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. – Dan Savage
School is very conformist, and one of the very first conforming that goes on in preschool and kindergarten is gender. – Dan Savage
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? – Dan Savage
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. – Dan Savage
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. – Dan Savage
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. – Dan Savage
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. – Dan Savage
One man’s blasphemy doesn’t override other people’s free-speech rights, their freedom to publish, freedom of thought. – Dan Savage
Really, when it comes to gay rights, there’s two wars going on. The first war is political. But the culture war is over. – Dan Savage
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. – Dan Savage
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. – Dan Savage
You want to help gay kids, you have to reach them in middle school and high school, when they’re being bullied. – Dan Savage
I’m allergic to dogs, so I couldn’t even adopt what gay men typically adopt when they have that maternal gene. – Dan Savage
The only way to get gay issues off the front pages of Canadian newspapers is to grant gay and lesbian people our full civil equality and leave it alone. – Dan Savage
The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it. – Dan Savage
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. – Dan Savage
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. – Dan Savage
The bullied straight kid goes home to a shoulder to cry on and support and can talk freely about his experience at school and why he’s being bullied. I couldn’t go home and open up to my parents. – Dan Savage
The cultural expectation should be if there’s infidelity, the marriage is more important than fidelity. – Dan Savage
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. – Dan Savage
