Episode 422 - Dan Savage
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuckologists?
Marc:What the fuck is sugar in us?
Marc:What the fuck tarians?
Marc:What is going on?
Marc:I am Mark Marin.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:Today's guest is Dan Savage.
Marc:The Dan Savage, author, writer, podcaster, radio personality, gay man, activist.
Marc:He's the fucking best.
Marc:And he hung out with me and we had a great talk.
Marc:We're going to get to that in a second.
Marc:Can I tell you what's going on with me?
Marc:I will be at the Rochester Fringe Festival in Rochester, New York, Saturday, September 21st.
Marc:Looking forward to that.
Marc:Nate Bargetzi is opening for me, and I love to watch Nate work.
Marc:I will be at the JFL Just for Laughs 42 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, September 24th.
Marc:I don't know if we're doing one or two shows.
Marc:And Friday, October 4th,
Marc:We're doing a live WTF at the L.A.
Marc:Podcast Festival.
Marc:Go to LAPodFest.com to see what those packages are.
Marc:And I'm going to be doing I'll be up in San Francisco on the 16th doing a live in conversation with Adam Savage.
Marc:He's going to be talking to me.
Marc:I think we're going to be interviewing each other.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It's for City Arts.
Marc:I believe it's what it's called to benefit.
Marc:Some fucking idiot on Twitter said, $100 for tickets.
Marc:Don't tell me you didn't have control of that.
Marc:Louis C.K.
Marc:tours for $25.
Marc:Well, first of all, I'm not getting paid anything.
Marc:It's a fucking benefit.
Marc:Idiots who think they know what they're talking about, don't know what they... See what the anger's doing?
Marc:See what the anger just did?
Marc:I have not tried the meds yet.
Marc:I'm not comfortable with the Lamictal, so I tried the propronopropanol.
Marc:What is it?
Marc:It's used to treat high blood pressure.
Marc:It's basically not a benzo.
Marc:It's not an addictive thing.
Marc:It's interesting.
Marc:You take it preemptively to ease your anxiety, and it's almost like it just turns it down a little bit.
Marc:Something gets turned down.
Marc:It's like, hey, I want to get mad, but, you know, it's okay.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:There's no body buzz.
Marc:There's no brain buzz.
Marc:There's no shift in perception.
Marc:Just a slight kind of drowsy muting of your equipment inside your head.
Marc:Who knows if it can help me get through things, learn how to communicate better, not destroy it, not to slash and burn the emotional forest.
Marc:If it can help me do that, then we will get the work done, folks.
Marc:Bombed on stage the other night.
Marc:Been a while since I did that.
Marc:That surprisingly painful after 25 years.
Marc:So I go on stage.
Marc:I'm starting to do some more sets in town.
Marc:Putting it at the old comedy store.
Marc:I went on Wednesday night.
Marc:I went third up.
Marc:I like going early so I can get some work done before they've been brain raped by a bunch of garbage jokes.
Marc:And I'm not saying that's bad.
Marc:Just sometimes the level of crassness can do some damage in my mind.
Marc:I just like to get them when they're fresh.
Marc:930 spot, though.
Marc:It was about 30 or 40 people.
Marc:And I went up there.
Marc:The guy before me did, nah, he did all right.
Marc:And I went up there and I was laid back because I wanted to try some new stuff and I was getting nothing.
Marc:I was getting a vacuum.
Marc:I was getting nothing but quiet judgment.
Marc:I felt that feeling in my heart, the sinking of the heart, the palpable, palpable gut reaction of rejection, the warmth of failure spread throughout my body.
Marc:So I did jokes that I know work.
Marc:They didn't really work.
Marc:I felt the pain, the pull, the sadness of failure, jokes, the embarrassment, the shame, all of it.
Marc:I still feel those things when I don't do well up there.
Marc:It had been a while since I tanked like that.
Marc:Fucking just like, you know, doing jokes to nothing.
Marc:Just dead faces, the few I could see.
Marc:But it was interesting to me that what I did feel, that what really feel, like, you know, you talk to some people, and I think most comics, despite whatever they say, will go, look, it's part of the job, it happens.
Marc:Yeah, it does happen, but it hurts.
Marc:And it hurts me because I am so emotionally invested in every fucking set.
Marc:I got to have some sort of connection.
Marc:My needs are deeper than the money or the laugh.
Marc:It's just the way I'm wired.
Marc:Tanked it.
Marc:But the primary feeling I feel is embarrassment and shame.
Marc:It's not just the pain of rejection.
Marc:It's like I was just up in front of all those people and I failed.
Marc:They looked at me like I was some sort of fucking amateur, like a sad man.
Marc:It was awful.
Marc:Did I have any control of that?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Back in the day, at another time in my life, I would have used that feeling.
Marc:I would have used that experience.
Marc:as a mallet to beat the shit out of myself with for days.
Marc:Like as soon as I didn't think about it, I'd be like, Oh God, Wednesday night, Jesus Christ.
Marc:That was fucking horrendous.
Marc:And I just feel the warmth of failure and rejection and shame.
Marc:But it went away in a couple of days and it's gone now.
Marc:And that's good.
Marc:That's progress.
Marc:That's that fight or flight thing.
Marc:That's the weird thing about fight or flight.
Marc:And when you're on stage tanking is like fight or flight kicks in.
Marc:But but they can happen at the same time.
Marc:Your body is going to have to keep fighting.
Marc:But boy, can you fly out of that body and wait outside and meet that guy in the lot?
Marc:You can do them both at the same time.
Marc:That's how highly evolved comedians are.
Marc:We can fight or flight simultaneously on stage when we're bombing.
Marc:Yep, we're up there fighting, but you're looking at a guy who has been abandoned by himself because that guy's got the car going out front.
Marc:My point is I have grown.
Marc:There was a time where I would have...
Marc:Just been discombobulated for weeks.
Marc:But I'm a professional comedian and I can take it.
Marc:You know, I got to say there's a caveat to this amazing emotional and psychological growth.
Marc:That it would, in the name of transparency, in the name of not keeping anything from you, I did go back to the comedy store to do a set on Saturday night.
Marc:And the manager there...
Marc:said that everyone got off stage on Wednesday and said that was the worst crowd they've ever seen in their fucking life that they've ever performed at.
Marc:So that made me feel better.
Marc:You know, I wasn't alone.
Marc:I guess what I'm saying is I have no idea whether I've grown at all.
Marc:I'm just happy that everybody else had a fucking horrible time.
Marc:I'm just happy we failed as a community for these fucking strangers who didn't do their part.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:There are bad audiences.
Marc:And oh, yes, you can blame them.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So what do we got?
Marc:We got Dan Savage.
Marc:Dan Savage.
Marc:What a great guy.
Marc:And what a lot of clarity to this dude.
Marc:His activism is personal and it's sharp.
Marc:But we had a very nice conversation about, you know, where he comes from, what he's about, his marriage, that kind of stuff.
Guest:Let's talk to Dan Savage.
What the fuck?
What the fuck?
What the fuck?
What the fuck?
Marc:So, Dan Savage, you're here.
Marc:People want us to talk.
Marc:They do.
Guest:I've read that on the Twitter.
Marc:Isn't that weird?
Marc:I guess it's not weird.
Marc:I guess we both do this.
Marc:Why shouldn't we talk?
Marc:We both podcast.
Marc:We both run our mouths.
Marc:We both get in trouble.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't get in trouble as much as you, I don't think.
Marc:You got me in trouble when we were on Mar together.
Marc:How did I get you in trouble?
Marc:You got my back, which I appreciated, and then you got the hit.
Marc:You took the hit.
Marc:You said you would hate fuck, was it Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman or both at once?
Marc:I don't think I could.
Marc:I think if I hate fucked Palin, she'd misunderstand it as a good thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I thought I can't leave him on that limb all by himself.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I offered that I would hate fuck Rick Santorum.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And now that was all over the right wing Christian batshit blogs that I threatened to rape Rick Santorum.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, so you got... But it would have been a consensual hate fucking.
Guest:I can hate fuck somebody with their consent.
Guest:I would never hate fuck somebody against them.
Marc:No.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You agree that you don't like each other and you should use that dynamic to elevate the sexual experience.
Guest:You plow that energy into plowing that energy.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And I think that's a fairly common dynamic in relationships.
Marc:Especially long-term ones.
Marc:You got to get the juice from somewhere.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But yeah, I was sort of upset because I didn't even get named in the criticism.
Marc:See, you already have a profile with the right wing.
Marc:They just nailed him.
Marc:They literally dismissed me on purpose, it felt like.
Marc:Like Bill Maher had a comedian on, but they still hung it on him.
Marc:And you know how they are.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:But you got named, so you at least got the publicity.
Guest:I jumped in front of a bullet for you, man.
Marc:I appreciate it, man.
Marc:You're welcome.
Marc:Well, now we're doing this.
Marc:It's all going to work out.
Marc:Where'd you come from?
Guest:I'm from Chicago.
Guest:Right in the city?
Guest:Yeah, I grew up in Rogers Park, which is as far north and east as you can go without going into the lake or the suburbs.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I performed at the Main Stage Theater, which I think is in Rogers Park.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, and I have a Rogers Park t-shirt.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Rogers Park is an awesome place to grow up.
Guest:Well, what was it like?
Guest:It was great.
Guest:You know, I sort of grew up at the tail end of a certain way of white people living that white people didn't start stop living for a while.
Guest:But I guess post Great Recession, we're living that way again.
Guest:I grew up in a multi-gen household.
Guest:My grandparents, my great grandparents owned this two flat, which is a Chicago term for an apartment building.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Two apartments.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And a flat roof.
Guest:Two flats.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my great grandparents raised their children in the downstairs apartment.
Guest:And then my grandmother and her husband stayed in that building and raised their children, including my mother.
Guest:And then my mother got married and my father moved in.
Guest:And so I grew up in this house full of my grandparents, my aunts and my uncles.
Guest:And a great grandparent?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My great grandparents had moved out at that point, but they were around.
Marc:I think that was a great way to live.
Yeah.
Marc:It was.
Marc:It had its perks.
Marc:Yeah, because I remember that's one of the reasons why people stay where they are is so grandparents can babysit.
Guest:Which is as it should be.
Guest:You think so?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When you're young, Terry and I adopted.
Guest:We had a son DJ and we adopted him when Terry was 24, 25, and I was 32 or 33.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that time of life when you are sort of your most productive and energetic.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Kids are boring.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And an only child is super boring because one of you always has to be the playmate of last resort.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So if there's no other three-year-old around, one of you has to be a three-year-old.
Marc:Stand in, be three.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And play with trucks, which works if you're high and doesn't work if you're not.
Guest:And you're not supposed to be high when you have kids, so it kind of doesn't work.
