because you basically don't really believe they exist.  You've also stated that there are no male-to-female transgendered people who ever perceived themselves as gay men, and make jokes about how every butch lesbian will eventually transition to male, both of which display a ginormous lack of understanding about trans experiences.  Oh, and is this an appropriate time to bring up your pro-war stance in Iraq?  No?  Too bad.

But to top all this shit off, you go and pull shit like this, in which you make a "joke" claiming a bigoted cis male politician is actually a female-to-male transsexual.  Then you get an employee of yours to publish a ridiculous defense of a blatantly transphobic act (and not mention, bafflingly unfunny "joke") which is almost as stupid as the original offending post.

I'm sorry, but this whole, "It's funny to say that bigoted figures are really what they hate," is an old, boring, and pointless meme.  Yes, some homophobic politicians have in fact been outed as queer (unlike you, I hesitate to assume that men who have sex with men but have been married to women are automatically gay).  Most homophobic politicians are still just plain ol' bigoted straight folks, and frankly, I care less about their orientation than I do about the actual harm they are doing to GTLBQ people. Then you take that one step further and make a running joke about Rob McKenna being a trans man - presumably, because you think he "looks" like one.  Setting aside the problematic idea that trans men look a certain way, he doesn't even fit the stereotype of what trans guys are supposed to look like!  What he does have is delicate facial features, so I guess that makes him "feminized" in your eyes - so he must be a trans man, i.e. not a REAL man, right, Dan?  I see no other way of interpreting this. 

But now, you're claiming can't be transphobic because you've raised money for trans causes.  Is that kind of like how fundamentalist Christian Zionists must not be anti-Semitic because they support Israel (as far as it relates to their own ends)?  And unable to resist pouring salt on a gaping wound, Queerty (don't read the comments - never read the comments) reports you saying this in your "defense":


"I am not biphobic or transphobic. One my best friends is trans. People accuse me of being biphobic when all I am doing is articulating that a lot of bisexuality has certain issues and problems. Many people did identify as bisexual when they were coming out and it was a lie. That is just true. It is not crazy when you meet a bi person to wonder if they are really bi. It isn't disrespectful. It is rational. Many bi people end up in an opposite-sex relationship so they are not in the same boat with us as gays and lesbians. … I joke about trans stuff. We are not allowed to say tranny anymore. There's the T word and the F word, there is every letter of the alphabet word. … I still use the word "faggot" all the time in my column. Every time that I am on chat shows on cable I make a point of using fag in reference to myself because I don't think it is a dirty word. I don't think we should be stupid about it."

While your wit is well-known, you've never been accused of a being a particularly deep thinker, Dan, as this quote makes clear.  Are you really so self-focused that you cannot conceive of how it's a little bit different for you, as a gay man, to reclaim "faggot" than it is for as a cis person to insist that "tranny" is OK?  Would you really be comfortable being called a "faggot" by someone you know to be an anti-gay bigot?  If words didn't have power, you wouldn't have tried to reclaim and de-legitimize "faggot" as a slur, and you do not get to decide what is or is not a slur for groups you are not a part of.  I mean seriously, sit the fuck down and think on this a while.  Do white people get to use racial slurs if they "have *insert ethnicity here* friends?"  And are you seriously not aware of how incredibly fucking stupid it is to use "I have *insert whatever here* friends as an excuse for any sort of bullshit?

As far as your biphobia goes, for fuck's sake dude, this isn't 1992.  Male bisexual chic has fallen far since the time you were coming out, whereas hey, guess what?  Being a gay dude has become far more accepted.  While yes, every single gay man on earth has a story about a guy who used to call himself bi and is now gay, this idea that men are actively taking on the stigma of male bisexuality in droves as a temporary measure to avoid the stigma of male homosexuality is kind of ludicrous.

And while it's true, based on the simple numbers game, that most bisexual people will "find themselves in an opposite-sex relationship" - what you mean here, obviously, is "will settle down with an opposite sex person."  What you did here is basically declaring a bisexual identity not relevant to queer politics because of a bisexual person's relationships.  An out bisexual person, Dan, can still be on the receiving end of homophobia simply by virtue of being honest about who they are, regardless of who they're dating.  They can still lose their jobs, custody of their kids, or get kicked out of the military.  I know it seems scary, but I promise you that acknowledging that bisexual people face oppression similar to what gays and lesbians face does not actually reduce your claim to the oppression you suffer as a gay man.  This isn't a zero sum game.

Here's the thing.  Unlike, it seems sometimes, a lot of rhetoric that gets thrown around in anti-oppression circles, I get that in the real world, most of us are not generally interacting amongst people who say, know what "cisgender" means or is terribly invested in radical queer critique or anti-racist analysis.  And especially for someone who came of age in a much different gay culture that a lot of this talk you deride as "alphabet soup" and such can seem like politically-correct  women's-study-majors buzzkill bullshit.  And if you were just some random gay guy who had some less-than-cool opinions about what words you are supposed to say or what you think about bisexuals, I wouldn't give a shit.

But you're not some anonymous, increasingly irrelevant negative queen with no power.You're a public figure.  Not just any public figure, but one of the U.S.'s most famous advice columnists.  The "Savage Lovecast" is one of the top 10 most popular podcasts on the entire Internet.  Like it or not - and I suspect you rather like it- you are in a position of authority, particularly to queer youth, but also for straights and how they perceive queerness.  For fuck's sake, Dan, you are Stephen Colbert's "Spokesgay"!  You are a representative for sex, liberty, and gayness to the rest of this fucked-up country. So you have a real responsibility as someone who claims to care about young freaks everywhere  to not be a huge fucking dick about people you don't like or understand.  Because it affects people.

It would be great if you bothered to educate yourself and learn why your views on appropriate language and transgendered people and bisexual people are ignorant and wrong.  Or if you can't be bothered to do that, to at least learn to shut the fuck up about your bigotry in the public sphere. But we both know that isn't going to happen.  So you can continue to increasingly sound like a throwback to some regretful primeval era of gay politics, the "glory days" before you had to worry about the "T" or the "B", because we're breaking up.  It's been a long time coming, but I'm fresh out of excuses for you, and you're embarrassing us all.