Dan Savage Quotes

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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 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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"See, I'm a subverter at heart."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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