Guest:And so to have parents, aunts and uncles, people who are delighted to take that kid off their hands for a while.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was beautiful.
Guest:And my mom didn't live in Seattle when we were new parents, but she would come out all the time and be the kind of working class Irish grandparent that you want, which she would take the baby and say, you two go away and have fun and do something.
Marc:So she got it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:She understood it from when she was younger.
Guest:She was the kind of grandparent that parents are happy to see because she would do the laundry and make dinner and take the kid off our hands.
Guest:Gave her purpose.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And spread the love around.
Guest:People out there, if you have children who have kids and you don't see much of your grandkids or your children with kids...
Guest:It's because you're useless when you show up.
Guest:If you're a burden when you show up to your children who have new children, they're not going to want you around.
Guest:If you show up and suddenly the laundry is done and dinner is made and you and your wife got to go out.
Marc:They'll build you a room.
Marc:They will.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:So how many siblings didn't have?
Marc:What was the business?
Marc:What was your dad doing?
Marc:My dad was a Chicago cop.
Guest:Really?
Yeah.
Guest:Busted heads at the 68 Democratic National Convention.
Marc:Did he really?
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:And then he became a homicide detective for about 10 years, which was weird for me when I came out to him when I told him that I was a big faggot.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Because, you know, he was a homicide cop in Area 6, Chicago, which was the gay neighborhood at the time, but this was the 60s and 70s when a gay neighborhood was not a nice place.
Marc:It was the freshly gay neighborhood, but it was a bad neighborhood and the gays came in and
Guest:No, no, no, no, no.
Guest:This was when gay neighborhoods were bad neighborhoods.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Why were they bad?
Guest:Because they were kind of marginal places.
Guest:They weren't like coffee shops and bookstores and they weren't lovely.
Guest:Well, what was the bad part?
Guest:Like, what were they?
Guest:Well, gay bars and shit were dominated by the mob then.
Guest:So gay neighborhoods were kind of rough places where gay people kind of dove in.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Had a little anonymous sex and then went back to the wife or the rectory.
Marc:So it was a cruising type of situation.
Marc:It was like a secret place.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like those bars, like what you saw in cruising or something.
Right.
Guest:Yeah, not as glamorous, not as hot, but sure.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it was specifically to sort of protect.
Marc:It wasn't a gay neighborhood because people, gays, went there.
Marc:It was a gay neighborhood because that's where they'd go to do their secret thing.
Marc:That's where the nightclubs were.
Guest:That's where the bathhouses were.
Guest:It was just at the cusp where people started creating gay neighborhoods and gay communities coming together in the north side of Chicago.
Marc:So your dad worked those beats.
Guest:Yeah, but Clark and Diversi was the intersection in the middle of his beat, and they called it Clark and Perversi.
Guest:That's what the cops called it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So when you came out to him, what was the reaction?
Guest:He wasn't a cop anymore, and I came out, and he reacted fine.
Guest:He was the last person I told.
Guest:Why'd you wait?
Guest:Because when I was 15, he divorced my mother.
Guest:He left, and I was ready to come out when I was 15, which is really weird.
Guest:Kids didn't come out at 15 in 1980 when I was 15.
Guest:They didn't come out at all, really, did they?
Guest:They came out after college.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:When they were out of the house.
Marc:So you couldn't be kicked out of life.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that still happens today.
Guest:Kids are kicked out of the house when they come out or are out of their families.
Guest:But my dad left my mom and I was like, I couldn't go into my mom's bedroom and say, hey, you know, this will take your mind off the divorce to my good Catholic parents.
Guest:So after my dad left, I didn't have to come out to him.
Guest:He wasn't around.
Guest:And he was really homophobic when I was a kid.
Guest:Like in the house.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, but in the way that I want to slam him for it, but I want to exonerate him at the same time, because this is what good parents thought they had to do then.
Guest:They thought gay was something that grew in your child, like an inclination or cancer, and you could nudge them and they wouldn't go gay.
Guest:So he would say shitty things about gay people because he cared about me.
Guest:He felt it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:When I was 13 years old, I begged my parents, all I wanted for my birthday, tickets to the national tour of a chorus line.
Guest:And these motherfuckers were shocked when I came out.
Guest:It's like I practically...
Guest:That was like, that's like seeing your 13 year old son give a blow job and you're shocked when he comes out.
Marc:I want tickets to the national, I want tickets to the chorus, my birthday, it's all I want.
Marc:But they don't, but I think there's a denial in place that like they may know, but they don't want to know.
Marc:And that's a powerful thing.
Guest:And this was 30 years ago.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Good, loving.
Guest:Literally, this is when being gay was the worst thing you could think of someone.
Marc:Right.
Guest:So you didn't think that about your own child, no matter how much evidence was staring you in the face.
Marc:But it wasn't because I think now hasn't it evolved that even if there is an accepting and tolerant household, they're still, I think, if they're empathetic parents, they feel that that lifestyle is going to be a horrendous struggle and they're worried about it.
Guest:Less so.
Guest:It used to be that parents would think, that lifestyle is going to be a horrendous struggle, so I'm going to do everything I can to prevent my child from becoming gay, which for my father meant saying shitty things about gay people to try to convince me not to be gay, not to choose to be gay.
Guest:But now parents know, I think, that you can't prevent your child from being gay, so you're going to have to... The problem isn't that your child is gay.
Guest:The problem is the way some people are going to treat your child because your child is gay, and the focus has shifted from...
Guest:you know, making the gay children the problem to making assholes like Rick Santorum and Tony Perkins the problem.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:So what would your father say?
Guest:I have this really distinct memory of him praising Anita Bryant.
Guest:This is ancient history, right?
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:This anti-gay crusader, the very first really high-profile one, and saying that gay people were a threat to civilization, to threat to what?
Guest:The family?
Guest:Right.
Guest:To the economy.
Guest:That was his argument.
Guest:We were a threat to the economy because gay people didn't settle down.
Guest:And in his experience, gay people, they didn't get married.
Guest:They didn't have families.
Guest:So they didn't buy cars and houses and washing machines.
Guest:And so GE would run out of money and the economy would collapse.
Guest:That was his theory.
Guest:And of course, we didn't get married or have families because you wouldn't let us.
Guest:Right.
Guest:As opposed to we didn't want to.
Guest:We wanted to, but we couldn't.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And ironically, of his four children, I'm the only one, I think, who's bought a new washing machine in his entire life.
Marc:Well, that's the ironic thing about that whole idea of the economic idea of gay people is wrong.
Marc:I mean, gay men drive a lot of the economy.
Marc:We shop.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Gay men without children shop.
Guest:Yeah, because you have money.
Guest:That's what's so funny about my father's opposition to the gay lifestyle was this hedonistic anti-family thing.
Guest:And also having sort of walked the beats that he was walking and his limited perception, it must have been a little... He'd encountered a lot of gay murderers and murder victims by the time I was... But he was really seeing it in me, seeing that I was gay.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And so when you came out to him, what was the first reaction to him?
Guest:He apologized.
Marc:For that?
Guest:He apologized for anything he might have said or done that made me feel uncomfortable.
Guest:And, you know, he was the last one I came out to in the entire family, which was easy because he'd moved away.
Guest:He'd moved to California.
Marc:Well, how many were there that you had to... Did you have to make the rounds?
Marc:Were you...
Guest:Well, my mom has six siblings.
Guest:My dad has eight.
Guest:I have three siblings.
Guest:There's eight million cousins.
Guest:Everybody lived pretty close to home base in Rogers Park or nearby.
Marc:So you just kind of made the rounds.
Marc:You kind of, I got to stop by this house.
Guest:A lot of people to tell when I started coming out.
Guest:And I did that shitty thing that some people do when you come out.
Guest:Like I told my mother and told her not to tell my father.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then my mom and dad came to see me act in a play because I was doing plays then where I got married.
Guest:There's a wedding scene for my character in this play.
Guest:And it was a comedy.
Guest:And my mother is bawling her eyes out because she thinks Danny's never going to get married.
Guest:Right.
Guest:This is the saddest thing I've ever seen.
Guest:And my father's like, what is wrong?
Guest:And she can't tell him.
Guest:So I really didn't come out to my mother.
Guest:I dragged my mother into the closet with me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I did that for about a year.
Guest:And then she was like, we can't keep doing this.
Guest:And you've got to start telling more people.
Marc:Your mother's telling you we've got to stop meeting like this.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my sibs.
Guest:I came out to my siblings and then, you know, my mother basically told all my aunts and uncles and there was some, there were problems.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like I had one uncle say that he would never speak to me again or be in the same room with me again.
Guest:And my mother was great.
Guest:Did that hold up?
Guest:No.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:No.
Guest:He's great now.
Guest:He loves me.
Guest:And but, you know, then that was the importance of actually having a big family was really helpful then because maybe for a little five minutes to turn into two warring tribes like on my side and against me and the on my side tribe utterly defeated the against me.
Guest:Right.
Right.
Guest:But also, my mother went to her brother and said, went to everybody and said, if you have a problem with Danny, you have a much bigger problem with me.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my mom was tough that way.
Marc:But wasn't the reaction, do you think, that not so much, it was their own fear, right?
Marc:I mean, you're still the kid they always knew.
Marc:They just all of a sudden have to see you in a way that they're not accustomed to or comfortable with.
Guest:Yeah, they have to picture you with a dick in your ass.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Or your mouth.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And I hate to be crude, but that's it.
Guest:Like you tell your parents, when you're straight, people don't see you having sex.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Coming out to my mom and dad meant burdening them with a mental image.
Guest:I could see it on their face.
Guest:Like you tell them you're gay and they're like, oh, there he is.
Guest:They're like picturing a dick going in your mouth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And when my sister had a boyfriend, they didn't picture her giving blowjobs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was just a given.
Guest:She's straight.
Guest:She has a boyfriend.
Guest:There's probably something going on, but I don't have to think about it because their relationship could be about dating and marriage and family and a future.
Guest:It's about so much more than the blowjobs.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But if you're a gay kid in the 80s, your relationship isn't about marriage.
Guest:It isn't about family.
Guest:It isn't about a future.
Guest:It's about a blowjob.
Guest:It's about sex only.
Right.
Marc:And that was a limited perception of straight people and still is to a certain degree initially, but not so much now.
Marc:But in terms of how the gay community evolved, I mean, they sort of had to lean on that in order to build community in a way initially.
Guest:We had to lean on the sex aspect?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Guest:You know, there's this great sort of explosion in the gay community after the Stonewall riots where just this sex culture took off.
Guest:It was very male-dominated, very male-oriented.
Guest:You know, people say, why are gay men like this?
Guest:Why do gay men have bathhouses and go to parks and have sex?
Guest:Gay men do everything straight men would do if straight men could do it, but straight men can't because women won't.
