 I caught Dan Savage sinning, and he was surprisingly affable about it. He doesn't watch TV much at home in Seattle, where he edits The Stranger and pens his syndicated sex-advice column "Savage Love," but at a hotel in Atlanta, on book tour to support the paperback release of Skipping Towards Gomorrah, which hit bookstores earlier this month, he was savoring the usually verboten pleasure of Judge Judy. Of course, sinning is nothing new to Savage: Skipping is an exploration of the seven deadly sins—and also a reply to right-wing moralists like Bill Bennett and Robert Bork. In the book, Savage takes a series of sinning excursions across America, and, while it's fun to read about his exploits, it doesn't seem like the man himself had much fun doing them: Seeking envy, he was badly chafed hiking while hiking with the rich; seeking greed, he didn't quite become a Vegas whale. Of course, he notes, "That's the thing when you try other people's sins." Worn out from book touring, Savage nevertheless spoke to mediabistro.com about his column, daily newspapers, and 13-year-olds who love The New York Times and Doonesbury.
What is it about sex columns? My hypothesis is that they simply showcase one person's opinion but through the repetition might end up changing or opening someone's mind.
No, they just titillate and entertain. Any sex columnist who says he's trying to help is lying. If you were trying to help people you'd be a union organizer or Democrat in Congress.
Is there a list of standard answers you shoot off to people who write in? For people who are really troubled and in danger?
Yes. It's all e-mail, and it's very easy to blast back, "Go, please." But lots of time there are people who really need help, are in some fucked up situations, and they need 10,000 words of advice, and what can you do? If you started answering those, you'd do nothing else. So you give them the information, telling them where to go.
You put the columns together with an eye toward questions you haven't answered before or haven't answered recently—a new subject, a compelling situation. There's a bit of "there but for the grace of God go I." And maybe people remember a bit of advice and avoid a situation, but who knows? I read Ann Landers all my life and consciously modeled my column on hers, but I don't remember ever being in a situation and thinking, "Oh, right, I remember this bit of advice I read in Ann Landers 22 years ago, and it really applies to this situation." That never happens.
Maybe at some subconscious level it seeps in?
Maybe. I get tired of sex columnists talking about their role like they're sisters of mercy. A lot of people because they just read the column think I'm just a sex guy. Mostly what I've writing in The Stranger in the last few years is about city politics, which I'm interested in now. I think I'm the only sex advice columnist who's ever given away as a prize to a contest a subscription to The New Republic.
I'm interested in the first-person nonfiction you did in this book. It's not strict memoir, but it's not wholly academic—although you do cite statistics and bolster your argument with facts.
I make the argument, and then I can make the joke. You trust someone who's telling a joke if they're also a little informed about the joke they're telling. Otherwise they're just some blowhard on talk radio. There's about a year's research in there. There are so many disparate things to research, and I had some help from a research assistant who's credited in the book. I had to sit down and read A Broken Hearth and Slouching Toward Gomorrah. I'm a big reader, and I've always read about politics. It's just my luck I write about sex primarily, and sex if so politicized in the culture I live in.
You're also the editor of The Stranger—how do you think you do at that?
I think I do really well at it. I think The Stranger is better now than it has ever been. I am really proud of how we handled the war in Iraq. We ran a piece by Christopher Hitchens, which we commissioned, in support of the war. We ran a piece by Ted Rall against the war. And we ran a piece by Neal Pollack where he wanted everyone to shut up about the war. Shut up Hitchens and shut up Dan Savage, everyone shut up. It was really funny, and it captured how tormented everyone was after the war, because we were being whipsawed back and forth. And I think we were the only alt-weekly in the country that dared to run anything that entertained the notion that the world would be a better place if we didn't oppose the war in Iraq.
I like to read punchy stuff, I like to read stuff that I don't necessarily agree with, and I like to be challenged. I have a subscription to The National Review, and they hate gay people, but I read it. And I want The Stranger to do that. A lot of left, anti-war folks are really mad that we're not just cheerleading for the demonstrations—to take that as an example. I want The Stranger to be conflicted and divided, and that's hard to do in a place like Seattle.
Where they killed the caffeine tax.
Yes, kill the caffeine tax, but pass the referendum instructing the Seattle Police Department to make marijuana arrests the lowest law-enforcement priority. And then no one talks about that. The Wall Street Journal praised Seattle voters to the skies after we stopped the latte tax but skipped over this nearly 60-40 vote telling the police not to arrest any adults who are caught with marijuana.
Did The Stranger have a part in that?
