Dan Savage's Quotes

I get letters every year from women who think Valentine's Day is an empty exercise, but are ironically pretty exercised when their boyfriends neglect or forget it.

I got picked on a lot, even by teachers too. I liked to listen to musicals and bake, and my homeroom teacher found out and mocked me in front of the whole class for baking.

I treat people who write me the way my friends and I all treat each other when we go to each other for advice, which is sometimes with supreme cruelty.

It's going to take generations of gay people marrying before these things start to feel natural. We haven't had it long enough to remake it as our own, so it does feel like you're getting dressed up in straight drag to do it.

Mother's Day is a torment if your mother is dead. Valentine's Day is a torment if you don't got one. And at some point in our lives, we will be tormented by Valentine's Day even if we're relatively lucky in love.

My dad was a homicide cop in the gay neighborhood in the city when gay neighborhoods were desperate, depressing, sad places run by the mob. The only gay people he'd met when I came out to him were corpses.

Preaching to the choir actually arms the choir with arguments and elevates the choir's discourse. There's a reason the right does it and does it well and triumphs.

Sometimes I talk to religious people about my column or what I do, and I ask them to, you know, read 20 or 30 of them and then come tell me that the message at the heart of every column isn't, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' In every possible sense.

The successes of the LGBT civil rights movement and the more prominent role openly gay people are playing in the public eye has actually turned up the temperature in middle schools and high schools for queer kids.

To be gay is nothing to be proud of. It's in how you are gay that you have something to be proud of, considering the obstacles placed in your path if you are gay.

When I was in high school I got involved in the fringe theater scene in Chicago, and I met some openly gay people. I could see that it got better, that they were happy and loved and supported. I saw with my own eyes that it got better.

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

A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It's often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied.

Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials.

Like it or not children are being raised by gay and lesbian parents all over America - as many as 10 million children. And it does nothing to make their lives more stable and secure to attack their families, to attack their parents to prevent us from marrying each other.

I think the best thing for you to do is just live your life. Live a life that's worth living, one where you do what you want to do, pursue your passions. That way, if you meet someone, they'll be joining a life that's already really good.

The cultural expectation should be if there's infidelity, the marriage is more important than fidelity.

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

Children have a right to some stability and constancy from the adults in their lives.

Straight couples don't have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn't compulsory and its absence doesn't invalidate a marriage.

A certain tiny percentage of everyone is gay.

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

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

A lot of people are living their lives online in much more public ways with Facebook and Twitter.

Every question is a hypothetical question for everyone but the person who asks it.

I'm allergic to dogs, so I couldn't even adopt what gay men typically adopt when they have that maternal gene.

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

School is very conformist, and one of the very first conforming that goes on in preschool and kindergarten is gender.

Actual gay people can make many others feel uncomfortable and paranoid because they don't know and can't articulate what makes a person gay, and they worry that maybe they themselves are gay.

Women can go on marrying and pretending that their boyfriends and husbands are Mr. Darcy or some RomCom dream man. But where's that going to get 'em? Besides divorce court?

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

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

How can you tell somebody whose is pursuing happiness that they're somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made?

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

I believe it's in the best interests of a child to be in a stable environment.

I didn't want kids to think that to be happy, they had to be famous or rich or live in the big city.