Guest:It's not that straight men are particularly virtuous.
Guest:If I told straight guys, there is this park, it is full of women.
Guest:Some of them are really hot.
Guest:Some of them are 18 years old and hot and they want to fuck you and they don't want to know your name and they don't want your phone number and they never want to see you again.
Guest:And you just go to the park.
Guest:That park would have, every straight man in America would be in that park.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:I mean, not every, but a lot.
Guest:Not every gay man goes to the park.
Guest:I've never had sex in a bathhouse or a park.
Marc:Why?
Marc:Because it was too... Well, why?
Marc:You're the age you could have.
Guest:Because the one thing that I had that probably saved my life during the HIV epidemic is that some gay men don't have that I have is kind of a well-developed sense of cooties.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I wouldn't share a can of Coke with my sister.
Guest:I'm not going to put a dick in my mouth that's been in like 40 other mouths that day.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Like that kind of rampant, crazy bathhouse sex.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:But, you know, getting back to my point, like straight guys would do that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A bathhouse is a whorehouse staffed by volunteers.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And there's no parallel in straight land.
Guest:But if there was one, straight guys would go.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I think they would.
Guest:Yeah, they would.
Guest:And so what you saw in the 70s was this kind of very...
Guest:This excessive kind of totally male idea of sex and the way sex could work if it was just a male construction.
Guest:It was male sexuality totally unencumbered in any way with disastrous consequences.
Guest:Right.
Guest:This was sort of biologically unsustainable, this level of promiscuity and multi-partnerism.
Marc:Yeah, because bacteria wins all wars.
Guest:And now we know that hitherto for unknown fatal sexually transmitted infection can emerge.
Guest:That was an unknown consequence in the 60s and 70s.
Guest:Now it's a known known, as Donald Rumsfeld might say, and we have to...
Marc:you know adjust accordingly gay people we gay men we have to have less sex than we can straight people should have more sex than they do and somewhere there's a balance right but the the idea that the identity of gay people in those times when they when the communities were being built you know was you know we need to celebrate and be as out as possible over the top even in order to to get our territory here
Guest:A little bit.
Guest:You know, a lot of people participated in that craze thing.
Guest:We're like really out, really proud, really active.
Guest:There was a political aspect to this.
Guest:You know, we'd been punished for this.
Guest:We'd been imprisoned for this, lobotomized for this, marginalized for this, for the sexual expression.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So we're going to celebrate it and we're going to fuck the fucking fucking shit out of this fucking.
Marc:Yeah, we're going to fuck it up.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:um but there are a lot of people who were driven to that by shame you know bathhouses really facilitated the closet the deal the culture made was you cannot be out there's this park yeah yeah or there's this one can't tell anybody you work with or your family or your wife we will turn a blind eye so long as you're only doing this gay shit in one of these two places right in chicago in the neighborhood your father policed get married settle down find some sad woman and lie to her all your life hope you don't get caught
Guest:And go to these places to get your gay rocks off.
Guest:We know you exist.
Guest:We've made this this allowance.
Marc:And we know who you are in the in the in the sort of the league, the world of power.
Marc:And I mean, all these people knew.
Guest:Right.
Marc:You know, but they were just sort of like, yeah, he does that.
Guest:But you had to pay lip service to the dominant culture, which is homophobic and say you were straight.
Guest:And then you could pay lip service to some dude in a bathhouse.
Guest:As long as you didn't know each other's names, didn't date, didn't fall in love, didn't disrupt the lie the culture was telling itself, which is that gay people didn't exist.
Guest:The Iranian lie.
Guest:President Iran comes up, we don't have gay people in Iran.
Guest:Eisenhower could have said the same thing.
Marc:What gave you the fortitude or the comfort to sort of come out as young as you did in the era that you lived in?
Guest:Oh, God, I don't know.
Guest:People were coming out.
Guest:I grew up in Chicago.
Guest:That was such a benefit because there was a gay neighborhood that was emerging in Chicago, Boys Town.
Guest:And so I would see gay people around sometimes.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I would think they look happy.
Marc:Yeah, despite whatever pressures there were in the world.
Guest:And I credit my Catholicism.
Guest:I had been raised not to lie to my parents.
Guest:I had been raised...
Marc:But were you not also raised not to suck dick?
Guest:I was.
Guest:These things were in conflict, and one or the other had to go.
Guest:I could lie to my parents, or I could suck dick, but I couldn't do both, and so I prioritized sucking dick over lying to my parents.
Marc:I think that was probably the right choice.
Guest:I do, too.
Guest:That was actually the good part.
Guest:Semen is a natural antidepressant.
Guest:There are antidepressant qualities in semen.
Guest:That's why I'm such a happy-go-lucky guy, no matter what the religious world is.
Marc:That is not true, is it?
Marc:You just made that up.
Marc:No, no, it's Googling.
Marc:You're not talking metaphorically here, because metaphorically, I think that on a lot of levels, the idea of what religion tells us, what you chose, was the right way to go for your own self and for everybody else's.
Guest:I saw through it.
Marc:Right.
Guest:You know, my sexuality brought me into conflict with my faith and my faith collapsed, not because I was just a hedonist who prioritized boners over God, but because I looked at religion and thought, you know, no, this is, you know, religion, whether you're straight or gay, inserts itself into your sex life and into that conflict, that internal conflict that is your sex life and says, oh, we can mediate this with God.
Guest:We can intervene here.
Guest:for your sexual sins and we've defined everything about human sexuality that happens as a sin and you're going to go to hell unless we're there to right well that was that that was the the the brilliance of those who wanted to control others in writing that shit if you can get into somebody's head about their sexuality you can control them yeah completely so did you do you have any priests in your family uh no and it was a huge catholic family that's bizarre it's a big i have a i had a nun uh for an aunt a great aunt and i went to the seminary i was thinking about being a priest no no
Guest:A preparatory seminary.
Guest:I went to a high school for boys thinking about... Did all your siblings go to that?
Guest:No, just me.
Marc:How many... What are your other siblings?
Guest:Two older brothers and a younger sister.
Marc:But you went on purpose?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You decided to do that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I decided to do that when I was 14.
Guest:Because I thought... I knew I was a fag, but I thought, I can never come out.
Guest:It'll kill my parents.
Guest:And literally at that age, I was thinking, okay, I'm the good one.
Guest:I'm the good goody two-shoes mama's boy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It'll kill my parents if I if they find out I'm gay.
Guest:So I should probably kill myself because it'd be easier for them to have a dead kid than a gay kid.
Guest:That's literally what I was thinking when I was 14.
Guest:No, I'll be a priest.
Guest:And then I never can come out and I can live in a big house and wear dresses.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But but when you went.
Marc:But that's interesting to me because I've always had this this weird theory that Catholic communities pushed.
Marc:boys who were leaning into homosexuality into the priesthood to save them.
Guest:And Catholic boys who were gay fled to the priesthood because it not only gave you an out from having a marriage and having a big Catholic family of your own, it was an honorable out.
Guest:It's like, oh, I would totally love to fuck women and have a lot of babies.
Guest:I totally love to eat a lot of pussy, but I've been called to the priesthood.
Guest:And it was, this is why you, there's so many, you know, some estimates are 50, 75% of all Catholic priests are, are gay men.
Guest:That's why the church is so conflicted and tortured and effed up.
Marc:But did, when you went in though, was it, did you think you would cure yourself or did you think?
Guest:No, I thought it was a good closet.
Guest:I thought it was a good.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was a closet with stained glass windows.
Marc:So that's interesting.
Marc:Cause I thought that maybe the guilt ran so deep in many people that they went into the priesthood to try to stop the behavior.
Guest:No, I wasn't behaving yet.
Guest:I was 14.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Right.
Guest:I was just wanting.
Marc:So you thought, like, if I could get in there, I could get what I want.
Guest:I can hide out all my life.
Guest:I won't have to have sex with some... I want to lie to some woman all my life.
Marc:Well, what is your... I mean, I don't really do much politics in here, but I think that the opinion or the intelligence behind how you would assess the sort of downfall of the church along these lines, along the pedophilia, how much of that had to do with repression?
Guest:Oh, a lot.
Guest:A lot of it had to do with repression.
Yeah.
Guest:And it wasn't just gay men who would flee to the church or flee to the priesthood to hide out.
Guest:Other people with like hugely effed up desires might think, well, here's celibacy, here's control, here's a life.
Guest:And so I'm going to go there and then, oh, and here are all these children.
Guest:So, you know, if you fled into the priesthood because you were a gay man, you're probably not going to rape children.
Guest:There's a difference between being homosexual and a pedophile.
Guest:Um, but if you fled into the priesthood because your sexuality was so dark and disturbing and effed up and you were a pedophile and you thought, I'm just going to shut this off and shut this, shut myself down sexually and go hide out in the church.
Marc:I'm going to try to, you know, out of shame, you know, pull myself out of the loop.
Marc:And then here are all these kids.
Marc:It's fucking, to me, that's a, well, it's a, the church is so effed up about sexuality.
Marc:You can say fuck here.
Marc:The church is so fucked up about sexuality.
Marc:I said fuck a lot already.
Marc:I'm trying to mix it up.
Marc:I'm just telling you.
Marc:I say fuck too much.
Guest:No one always tells me I say fuck too much.
Marc:But are you still on regular radio or only the podcast?
Marc:Only the podcast.
Marc:Okay, so you can say fuck all you want.
Guest:Yeah, I say fuck a lot on my podcast.
Marc:So you go to the seminary school and what was the experience?
Marc:I mean, what made you go like, nah, I can't do this?
Guest:Well, you know, I picked it in eighth grade and I went and then, you know, I was there for a year.
Marc:And you bought it.
Marc:You bought Catholicism.
Marc:I did buy Catholicism at the time.
Marc:You believed in Jesus.
Guest:And people were mean and it was just, it was a little bit like when I was in the Boy Scouts.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Everybody was supposed to be good to each other.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And everybody was, every kid was a brat and an asshole.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I thought, well, this is bullshit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No one's living up to the ideals of the Boy Scouts.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:No one's teaching me how to tie knots.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so I had the same kind of reaction in the seminary.
Guest:Like all these people are shits and not good Christians.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it was just a horrible place.
Guest:And I was a shit too, you know, as a freshman in high school.
Marc:When did you have the first experience with men?
Guest:Well, it depends.
Marc:You know the first real one.
Guest:Well, no, actually, it's complicated.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Because I lost my virginity in a three-way with a guy and a girl.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:Wait, how old were you then?
Guest:15, and they were in their 20s.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:So I was raped by a woman, right?
Guest:Technically, it was statutory rape.
Guest:I was totally down with it.
Guest:But if the haters, people hate gay people say, oh, you're seduced into it, you were raped by somebody.
Guest:Oh, so this is why you're gay.
