Dan Savage

Daniel Keenan Savage (born October 7, 1964) is an American author, media pundit, journalist, and LGBT community activist.

He writes Savage Love, an internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column.

After living in West Berlin from 1988 to 1990, he moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he befriended Tim Keck, co-founder of The Onion.

When Keck moved to Seattle, Washington, Savage moved as well to become an advice columnist for The Stranger, which Keck founded; he had offered Savage the position after Savage wrote a sample column which impressed him.

Savage has since become a sex columnist and a vocal proponent of LGBT rights in the United States, voicing his advocacy through his column, Savage Love, and a podcast version of his column, the Savage Lovecast.

He lived in West Berlin from late-1988 to 1990.

In 1991, Savage was living in Madison, Wisconsin, and working as a night manager at Four Star Fiction and Video (now Four Star Video Cooperative), a local video store that specialized in independent film titles.

He befriended Tim Keck, co-founder of The Onion, who announced that he was moving to Seattle to help start an alternative weekly newspaper titled The Stranger. Savage "made the offhand comment that forever altered [his] life: 'Make sure your paper has an advice column—everybody claims to hate 'em, but everybody seems to read 'em'."

Savage wrote a sample column, and to his surprise, Keck offered him the job.

From 1994 until 1997, he had a weekly three-hour call-in show called Savage Love Live on Seattle's KCMU (now KEXP-FM).

From 1998 to 2000, he ran the biweekly advice column Dear Dan on the news website abcnews.com.

at the beginning of each printed letter as a salutation." In his February 25, 1999, column, Savage announced that he was retiring the phrase, claiming that the reclamation had been successful.

He has written in a number of columns about "straight rights" concerns, such as the HPV vaccine and the morning-after pill.

In 2001, Savage and his readership coined the term pegging to describe a woman anally penetrating a man with a strap-on dildo.

Outside of his writings and podcasts, Savage has advocated for progressive politics and advancing the rights of LGBT youth to prevent suicide in the community.

In March 2001, he directed his own Egguus at Consolidated Works, a parody of Peter Shaffer's 1973 play Equus which exchanged a fixation on horses for a fixation on chickens.

He coined the term santorum to define a by-product of sex after former senator Rick Santorum made anti-LGBT comments in 2003, and condemned the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its support of California Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California.

His activism and public speaking has brought praise from celebrities and politicians, including former president Barack Obama.

Dan Savage was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Judith "Judy" (née Schneider), who worked at Loyola University, and William Savage Sr. He has German and Irish ancestry.

The third of four children, he has two brothers and one sister.

Savage was raised as a Roman Catholic and attended Quigley Preparatory Seminary North, which he has described as "a Catholic high school in Chicago for boys thinking of becoming priests."

Though Savage has stated that he considers himself "a wishy-washy agnostic" and an atheist, he continues to identify as "culturally Catholic".

Savage attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he received a BFA in Acting.

Letters from the Earth (2003), also at Consolidated Works, was Savage's most recent production.

Letters was a trimmed version of Mark Twain's The Diary of Adam and Eve.

It received scathing reviews, including one from The Stranger - "My Boss's Show Stinks".

In addition to writing a weekly column and four books, Savage has been involved in several other projects.

He has opposed laws restricting pornography and the sale of sex toys, and founded the It Gets Better Project with his husband Terry Miller, whom he married in 2005.

Savage has been featured on numerous television programs and news outlets, including Countdown with Keith Olbermann and Anderson Cooper 360.

Savage has attracted controversy over his comments and actions related to LGBT issues.

In his November 9, 2005, column he wrote that "[t]he right-wingers and the fundies and the sex-phobes don't just have it in for the queers. They're coming for your asses too."

As a theater director, Savage (under the name Keenan Hollohan, combining his middle name and his paternal grandmother's maiden name ) was a founder of Seattle's Greek Active Theater.

Much of the group's work were queer interpretations of classic works, such as a tragicomic Macbeth with both the title character and Lady Macbeth played by performers of the opposite sex.

Savage stated in a February 2006 interview in The Onion's A.V. Club (which published his column until 2021 ) that he began the column with the express purpose of providing mocking advice to heterosexuals, since most straight advice columnists were "clueless" when responding to letters from gay people.

Savage wanted to call the column "Hey, Faggot!"

in an effort to reclaim a hate word.

His editors at the time refused his choice of column name, but for the first several years of the column, he attached "Hey, Faggot!"

In 2010, Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, began the It Gets Better Project to help prevent suicide among LGBT youth.

He has also worked as a theater director, sometimes credited as Keenan Hollahan.

Born in Chicago to Roman Catholic parents, Savage attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in acting.