We stumped like hell for it. The Stranger does advocacy journalism, and for the politicians we like we stump like hell for them. The mayor of Seattle is the mayor of Seattle because of us. He won by 1,500 votes, and we put him on the cover and people voted for him. We stump like hell for people we're for. I get tired of reading alt-weeklies who think anyone with any power is a bad person. It's as if the minute they get elected it's all about tearing them down. I kind of think you want to be cheerleading for them. I am Roger Ailes, in a tiny way. There are politicians on the city council that we helped put there, and we want them to do well and we slap them when they're being stupid, but it just doesn't help to have never an encouraging word when they get any power.
I don't want to say that all alt-weeklies suck. Alt-weeklies partially positioned themselves as the alternative to the dailies, and so they can become as predictably lefty and power-phobic as the dailies can become conservative and power-filled. But I really like the alt-weekly in Austin, and The Chicago Reader is doing a great job.
What separates the good alt-weeklies from the bad ones?
They have really great sense of play, like the paper in Oakland that ran Gary Coleman for governor. Daily papers are going to collapse in a few years, and one of the reasons is that they take themselves so fucking seriously. Why did no daily paper run someone from governor? William Randolph Hearst would have run someone for governor. William Randolph Hearst would have probably run for governor himself.
How does syndication come about for a columnist? Did you seek out other papers, or vice versa?
I know nothing about it. I get questions all the time. A paper in British Columbia called first, and then a couple of other papers called, and then a couple more. I never really got out there and hustled it. Eventually I had to hire someone, and he went out and hustled it a bit.
What did you think about the Doonesbury masturbation blowup? Where'd you stand on that? I assume something similar has happened to you.
Daily newspapers wonder why adults don't read them. The "family newspaper" albatross that daily newspapers have hung around their necks is going to kill them. The newspaper is for adults, and any 11-year-old who's reading Doonesbury is mature enough to see the word masturbation in that context and then not masturbate on a bus in front of a nun. And daily newspapers just can't let that go. And that there are 90-year-old readers who are going to cancel their subscriptions is good.
They dropped that Doonesbury in Seattle. They didn't run that comment, about masturbation and prostate cancer. It wasn't appropriate, they said; it's in a comics page that a lot of people read with their children. Well, you know, maybe they should skip Doonesbury that week.
I like the thought of an 11-year-old who reads the newspaper and loves Doonesbury.
Yeah, it's like, "Oh, mom, I love that Zonker."
How did you think Trudeau handled it?
You know, there are some papers that take the fucks out of "Savage Love." People will say they read it online on The Stranger's site, and it was profanity, and they're censoring you. No, they're editing me. I edit a newspaper, and I don't print everything in it that the writer gives to me. What's frustrating is that with daily papers, the editors always bitch about their falling readership, their terrible demographics, and then they're not be able to put two and two together and realize that if you don't have anything in your paper that's going to upset a five-year-old then 35-year-olds are going to look elsewhere for the kind of writing that appeals to them and speaks to them.
I mean The New Yorker says the f-word, The New York Review of Books does, and the public does. It's especially funny the knots that daily papers tied themselves into after Bush called Adam Clymer at The New York Times an asshole. Why couldn't that be in The New York Times? If the Republican presidential candidate can say it out loud and not lose the election, why is it too toxic for The New York Times? Any 13-year-old who is reading the Times and sees the word asshole in a paragraph after the jump already knows the word. Who are they protecting? They're protecting the sensibilities of subscribers they should want to get rid of. They can pick up readers who don't like their newspapers' writing to be porridge.
Do you think this is all going to come to a head for the dailies at some point?
I think you're going to see a moment of truth in daily newspapers in another 20 years, when the lion's share of their readers pass away. I call these papers donuts, because, for example, the Seattle papers have very few readers in the middle of city and they have all these readers in the suburbs, and why is that? Why aren't young adults and urban people reading what is ostensibly their urban newspapers? Because they're patronizing, and they presume a conservatism on the part of the reader that just doesn't jibe with who the urban people are. The papers don't speak them. And eventually these newspapers are going to have to speak to them, especially when their readers grow old and die. Then they can cut Marmaduke, they can drop Heathcliff. I think the comics page is really the bellwether of the health of the daily newspaper. Daily newspapers are so terrified of their readers. It's hysterical. One of the things we do right at The Stranger is we fight with our readers all the time, we battle them.
Chris Gage is a production editor at John Wiley & Sons and a onetime resident of Seattle. You can buy Skipping Towards Gomorrah at Amazon.com. |
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