Guest:No, no, they say if you're, you know, you have been raped by a man, that makes you gay.
Guest:Well, I was, my first sexual experience with a woman and it was rape.
Marc:How did that unfold?
Marc:You were a 15-year-old kid and you met these college kids or what?
Guest:You know, it was a camping trip.
Guest:It was my brother's ex-girlfriend and some guy she was messing around with.
Guest:And they approached me and it happened.
Guest:What happened?
Guest:What happened?
Guest:Come on.
Guest:I've written about this.
Guest:I don't know why it's so hard to talk about it.
Guest:He had sex with her and then I had sex with her.
Guest:So my first was sloppy seconds.
Guest:And you watched?
Guest:I watched him do it and thought, okay, I can do that.
Guest:And I had to close my eyes and pretend she was Leif Garrett or Andy Gibb.
Marc:Did you really?
Guest:Yeah, a little bit.
Guest:And I couldn't... This is what's so...
Guest:I couldn't touch him because I was, I knew I was gay and I thought if I touch him, he's going to realize I'm gay and he's going to stop what he's doing and kill me.
Guest:Right?
Guest:He'll like stop what he's doing and beat me up.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because I saw him naked and fucking.
Guest:And I was, you know, fucking her and it was taking a while because it's hard to pretend that she's Andy Gid with her head on backwards or whatever.
Marc:But he still, he can feel it.
Marc:It feels good still.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was like not quite getting there and at one point he reached between my legs and just started playing with my balls and I was there.
Ha ha!
Guest:That really did the trick.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's such closet case thinking.
Guest:That was what you were missing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was such closet case thinking.
Guest:I thought, oh, he can touch me because he knows he's straight.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But if I touch him, he'll know I'm gay and kill me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that's the sort of like shit that goes on in a kid's head when they're in the closet.
Guest:Like you're always like worried about who can tell and how much you're giving away and whether you're going to get busted and murdered.
Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I ended up in a couple of threesomes in college with a guy who I was friends with, who was just had much more game than me.
Marc:And we were really good friends and he had a lot more sexual confidence.
Marc:So we ended up in these, you know, like two or three threesomes where I would just end up, you know, watching him fuck and then, you know, doing it next and not doing, you know, very well.
Marc:And it's all very quick, but we didn't really engage, you know, but it was just sort of like, I was sort of using him as my stand in Dick in a way.
Marc:Like, well, if I'm with him, he's going to probably, you know, pave the way.
Marc:And I
Marc:That's awesome.
Guest:You're very highly evolved.
Guest:I get letters from a lot of the time from straight guys, straight young men, college age guys who cannot do that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They want their girlfriend to have a girl, girl, boy, three way.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Two women with that.
Marc:That's a lot of pressure.
Guest:And the girl's like, okay, I'll do that when we can have a boy, boy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Me three way.
Marc:Right.
Guest:He can't do it because he's afraid that being in a room with another guy with a hard dick is going to poof, make him gay.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Do you think that people are either all gay or half gay?
Marc:Is there real bisexuality?
Marc:I know you have conversations about this.
Guest:Absolutely, bisexuality definitely exists.
Guest:I had sex with girls, and I was able to perform more than once.
Guest:But that first one didn't sound good.
Guest:uh no it wasn't it was it was okay if you're out there listening it was great i loved it thank you so much wherever you are now um and it totally threw my family off the scent for a few years that was the point of it like well my mother is gonna think i'm what you told your family had a threesome with your sister's ex-girlfriend i made my brother i made sure they found out not that i would tell them but that like right right because that was the point yeah and my brother found he was mad and then he kind of had to forgive me like his straight older brother yeah yeah um but yeah people are how to i think people are a little flexible around the edges
Guest:Every once in a while, I see a woman that I'm like, yeah, zing.
Guest:I kind of feel something.
Guest:It's almost invariably a lesbian firefighter.
Guest:A lesbian who looks like a guy, right?
Guest:Muscles and looks like Rolf from The Sound of Music, but is a woman.
Guest:You like that, huh?
Guest:Yeah, I like that.
Guest:I like squishy guys.
Guest:Every once in a while, I see a lesbian who blings onto my sex dar.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And when that happens, I don't think, oh my God, I must really be straight.
Guest:I don't have this panic attack.
Guest:But straight guys, when they see the one dude who pings onto their sex dar, suddenly have this panic attack about what it must mean.
Guest:Maybe I'm not really straight.
Guest:Doesn't matter how much pussy I've eaten.
Guest:Doesn't matter how much pussy I've pounded.
Guest:Angrily.
Guest:You know that I've met the one guy that I could be sexual with who just like kind of attracted me because they vibed the way for me.
Guest:The kind of types I'm attracted to.
Guest:Those guys write me every day having just flat out panic attacks that they must be gay.
Marc:Well, they don't want to make the big shift in lifestyle.
Marc:I think it's more... They don't have to.
Marc:It's not required.
Guest:I feel sorry for you straight guys.
Marc:I really do.
Marc:Why?
Marc:Because we're carrying this burden of attitude and... Because you run the world, which sounds glamorous, but that includes the 7-Elevens.
Marc:I think there's some gays running the world.
Guest:Well, the Vatican.
Marc:It's a state.
Marc:But I think there's still some closet cases in high positions that...
Marc:No doubt.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But you're less free sexually than everybody else.
Guest:Like, I'm a gay dude.
Guest:I could leave your garage and go have sex with a woman.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Nobody's going to think I'm straight now.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Except maybe that woman, if you're not honest with her.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But everyone will think, oh, that must have been crazy.
Guest:That fag savage fucked a woman.
Guest:I wonder what that was about.
Guest:No one's going to say, Dan Savage isn't a fag.
Guest:He fucked a woman.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And so gay dudes are- And then the really angry guys will go, that fag's fucking our women.
Yeah.
Guest:I thought the whole point of us accepting them was more women for us.
Guest:And now they're fucking our women too.
Guest:But women can do whatever they want.
Guest:They can eat pussy at college and then be straight identified.
Guest:And nobody says you're not straight.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But straight guys.
Marc:Suck one dick in college.
Marc:That's it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You're trapped.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's not a prison of your own construction solely because straight women, when they find out that their husbands or boyfriends had one same sex encounter, write me, panic that it must mean he's gay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And gay guys, you know, if we found out that some hot movie star had had one same-sex relationship or encounter, we would all insist that he had to be gay.
Guest:He couldn't do that if he weren't gay.
Guest:Why do you think that is?
Guest:I don't know, but it's sad for straight guys.
Guest:I didn't like straight guys when I started writing a sex advice column.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I started feeling so sorry for straight guys after about two years of reading their letters.
Marc:Because they have to honor this paradigm.
Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That being a straight male somehow, after gay people started coming out of the closet, became defined as nothing positive.
Guest:If you're a straight guy, you are not a fag and you are not a girl.
Guest:So that if there's anything girly or gay that intrigues you or interests you, it can undermine your heterosexual bona fides with other straight people, other straight guys.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it induces a kind of paranoia in straight guys.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They're not sort of comfortably straight.
Guest:Not all of them.
Guest:Individual results may vary.
Guest:Um, but there's sort of paranoid that they are.
Guest:I used to pretend to be straight when I was 15 years old.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And, and, and really try to perform straight.
Guest:And I see so many straight guys who are adults who are still doing that.
Guest:Still trying to convince the world that they're straight.
Guest:Nobody walks around once they're out of the closet and gay going, I've got to convince everybody.
Guest:I have to walk this very careful line with my, you know, playing gay so that nobody thinks I'm not gay.
Guest:But straight guys have to walk this line, all their lines.
Marc:Well, I think that part of it is that the reason why the two females, one dude thing, or women having sex with each other for the enjoyment of men, that's all part of the male paradigm, the straight paradigm.
Marc:But there's no... I don't know how many women... I think it would be different if there were women who fantasized about watching a couple of guys fuck.
Guest:They're out there.
Marc:Yeah, I know, but they're not the mass.
Marc:They're not the majority.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That's true.
Guest:But all the slash fiction, which features male-male characters getting it on, is written by and for women predominantly.
Guest:And there's a lot more women consuming gay pornography than there used to be.
Guest:But it's still a minority, I think, among women, whereas I think it's a truism that almost all straight guys dig a little lesbian porn.
Marc:So, wait, so how many women did you have sex with?
Guest:Oh, four.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Three or four or five, I don't remember.
Marc:And how did those, like, just out of personal interest, and we're talking about you, I mean, how did those play out?
Marc:The first one, you needed a little reach around from a dude, a little help.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Guest:And so the second one- But you know that first time, when you lose your virginity, there's that first time you think, you're worried, can I do this?
Guest:Can I do this?
Guest:Whether you're fucking what you want to be fucking or not.
Marc:My first time was horrible.
Guest:Was it?
Guest:What happened?
Marc:Well, my, like, I had a tremendous- I was alone.
Marc:No, yeah, well, no, yeah.
Marc:No, I, like, I was completely panicked.
Marc:I saw pornography at a very young age, and it really fucked my brain up in the way that, like, what performance meant, what had to be done, you know, like, I had a lot of anxiety around performance before I performed at all.
Marc:So there was no real innocence to it, because I'd sort of been brain raped by porn.
Mm-hmm.
Marc:So I brought a lot of anxiety to it.
Marc:So all I knew was that I had to do this thing.
Marc:So there was like, I was all up in my head and it took a long time to actually get it up and then to get it in.
Marc:And then it was over very quickly and I was ashamed immediately.
Marc:Oh yeah.
Guest:I'm sorry.
Marc:That's okay, man.
Marc:I wish I'd been there to cup your balls.
Marc:If you might've been there to grab my balls around the back, I would have had a different life.
Marc:I wouldn't, the fight wouldn't have been so hard.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But yeah, and then there was just a series.
Marc:It took me a while to relax enough to deal with it, just to deal with the act of sex.
Marc:A lot of premature ejaculating.
Marc:I was very good at that.
Guest:It requires practice.
Guest:One of the burdens, we talk about slut-shaming girls, and it's a real problem.
Guest:You talk about what?
Guest:Slut shaming of girls and a lot of the pressure that's on girls sexually to be, you know, is voluptuous and seemingly available but chaste at the same time and it puts the zap on their heads.
Guest:But there's also a zap that is on boys' heads, which is sex is your job and you have to be good at it.
Guest:It's like calisthenic.
Guest:The burden of mastery.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:The first time you do it, you have to sort of execute this quadruple backflip double jump thing perfectly.
Guest:And that's a lot of anxiety-inducing pressure.
Guest:We have to give people permission, and I do all the time when I talk to young people, permission to really look bad at it at first.
Marc:Well, you have to be.
Marc:I mean, like, I don't think I knew about vaginal orgasms until it was within the last decade.
Marc:And I'm 49.
Marc:Like, I never really got that there was two kinds.
Marc:And not because I'm some in denial.
Guest:There aren't two kinds.
Marc:Well, no, but there are girls that can come from just having sex.
Marc:without clitoral stimulation.
Marc:Yes, there are.
Guest:I've had them.
Guest:They're lying to me.
Guest:No, here's the paradox.
Guest:There's no such thing as a vaginal orgasm.
Guest:All orgasms, all female orgasms are clitoral.
Guest:It's just that some women, because of the position of their clitoris, the angle of the clitoris, where the clitoral roots are, her clitoral shaft is positioned.
Guest:they get enough clitoral stimulation from vaginal intercourse because so it's a deeper clitoral stimulation so the g-spot is just an extension it's not a g-spot thing that's a whole other thing that's the female prostate which is a whole other thing that's what i'm talking about but the what about that
Guest:Well, that's also a thing if you're stimulating, if you're hitting the G spot.
Marc:You can have an orgasm there?
Guest:Yeah, you can have an orgasm there.
Marc:That's what I'm talking about.
Guest:Okay, well, that's different.
Marc:Well, I didn't know.
Marc:I'm not a professional.
Marc:I'm just saying, like, I didn't know about the G spot female prostate orgasm until within the last 10 years.
Marc:Which often induces female ejaculation.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I've had a little experience with that, and I'm still on the fence as to what that is exactly.
Guest:Well, they've studied it chemically, and it closely resembles prostate fluid.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Seminal fluid.
Guest:Yeah, it's not urine.
Guest:But there are some women out there that just, they'll just pee because there are, because, because it became such a thing in porn that some actresses learned to sort of ape what it looks like.
Marc:So now I have, now I'm feeling insecure.
Marc:I know that's what I was talking about was that, that the G spot orgasm, female prostate.
Guest:But that still involves a lot of clitoral stimulation.
Marc:Sure, sure.
Guest:But the people are like, I can, you know, my girlfriend can come from just vaginal penetration.
Marc:Right.
Guest:I don't have to do anything to her clit.
Guest:No, you're doing something to her clit.
Marc:No, I get that.
Marc:While you're penetrating vaginally.
Marc:I'm fairly adept at that.
Marc:Awesome.
Marc:Good for you.
Marc:Yeah, thank you.
Marc:And now.
Marc:You're much better.
Guest:Don't you wish you could tell your teenage self losing his virginity?
Guest:You're going to get better at this.
Guest:It gets better.
Marc:Dude, it took, it really took a woman who was, you know, aggressively sort of like, you know, don't fucking come.
Marc:If you fucking come, I'm gonna be mad.
Guest:That's hot.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:How hot is that?
Marc:It was pretty great.
Marc:And I, you know, I still talk to her.
Marc:we're friends but it was like angry I hope she texts you every once in a while just randomly in the middle of the day don't fucking come no she doesn't she says don't write about me in your book I'm in a thing and I don't want that out there right now because I wrote about her in my first book but it was all sort of very thank god that she came into my life but she was like well look I'm in a thing right now and I don't know if the dude that I'm with can handle so why don't we
Marc:You know, secrets are secrets, right?
Guest:I wrote about the woman that I lost my virginity to and that relationship and what I learned about myself in that relationship.
Guest:In this book, what I learned from women who dumped me because she eventually dumped me.
Guest:And sometimes I think, God, I wonder if she saw it.
Guest:I wonder if she read it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:God, I hope not.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Because I didn't say very flattering things about her.
Guest:But you dated a woman?
Guest:Yeah, I dated a few.
Guest:I was a teenager.
Marc:Right.
Guest:In Chicago, it was the 80s.
Marc:So you knew you were gay.
Marc:You had this one thing where the guy squeezed her balls and that was good.
Marc:And then you went on to date...
Marc:A couple other girls.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:For long periods of time?
Guest:Months at a time.
Guest:And then, but you know, I thought, I thought at the time I could never come out.
Guest:I thought I would have to, you know, live a double life and maybe have sex with guys on the side, but I would have to have a girlfriend or a wife because if I ever told my family, they would kill me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so I thought being out wasn't possible for me.
Guest:And then that all played, you know, by the time I was 17, I was like done with it.
Marc:So, okay, so you were basically, you know, sort of like you accepted the paradigm at the time, which was like, I'm gay.
Marc:I got to figure out how to fuck a woman well enough to keep one in the dark for the rest of my life.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then I'll go live this other life.
Marc:And that's just the way it is.
Marc:Huh.
Guest:And I came around pretty quick.
Guest:And you were aware of that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I came around pretty quick and thought, I'm not going to live like this.
Guest:This is not what I want.
Guest:I don't want.
Marc:Because you thought it was unfair?
Guest:I thought it was unfair to her.
Guest:I thought it was unfair to me.
Guest:I didn't think I could lie successfully all my life.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I didn't want those kinds of relationships, sexual relationships with men.
Guest:I didn't want to have sex in the park or the bookstore or the bathhouse.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:With anonymous dudes.
Guest:I wanted a husband.
Guest:I wanted a relationship.
Guest:I'm kind of sentimental and romantic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And what I saw when I first started hanging out with some gay dudes when I came out as bi for five minutes, what I saw of that- What was that?
Guest:Before you came out as gay, you came out as bi?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A lot of people will briefly identify as bi before they come out as gay, which doesn't mean that bi people don't exist.
Guest:These are gay people who are creating this impression that bi is this transitory phase.
Guest:that some people go through.
Guest:Yeah, bi identity is a transitory phase for a lot of gays and lesbians, not for bi people.
Guest:It's not a phase for them.
Guest:But a lot of, you know, telling my friends I was bi meant I hadn't gone completely over to the dark side.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:I wasn't some fag.
Marc:You're right.
Marc:You're still kind of cool.
Marc:Right.
Guest:You know, I was David Bowie-ish as opposed to Liberace-ish, since he's back in the news.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But, you know, I started hanging out with some gay dudes, and they would say, this is how baths work.
Guest:This is how parks work.
Guest:I was just like, oh, my God, that sounds so awful.
Marc:and and dehumanizing and i just never could tap into it like you said it's probably good yeah it was 1981 i'd be dead if i would have been like yay yippee bath houses i'm 18 let's go well i had a professor that was you know really you know into me and he was uh you know a big gay guy full-on you know stonewall new york older than us you know bath houses all of that shit you know you know captain's hats
Marc:And a lot of guys thought that was the revolution.
Marc:But I was fascinated by the freedom of the disposition that he had around sex.
Marc:Like I would listen to him tell these stories, though he was trying to seduce me.
Marc:I was completely compelled by this lifestyle that had no shame around it.
Marc:And you were able to sort of live out and act out.
Marc:I'm not a fetishist, but just the weird audacity of gay sex on that level was fascinating to me.
Guest:You can have audacious, fun, crazy, kinky, nutty gay sex.
Marc:Without going to a bathhouse.
Guest:Without going to a bathhouse.
Guest:And you can have that in the context of a relationship.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I do.
Guest:You do?
Guest:My husband.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We swing from chandeliers and shit.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And it's a ball.
Guest:And it's fun.
Guest:You know, I had a really good friend years ago.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we used to get together, you know, have lunch on Monday and tell our stories to each other of the weekend.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he would tell me his stories and I would be appalled.
Guest:And all his stories were basically vanilla gay sex, but with a million dudes in crazy places.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Giving a million blowjobs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And getting fucked in the park.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But just like butt fucking and oral sex.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like it's just gay vanilla.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I would tell him what I had done that weekend with my one true love.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he would be appalled because we were doing this crazy shit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But that's interesting because the way you're approaching it requires a type of trust and intimacy and the ability to feel comfortable to do that and wake up with each other the next day and have breakfast and then go to bed with each other the next night and not do that.
Guest:Some people can't do that.
Guest:A lot of straight guys can't do that.
Guest:The Madonna whore problem that so many straight guys have.
Guest:They don't want to have crazy sex with the mother of their children, with somebody that they love.
Guest:They want to do that with somebody that they look down on.
Guest:Or not connected to.
Guest:Or they're never going to see again.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Because to do crazy, fun, kinky shit, crazy stuff, and then have to look that person in the eye at dinner with your parents or whatever, some people can't clear that bar.
Guest:They don't want someone to know their secrets, essentially, that they have to interact with all the time.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So they compartmentalize their sex life into normal and good and wholesome sex with the wife or girlfriend and this shit that I do when I get to go to Thailand with a million...
Marc:Yeah, but I also think there's an issue now that I'm curious about in that I think there's a comfort level that's achieved by status quo in a relationship where it's not so much a Madonna whore thing, but it's just sort of the friendship starts to overtake or the comfortability or just the predictability of the situation overtakes your drive to be wild.
Guest:Well, we know what that's about, which is...
Guest:Well, not necessarily by wild, but just be wild for each other.
Guest:When a relationship starts, there are all these obstacles that you have to overcome to get in their pants.
Guest:Do they like me?
Guest:Do they not like me?
Guest:Where are we going to go?
Guest:Who are we going to do?
Guest:Getting to know each other as you reveal yourselves to each other.
Guest:It just feels risky and dangerous, even if it's the most sort of...
Guest:boy-girl-vanilla kind of relationship on the planet, it still feels like you're taking risks and jumping hurdles.
Marc:Because, yeah, you're just getting to know each other.
Guest:Yeah, and you're getting over those obstacles.
Guest:Once you've overcome all those obstacles, there's no challenge anymore.
Marc:Right.
Guest:It doesn't feel like a game anymore.
Marc:And that might be exactly what you're into, is that feeling of,
Guest:And how do you get that feeling back?
Guest:You have to get a new partner.
Guest:You have to end this relationship, find space.
Guest:Or you have to artificially create those obstacles, reinstall them in your relationship.
Marc:Yeah, I do that with just fighting over nothing.
Marc:Right.
Guest:A lot of people do that.
Guest:A lot of people will pick a fight so they can have the breakup sex.
Guest:Because then you have to overcome the obstacle of the conflict.
Marc:But they don't know they're doing that.
Marc:You're telling me that people do that on purpose?
Marc:I can't imagine that.
Guest:I don't think people know they're doing it on purpose, but I think people do do it subconsciously on purpose.
Marc:I'm very aware that having an argument over bullshit is foreplay.
Guest:Can you do something subconsciously on purpose?
Marc:We have patterns.
Marc:And then either you're going to call yourself out on that or not.
Marc:If you keep doing this, like, oh, she's crying.
Marc:Now I've got to make it right.
Marc:And then we're going to have that amazing sex.
Marc:And this is the third time this month.
Marc:At some point, you've got to realize, well, this is kind of a sick thing I'm into.
Marc:And I don't know how to disarm it.
Marc:Because if you're stuck in that pattern and you're not aware of it and it's not a discussion, then eventually they'll leave.
Marc:And then you're going to have to start over again.
Guest:Eventually you'll pick the breakup level fight.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:When you were just hoping for the breakup.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, I don't think you're ever hoping for that.
Marc:I mean, I think that's a sad part of that dynamic.
Marc:So when, okay.
Marc:So you go out with a few women in high school.
Marc:And then you decide that that's when you come out after that shit.
Marc:You're like, this ain't going to happen.
Marc:Because I imagine that if you chose to be honest with your parents, the idea of lying to a girl that you're dating just was consuming.
Marc:You have a moral compass.
Guest:I got rid of those.
Guest:I ended those relationships.
Guest:Or they had run their course.
Marc:Are you friends with any of them still?
Marc:No.
Marc:No, I wouldn't even know where they are.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Well, some... I mean, I think some women seem to be that woman.
Marc:Like, they date gay guys until they run out of them.
Guest:I didn't date those women.
Marc:No?
Guest:You know, we could... As a gay teenager, I knew who the fag hags were.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And to date a fag hag was to kind of out yourself as a fag, and I was very concerned with not being...
Marc:Does that happen a lot?
Marc:Do fag hags date gay men?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:There's actually a study out of the University of British Columbia, I think, that showed that gay kids were at higher risk for unplanned teenage pregnancies than non-gay kids.
Guest:Huh.
Guest:Because we would get in... You know, I had a pregnancy scare with my girlfriend where she missed her period, and I was like, oh, my God.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Pretending you're Andy Gibb isn't a form of birth control?
Guest:Who knew?
Guest:Pretending that was Andy Gibb's ass didn't...
Guest:Prevent you from ovulating?
Guest:But gay kids will sometimes act out sexually to prove that they're straight and take more risks than straight kids who don't have to prove they're straight to anybody.
Guest:And that's what I was doing when I was 15 years old.
Marc:And I imagine there's also an immediacy to it because you don't really want to be there to begin with.
Marc:So once you're up, you're like, let's get this going.
Marc:Let's bang this out.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:I'm just here to prove a point.
Guest:I'm not here to enjoy myself.
Guest:I'm ready.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:To give you an idea how weird it was for me to be an out teenager when I came out and how unlikely that was.
Guest:Now I get letters from people whose kids are coming out to them at 11 and 12 and 13 years old, which blows my mind.
Guest:I came out at 18, then I went to college.
Guest:I was in a theater program, downstate Illinois, where after this other guy left, I was the only out gay guy in the acting program at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana.
Guest:The only fag in the department.
Guest:How is that possible?
Guest:It wasn't possible.
Guest:Everybody else was gay.
Guest:They just weren't out.
Guest:And all these guys that I was in this theater program with came out after college, which is how it was done then.
Guest:And I was a little bit of a pariah, a little scary to the guys who were closeted.
Guest:Just like I couldn't date a fag hag when I was 15 because it would kind of out me.
Guest:They couldn't be kind to me when I was in college because it would out them.
Marc:Well, who do they think they were fooling?
Marc:They're in an acting program, right?
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Well, who are they dating in college?
Marc:Not you.
Marc:Women.
Marc:They were dating women.
Marc:Oh, so that was that deep of a classic.
Guest:They were doing at 1920 what I had gotten out of my system at 15, 16.
Marc:So when you graduated high school, you went into theater as an actor.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So what happened to that dream?
Marc:I wasn't very good at it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I moved to Berlin with my boyfriend years ago.
Guest:I worked with a theater company there.
Guest:When I moved to Seattle to work on the paper to help start The Stranger, I started a theater company called Greek Active.
Marc:You were in Berlin?
Guest:Yeah, I was in West Berlin when the wall came down.
Marc:Really?
Marc:I lived there for two years.
Marc:You did that after college?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you had a boyfriend, same one you got now?
Marc:No, different one.
Marc:And you went to Berlin to... That must have been exciting.
Marc:I went to Berlin to be with my boyfriend.
Marc:Oh, he lived there?
Guest:Yeah, he got a fellowship with the West German government.
Guest:This gives you a idea of how far behind the Times the U.S.
Guest:is.
Guest:1989, he gets a fellowship to study arts management in West Berlin from the West German government.
Guest:And I was able to get residency and a green card.
Guest:Basically the German equivalent of a green card in 1989.
Guest:We are fighting about this very issue right now with immigration reform, whether the partners of gay people will be able to apply for green cards and live in the United States.
Guest:I was able to do that in Germany in 1989.
Guest:And you still can't do that in the United States in 2030.
Marc:It's sort of embarrassing how the conservative, bigoted contingent of our country still drives social policy.
Marc:It's embarrassing after a certain point.
Marc:It is embarrassing.
Marc:Because all these other countries, they're fine.
Marc:They actually have an industrial base.
Marc:People are better taken care of, and we're supposed to be the example.
Guest:And people are freer.
Guest:That's what drives me crazy about the whole health care debate.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, it's impacting our... You know what makes you not free?
Guest:You can't quit your job because you can't afford to lose your health insurance because you have a sick child.
Guest:You are now the slave of your employer.
Guest:In Sweden, you don't have that problem.
Marc:Right, and you idiots are fighting about a word you don't understand, socialism, that you don't even understand it.
Guest:It can't pronounce it, can't spell it for certain.
Marc:Yeah, and don't understand that on some level it functions.
Guest:Yeah, you like your socialized fire departments and highways and... And Social Security.
Yeah.
Marc:So when you were in Berlin, outside of the green card issue, where did your politics come from?
Marc:Where did it take root where you realized like, holy fuck, I've got to fight for what's right?
Guest:Well, it was the AIDS epidemic.
Guest:It was ACT UP.
Guest:I wasn't involved in ACT UP.
Guest:It was Queer Nation.
Guest:The first thing I did politically was protested draft registration that Carter...
Marc:imposed after the Iranian I did that too well no but we were kind of the same age I mean I very quickly you know went out and registered as a conscientious objector and because I was draftable at that because we had to but then I like did all the research I needed to do on conscientious objecting I wrote it on my registration card I did too and I picketed yeah I picketed the post office where we had to do it right that's what I went to the post office to do that
Marc:so that was it the first big move yeah but it was you know for me as a gay man it was really the AIDS epidemic that kind of goosed me politically and made me politically active and what was the day that so you're in Berlin you saw the wall come down you saw a way of life there that was different or were you that aware of it
Guest:I was, you know, moving to Europe after college was an eye opener because you just in the United States growing up, you just soak in this greatest country on earth bullshit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And most Americans haven't been to any other country on earth and have no frame of reference at all.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they don't know if this is true or not true.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Provable or not provable.
Guest:And when I went and lived in Germany for a while, I was like, oh, yeah, we are not the greatest country on earth.
Guest:There are some things that the Germans do better.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like health insurance, like public transportation, like social welfare and social safety nets.
Guest:And that was, for me, a real eye-opener and real – you know, the –
Guest:There were poor people.
Guest:There were homeless people.
Guest:But there wasn't the kind of grinding, horrendous poverty that just destroyed people and chewed people up.
Guest:Rich people paid their taxes.
Guest:And part of what they paid for was the ability to walk down the street and live in a world where everybody else is treated decently.
Guest:And that really had an impact on me.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So when did your dream of theater die?
Yeah.
Guest:After my stupid sex advice column took off, I moved to Seattle, started a theater called Greek Active.
Guest:What was that?
Guest:Greek Active is slang, old gay code for I will fuck you in the ass.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Greek Active.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you would see personal ads in the 60s and 70s that say Greek Active or Greek Passive.
Guest:And that meant I fuck ass or I get fucked in the ass.
Guest:So we called our theater company because the first play we did was a Greek tragedy.
Guest:We called it Greek Active just for the delight of seeing the name of our theater company in the headlines of all the reviews in the daily papers.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Of people who didn't know what it meant.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Greek Active announces Greek Active Triumphs.
Guest:That was a great headline one day.
Guest:Yeah, it always does for us.
Guest:And we did all these, you know, we did all these plays and the theater was really successful, but the column was taking off.
Guest:I was directing all the plays.
Marc:What was the angle of it?
Marc:What was the, I mean, did you do anything differently?
Marc:I mean, were you doing gay themed plays?
Guest:We did a lot of like queer shit.
Guest:We did a production of Macbeth where all the female parts are played by men and all the male parts played by women.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We just did kind of comedy takes on a lot of Shakespearean tragedy.
Guest:We did a production of St.
Guest:Joan.
Guest:Morning Becomes Electra, which is a play by O'Neill that's set after the Civil War.
Guest:We set it after the Vietnam War and it was all just kind of like...
Marc:So you had a, it definitely had a socially active bent.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And what were your audiences?
Guest:It was also the nineties.
Guest:It was the height of the, you know, people dying in the gay community.
Guest:And a lot of people in the company had HIV and some people were sick.
Guest:And so all we did was comedies.
Guest:And the, the low, the, the motto of the theater was my life is, is a fucking drama.
Guest:Make me laugh.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Just so that.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:Escapism.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Um,
Guest:But then it reached a point where I couldn't do the writing I was doing.
Guest:And I started writing books and do the theater.
Marc:How did you get the opportunity to write the column?
Guest:I met Tim Keck, who founded The Onion.
Guest:Tim Keck and Chris Johnson were the founders of The Onion.
Guest:Those two guys invented writing bullshit in the AP style.
Guest:That was their thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they sold The Onion and Tim moved to Seattle to start The Stranger and he was telling me I'm going to do this paper and I looked at him and said, oh, you should have an advice column because everybody reads those.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he said, why don't you write it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I wasn't angling for the gigs.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I was shocked when he said that and I started writing it.
Marc:What was the original column like?
Ha!
Guest:The original idea was I was, the salutation, every letter began with, hey, faggot, and then there'd be the question and then my answer.
Guest:Although the column was always called Savage Love.
Guest:And the idea was I was going to treat straight people in straight relationships with the same revulsion and contempt that, like, little old lady advice columnists always treated gay people and gay sex with.
Guest:It was going to be like, ew, straight people and straight sex, gross, but here's some advice.
Guest:And it turned out that straight people really loved being treated with this kind of contempt.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Why?
Guest:Because it's sort of like a white man's... It was a new experience for them, not for us.
Marc:It was totally like, whoa, what is this contempt?
Marc:I've never been on the receiving end of this.
Marc:So it's like a straight man's burden kind of thing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like, you know, they were, you know, we deserve this.
Guest:And I started getting letters and then it took off.
Guest:It was going to be a joke.
Guest:I was going to do it for six months or a year and then my ex-boyfriend and I were going to move back to Berlin.
Guest:And we broke up and I was stuck in Seattle and the column took off and then other papers started picking it up and it got syndicated and then I got a book deal and I was like, oh my God, I am now stuck.
Marc:You're the guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're the savage love guy.
Guest:I know.
Guest:And I have my husband to thank for the longevity of the column because I met him when the column was three years old.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was sort of the, you know, that 90s boom in sex columns.
Guest:Anko Rankarankovich or whatever her name was in Esquire and Candace Bushnell.
Guest:And there was this kind of boom of sex columnists.
Guest:And I was one of them.
Guest:They're all gone and I'm still there because I don't write about my own sex life.
Guest:Whereas most of those other columnists, they wrote a lot about their own sex life.
Guest:And three years into it, I was writing a lot about my own sex life.
Guest:And then I met my husband, Terry.
Guest:And he said, well, you can write about your sex life or you can have a sex life with me.
Guest:But you cannot have a sex life with me and write about your sex life.
Marc:He didn't want to be public.
Marc:No.
Guest:And so I stopped writing about my sex life.
Guest:And I think that is why Savage Love has had the longevity that it's had.
Guest:Because it's not about me.
Marc:And all those other ones that were completely driven by their sex life probably ended up leveling off at some point.
Guest:Yeah, you break trust with the reader because at a certain point the reader's like, yeah.
Guest:How much could this be true?
Guest:Yeah, how many relationships can you have?
Guest:Is this something that's genuine that you're actually interested in experiencing?
Guest:You're just like churning for column fodder.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And because my column fodder is the reader's, I never had to seem to be reaching around or anything else to get to a column.
Guest:I never kind of broke faith with my readers.
Guest:They never lost their trust in me.
Marc:Well, talk a little bit about when ACT UP came to organizing that, how the fury of that thing defined you.
Guest:Well, people were dying and nobody gave a fuck.
Guest:It was- 81?
Guest:81, 82.
Guest:ACT UP didn't get started, I think, until 86, 87.
Marc:The first reports were like 80, 81, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Mysterious cancer seen on gay men.
Guest:The report in the New York Times.
Guest:Thousands and thousands of people died in horrendous and gruesome ways.
Guest:And nobody gave a shit because it was just facts.
Marc:People you knew.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Early boyfriends.
Guest:And, you know, I just remember the terror years.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:83, 84, when everybody was standing around in gay bars saying, oh, yeah, I have to be really careful.
Guest:But no one was changing their behavior yet.
Marc:Really that long.
Guest:Yeah, it took a while to turn off the blowjob spigot for some folks.
Guest:And, you know, people started getting sick, people started dying, and there was no response from the government.
Guest:And, you know, we had the, what was that?
Guest:Legionnaires disease.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know.
Marc:Ridiculous.
Marc:A hundred.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Folks died.
Marc:From a boat or something, or a hotel?
Marc:A hotel.
Guest:A hundred legionnaires died, and the government kicked into action to figure out what the hell was going on and to fix this and make sure this would stop.
Guest:A hundred legionnaires.
Guest:Gay men in their 20s and 30s and 40s were suddenly dying by the thousands, and nothing was being done.
Guest:And the government couldn't respond.
Guest:And Reagan, it took him seven years to even say the word AIDS.
Guest:And by then, tens of thousands of Americans were dead.
Guest:It was 9-11 times 30 at that point.
Guest:you just felt so betrayed you know felt so abandoned and lost again yeah by your country but now you're abandoned by your country before you're abandoned by culture and by your parents by your faith yeah everything and this was kind of the last straw people used to say you know when people like Harvey Milk were encouraging people to come out
Guest:That, you know, Harvey Fierstein wrote this in one of his plays.
Guest:Wouldn't it be great if every gay man, you know, would turn purple one day?
Guest:Because then they would see how many of us there are and how many of us they know and love.
Guest:And then along comes HIV and a whole bunch of gay men turned purple one day.
Guest:Got Carposis Arcoma, got lesions that were purple.
Guest:And, you know, once you can't hide, you have to fight.
Guest:And that's kind of what happened to the gay community in the late 80s and early 90s.
Guest:You could no longer hide.
Guest:Guys who were sick could not hide.
Guest:And guys who were not sick yet felt like I'm going to be sick sooner or later.
Guest:But I might as well come out fighting now rather than waiting until I'm too sick to fight.
Marc:Well, that's good that they did that in the sense that, you know, obviously, but I imagine within the gay community, there was still this sort of denial initially.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:There's a great book by Randy Schultz called And the Band Played On.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, that metaphor from the Titanic, the band is playing as the ship is sinking, that there were all these people in the gay community who were, what's the word?
Guest:Complicit in a way in how long it took the gay community to respond and to realize exactly what was going on.
Guest:And people will say you can't tell people that they have to come out.
Guest:You know, no, you can't.
Guest:No, you don't have to come out.
Guest:But you have to accept that if you are not out and you are gay, that is a moral failing, that you have fallen short, that you have failed people and you have failed yourself and you have failed this wider community of which you are.
Marc:And you believe that, too.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:I don't believe in outing unless you're talking about somebody who is, you know, Ted Haggard or Larry Craig.
Guest:But, you know, out some fucking dentist who's lying to his wife gives a shit.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But if you are not out.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Unless you have some very good reason.
Guest:And, you know, you're 15 years old.
Guest:You're growing up on some Mormon compound in Utah somewhere.
Guest:And your parents are shitty.
Guest:And you might wind up homeless if you come up.
Guest:You have a good reason to wait to come out later.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:You're 25, 30 years old.
Guest:You're a lawyer.
Guest:You're set.
Guest:You're no longer dependent on your parents in any way.
Guest:And you're not out.
Guest:You're just a fucking coward and a part of the problem.
Marc:I think it's interesting, too, because it seems that within the community and also on the other side of the straight world is that there's a constant need for the straight world to pigeonhole gay people, specifically as gay, as opposed to, like, there are gay Republicans.
Marc:There are gay assholes.
Marc:There are gay.
Guest:There's a lot of overlap.
Guest:That gay asshole, gay Republican thing is a Venn diagram that's just a fucking circle when you look at it.
Marc:But that gay people are just, you know, that is not the top of what they are.
Marc:That is just, you know, that's what they, that's their life.
Guest:need to identify that as a top of who we are right now because it is for that reason that we are discriminated against is for that reason we didn't make gay the most important thing about us straight people made gay the most important thing about us when straight people said we're gonna discriminate against you throw you out of the army not allow you to be married we're gonna make sure that your lives are really circumscribed and we're gonna fuck with you it's not like gay people said hey we're gay people and this is the most important thing about us straight people identified a gay as the most important thing about us and the reason to discriminate against us
Marc:But that was because out of reaction for that, that was why the gay community initially, you know, amped up the sex publicly.
Guest:Perhaps.
Guest:I think it was just after centuries, centuries, centuries, millennia of oppression.
Guest:But now there was this sense of sexual freedom and possibility.
Guest:It just exploded.
Guest:Right.
Guest:In the 70s.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But that was necessary in order for the community to sort of define itself.
Guest:It was this adolescence and it was this great coming together.
Guest:And, you know, it cemented a lot of bonds.
Guest:You know, Eric Rofus is this gay writer who wrote a lot about that.
Guest:He wrote this book called Dry Bones Breathe about, you know, promiscuity and what was good about it.
Guest:And this like band of brothers who were all sort of sexually linked in those relationships.
Guest:So there was good in it, but it was, you know, let's give a Rotella road in sexual ecology, unsustainable biologically over the long haul, as we've seen.
Marc:But now the evolution is that, you know, when a basketball player comes out and it's good because it's no longer about the sex as much as it is about like, hey, we're your neighbor.
Marc:You know, we're in your family.
Marc:We're you.
Marc:Hey, we're seven foot tall and we weigh 250 pounds and we could kick your ass.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Good, good.
Marc:So that's it.
Marc:That's the cultural dialogue now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's the final, it's the last bastion.
Guest:It's the last, you know, citadel that we're storming.
Marc:And you're optimistic.
Guest:Oh, absolutely.
Guest:We're winning.
Guest:We're winning.
Guest:You know, we're sitting here in Minneapolis or Minnesota, achieved marriage equality yesterday.
Guest:And today, Brazil achieved marriage equality, became the 15th country on earth with full equality for same-sex couples.
Guest:And how long have you been married?
Guest:I've been with Terry for 18 years and married for eight.
Marc:And when you got married, that was in the first wave?
Yeah.
Guest:We ran up to British Columbia to get married eight years ago.
Marc:So before.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then we got married again in Washington State.
Guest:We renewed our vows in Washington State when marriage came to Washington.
Marc:Now, so that's solid.
Marc:So what is offered to you as a married couple in Washington State?
Guest:A massive tax bill.
Marc:You're supposed to get a tax break.
Guest:Oh, no, no, no.
Guest:Because right now with taxes, what the government says is because you're married, you have to file as community property.
Guest:But because you are not married, you're not allowed to file jointly.
Guest:So we get taxed doubly.
Marc:So you haven't got the rights on that level.
Guest:No, we don't.
Guest:We actually had a tax bill this year, which was basically our son's college education wiped out because Terry doesn't have a vagina.
Guest:Taxes we wouldn't have had to pay if Terry had a vagina.
Guest:And he won't get one no matter how often I beg.
Guest:April 10th, April 11th every year, I'm like, honey, we need a sex change, and then we want to pay this.
Guest:You're legally a woman.
Guest:We could file jointly.
Guest:I don't want him to get a vagina in place of his penis.
Guest:He'd have to get a vagina on his hip or behind his knee or somewhere else.
Marc:Maybe just a tattoo of a vagina would work.
Guest:Maybe that would pass muster with Antonio Scalia.
Marc:Maybe that would be good enough for him.
Marc:Just have a tattooed vagina just in between your cock and your belly button.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Marc:But now that's another interesting thing, because I've gotten flack from the transgender community a little bit.
Marc:As have I. Like two listeners, because I'm insensitive.
Guest:The place we have to get to is that, including the queer community, including the gender queer community and the trans activists and everybody else.
Guest:is that there are predominant gender norms, and most people are comfortable existing within them.
Guest:The problem isn't that these gender norms exist.
Guest:The problem is that people who depart from them, who aren't comfortable existing within them, or that isn't who they are, are stigmatized and persecuted.
Guest:And I think we need to get to a place where we accept that, you know, the gender norms are, you know, pretty standard and most people are comfortable at either end of the gender binary, as they call it.
Guest:But those people, you know, boys like to play with dolls and girls who like to play with trucks and girls with beards and boys who are really effeminate.
Guest:They shouldn't be in men, adult men who are really effeminate.
Guest:uh or are transgendered they shouldn't be stigmatized or brutalized and they are for violating these this gender code that exists in our culture and i think that because of those cultural norms when when you disarm things or you you make fun of them that it's very easy to detach from the feelings of that person's
Guest:The mistake I think that people make when they get in your face.
Guest:Or even using the word tranny.
Guest:Which you're not allowed to use anymore.
Guest:Which is crazy because it was widely embraced in the queer community.
Guest:Even queer was controversial for a while.
Guest:And then a secret memo went out in Transland saying this is now a hate term.
Guest:This is our letter of the alphabet hyphen word word.
Guest:Like N word and F word and R word.
Marc:But you use the word fag and you fought for the word fag.
Marc:You enjoy the word fag.
Guest:Right.
Marc:I love the word fag.
Marc:But there's, you probably get flack for that.
Marc:I do.
Marc:Still.
Guest:I do from some folks.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm not a hypocrite.
Guest:You know, some people, some trans people said I was, you know, I'd use tranny in my column or let people use it in my column.
Guest:And they would say that was hypocritical.
Guest:And I was like, no, it's not.
Guest:I've defended comedians who've used the word faggot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If I was like, if I fell down on the floor and cried every time someone said faggot and then I threw tranny or dyke around, then I'm a hypocrite.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I actually, you know, I grew queer nation back in the day, the way we
Guest:take these words and make them not hurtful is to own them, own them, eat them, make them ours.
Guest:Like we have with queer, which used to be hugely controversial.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And now I can say queer without having any fear at all.
Marc:Without me throwing my tea in your face.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But fag, not so, really.
Marc:You just said fag.
Marc:I know, but it's still your word.
Marc:I mean, I can't.
Marc:I lend it to you.
Marc:Yeah, but are you going to defend me when I get in trouble?
Marc:Absolutely.
Guest:I've defended people who've used, you know.
Guest:I don't need to use it.
Guest:Because some people get, you know, when I go on Marr, people will like write me angry emails because Bill Marr does sometimes sort of mine homophobia and heterosexual male discomfort with gay sex for laughs.
Guest:And that's not okay.
Guest:I think that's great.
Guest:And I think that's necessary.
Guest:When he does it.
Guest:It's real.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's real, but it also, Marr owns it.
Guest:And this is a point of tension.
Guest:And the more we can talk about it and laugh about it, it actually helps.
Guest:And part of what I think people like Marr and the guy with the radio show, Howard Stern, are doing is the joke has shifted to them.
Guest:The joke is their discomfort and weirdness about gay sex.
Marc:But that's a lot of times what humor, not all humor is bullying.
Marc:Not all humor is hate.
Marc:No, I agree.
Marc:A lot of humor is like, I don't know what to do with this.
Marc:And I'm squicked out by this.
Guest:And I'd rather have straight... No, I'm squicked out by cunnilingus.
Guest:I can't think of anything... When I was fucking girl, that did not happen.
Guest:You cannot pretend your girlfriend is Andy Gibb with your face pressed into her vagina.
Guest:This is my boyfriend, Andy Gibb, with a terrible gunshot wound.
Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah, it's neat.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so if I can, as a gay man, talk about that kind of discomfort with, like, straight sex, I think that it helps to have straight guys be able to, like, talk about that discomfort.
Guest:And then you have somebody like Mara or Stern or almost all comedians who exist on the planet.
Guest:They're a little squicked out by gay sex, these straight guys.
Marc:Yeah, but we all have gay friends.
Marc:And you're for gay rights.
Guest:And that's a really important thing to model that you can own.
Guest:Because some people go from...
Guest:Gay sex squeaks me out to I'm opposed to gay rights, gay marriage, gay people adopting, gay anything, because gay sex is icky.
Guest:And I think it's important to have people out there going, yeah, gay sex kind of freaks me out, does seem a little icky, but I am on the side of gay people and the problem is me.
Guest:Right.
Marc:There's a difference between making fear hate and just being like, I don't know.
Marc:I can't.
Marc:Really?
Marc:In your ass?
Marc:You put one of those things in your ass?
Marc:In there with another dude?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It's not for me, but knock yourself out.
Guest:And I feel the same way about straight sucks, but gay people haven't oppressed straight people for centuries, so it exists in a different context.
Guest:That said, I think it's a waste of time when organizations like GLAAD, which under the new... There's a new guy running GLAAD, and he's not doing this anymore.
Guest:Policing, going after David Spade...
Guest:Going after what's-her-face, it's a waste of time.
Guest:And it makes gay people seem ridiculously thin-skinned.
Marc:It also is, I think, part of the need for outlets of any kind, whether they're supposedly for activist causes to generate drama in order to get attention.
Marc:I mean, sometimes you've got to ask, like, are you really working for the cause or are you just looking for some attention here?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Or you're being a douchebag.
Marc:Well, yeah, that goes right in with attracting attention, doesn't it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So as a father, what are the challenges that you've had to deal with as a gay couple, bringing up a boy?
Guest:We, you know, we've never really encountered any discrimination.
Guest:We've never really encountered any assholery on the, and we've, we haven't sought it out, but we've been in places where, you know, we know that we must've been interacting with people who disapproved.
Guest:Terry's from Spokane, Washington.
Guest:We go home.
Guest:to visit his family we've driven to michigan and back from our house in seattle we know we've interacted with people who you know probably would vote against same-sex relationships and disapprove of gay adoption and no one's ever been very pleasant to you yeah no one's been ever ever been anything but very kind to us right um and that gives me hope but yeah how about it on just a parenting level i mean within the home
Guest:It's been fine.
Guest:You know, we are facing the same challenges I think a lot of people with teenagers at home face.
Guest:How old is he?
Guest:He's 15 and a freshman in high school.
Guest:And we, you know, are facing the same, you know, a little too much on the Instagram, a little too much partying in the high school environment.
Guest:And we're on him about it.
Guest:The challenge is he's a straight, you know, he's a straight boy with gay dads.
Guest:Not just gay dads.
Guest:The gayest.
Guest:The gayest of dads.
You're right.
Guest:And Terry's pretty fucking gay too.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so, you know, he's got a, you know, he's defining, everyone defines themselves in opposition to their parents to some extent, but he's really having to assert himself in a way so that his friends understand that just because I have gay dads.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Doesn't mean.
Guest:So he's overcompensating like a closeted gay kid.
Yeah.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:So you can relate to him.
Guest:I hadn't even thought of it that way.
Guest:Maybe he is.
Guest:The funniest thing happened.
Guest:You're his secret.
Guest:He's a snowboarder.
Guest:I learned to snowboard.
Guest:We all go snowboarding together and Terry snowboards.
Guest:And we were away at a snowboarding trip.
Guest:And we brought a couple of his little douchey snowboard straight thuggy friends with snowboarding.
Marc:I'm glad you're not biased in any way, too.
Guest:Oh, no, no.
Guest:They're not douchey because they're straight.
Guest:They're douchey because they're teenage boys.
Guest:All teenage boys go through douchedom.
Guest:Just some never emerge from douchedom.
Guest:They all go through it.
Guest:It's like puberty.
Guest:You go through douchedom just like you go through puberty.
Guest:And they're sitting around a table, and Terry and I are cleaning up the kitchen when we make dinner.
Guest:And one looks at DJ and goes, so you're going to be gay when you grow up.
Guest:Your parents are gay, so you're going to be gay.
Guest:And there's this pause, and Terry and I look at the guy, and we're like, I can't believe this shit again.
Guest:is saying this yeah when we just fed him dinner it's like i'm somewhere and uh this is pausing dj goes yeah my parents they're gay yeah but their parents were straight like your parents yeah so i guess you're gonna be gay and we didn't know what to do at that moment we were like okay that was really homophobic but really kind of awesome
Guest:You know, DJ, that kid got homophobic in DJ's face about his family.
Guest:And DJ got homophobic back in his face about his family and threw it at him.
Guest:And I'm like, we're just going to leave this alone.
Guest:We're going to tiptoe out of the room and pretend we didn't fucking hear this.
Marc:That was it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's beautiful.
Marc:Well, it was great talking to you, Dan.
Marc:Thanks.
Marc:I think we did good.
Marc:This is your third book.
Guest:That was my seventh book.
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:I know, right?
Guest:I've been at this for a while.
Marc:I should do more research, yeah.
Marc:What's the new one?
Marc:How is it different than the other ones?
Guest:Oh, I don't know.
Guest:It's in French.
Guest:It's called American Savage.
Guest:It's about politics, gay marriage.
Guest:It's also about healthcare, pot, assisted suicide.
Marc:So not just gay stuff.
Marc:Not just gay stuff.
Guest:Not just Andy Gibb with a gunshot wound.
Marc:That was a good one.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:And Savage Love is the podcast.
Guest:Savage Love is my column.
Guest:And the Savage Lovecast is my podcast, which is at www.savagelovecast.com.
Guest:And I want to invite you to come on and give sex advice with me sometime.
Marc:I can do that, I think.
Guest:You're up in Seattle to perform every once in a while.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, I don't know if my advice will be any good.
Marc:I don't know if my advice is any good.
Marc:Well, what is the most common thing you get from straight guys?
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:How do I get girls to have sex with me?
Guest:How do I get my girlfriend to have a three-way with another girl?
Guest:How do I get laid?
Marc:Pretty standard.
Guest:Pretty standard and pretty, in a way, sad.
Marc:Why?
Guest:Because straight guys are just afraid to ask because they're afraid to hear no.
Guest:Everyone's afraid to ask.
Guest:They're not a straight guy.
Guest:I think it's a gay guy and a straight girl and a bi person thing.
Guest:People are afraid to get rejected.
Guest:It's particularly young straight guys who, you know, they have that burden of mastery on their shoulders.
Guest:They have to be good at and have swagger.
Guest:And rejection really can take the air out of your sales.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Um, but the sooner you're, you embrace rejection, you know, the sooner you get to know, then the sooner you've moved on to some girl who might be a yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's just hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around that.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:That's better.
Guest:Instead of like weaseling around and realizing you're in the friend zone or whatever, just ask the direct question.
Marc:Will you fuck me?
Guest:Well, if you're gay, that is literally the question that you can put it that way if you're gay.
Guest:You can't put it that way if you're a straight guy.
Guest:You want to hang out?
Guest:You want to hang out?
Guest:You want to go on a date?
Guest:A date date?
Guest:If the answer is no, don't be friends.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Don't be a weasel.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Well, okay, I made note of that.
Guest:But, you know, advice, you look it up in the dictionary, it says opinion about what could or should be done.
Marc:I'll gladly come on your show.
Guest:You don't have to have any qualifications to give advice.
Marc:You just have to run your mouth.
Marc:No problem.
Marc:That's all I do.
Marc:I can do that.
Marc:Thanks, man.
Marc:that's it that's our show thank you for listening i hope you enjoyed that
Marc:Love that guy.
Marc:So what do I got to tell you?
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