Taki's Mag

Dan Savage

Although it remains unclear exactly what buggery has to do with ethical reporting, Professional Homosexual Dan Savage was there to unravel the mystery to a group of Seattle teens on April 13 at the National High School Journalism Convention. When he started ripping into the Bible—calling it “bullshit” and accusing it of not only being wrong about homosexuality, but also about slavery, masturbation, virginity, and, yes, shellfish—small clusters of students stood up and began leaving. Their exodus was largely quiet. They did not try to shout him down or sprinkle him with holy water.

Savage called the retreating clusters of offended and presumedly Christian students “pansy asses.” Looking so empowered that one would think he needs to carry extra battery chargers whenever he travels more than 25 miles, Savage gloated that he was “beating up the Bible,” then apologized if anyone’s feelings were hurt. “But I have a right to defend myself,” the defiant little banty rooster asserted.

But nobody attacked you, ya douche. You were attacking them, and they quietly left.

Although what constitutes “bullying” is in the eye of whoever thinks they’re being bullied, Dan Savage—it’s his real name, a coincidence as glorious as if he’d been born “Percy Fierce” or “Lance Fabulous”—has left quite a fecal slime trail of either bullying his ideological opponents or, if you don’t want to use that word, being a generally aggressive and hateful dickhead toward them.

What’s the currently acceptable term for a gay male blogger? A blaggot? A glogger? A blomo? Whatever it is, Dan Savage is probably the most prominent one in the blogosphere. He was the one who created Rick Santorum’s frothy, feces-flecked “Google problem.” He also claimed that while sick with the flu, he once licked almost everything he could find in Iowa Republican Gary Bauer’s office, including doorknobs, keyboards, staplers, phones, and clean coffee cups. (He later claimed he had made up the entire incident, and he’s also been caught repeatedly lying about his age, so he may suffer from a low T-cell count—with “T” standing for “truth.”)

He’s also displayed tremendous tolerance for diversity of opinion. “I wish the Republicans were all fucking dead,” he once told Bill Maher while cameras were rolling. He once said he wished a Pennsylvania politician would get “dragged behind a pickup truck until there’s nothing left but the rope.” He invited Herman Cain to orally pleasure him to prove, as Cain had asserted, that homosexuality is a choice. (Cain chose not to orally pleasure him.)

When Mississippi TV reporter Kandiss Crone did a story on a local adult store that led to the store owner’s arrest, Savage suggested that his readers send Crone their used sex toys. How would he feel if someone sent him an aborted baby? Or a severed vulva? Not too good, I’ll bet.

Despite all his taunting of Bible-thumpers, they seem to mostly write him off as a creepy sodomite and stay as far as possible from Dan and his bodily fluids.

It’s his comrades amid the “gay community” and sundry other pissy progressive sectarians who appear to bear a larger-than-life hatred for him—not all of them, but enough to make it really, really funny to me. I thought they were all “on the same page” about the fact that those evil, repressed right-wingers were goose-stepping toward them to snatch away their butt plugs and shut down their all-night fisting parties. I thought they had to stick together and remember Stonewall as if it was the Alamo. I thought they had to keep the rainbow intact.

Apparently not!

For me, one of the most enjoyable parts of observing leftist identity politics is its tendency to fracture…then splinter…then atomize…then, each week, suddenly discover a new subatomic level of identity. It’s a boiling, swirling alphabet soup of micro-identity where at any given moment the LGBTTIQQ2SAs at the gay bar might all suddenly accuse one another of not understanding one another, leading to heartbreak and bloodshed.

His fellow homos and similarly minded sex freaks accuse Dan Savage of transphobia, biphobia, and pozphobia (the irrational fear of someone with the ability to infect you with a deadly virus).

Those outside the “gay community” but who still lay down their sleeping bags beneath the progressive circus tent accuse him of obesophobia, Negrophobia, proletariophobia, and vaginophobia.

Basically, there’s only one thing this “community” shares—they all suffer from lexophobia, an irrational fear of words.

Dan Savage is perhaps best known for his syndicated column “Savage Love,” but I remember it even way back when it was called “Hey, Faggot!” In 1999, Savage retired the column’s original name, arguing that he’d successfully reclaimed the word “faggot” and didn’t need to use it anymore.

Guess what, Danny boy? Words exist in international waters, and I’m swooping right past you in my pirate ship and taking the word back.

Frankly, I think you’re all acting like a bunch of fags. And I use the word “fags” strictly to denote a weakness of character. It has nothing to do with the procreative organs our blessed Lord bestowed upon you to your apparent ingratitude. If you prefer I use the term “pussies” or “babies” or “whiners” or “sissies,” well, I respect your preferences, but for now I’m still going to call you a bunch of fags.

Some of you appear to have an identity founded on persecution and manage to feel persecuted even if no one shows the slightest interest in persecuting you. At some point I start wondering, “Are you not being bashed enough? Is this why you’ve resorted to getting in people’s faces and rubbing their noses in shit—on the outside chance that you’ll anger one of them enough to bash you? Do you feel incomplete without at least one bashing a decade?”

And why don’t you go back to blowing each other instead of blowing this “bullying” thing out of proportion? Mere insults can’t drive a person to suicide. Claiming that anyone can “make” another person kill himself places far too little responsibility on the person killing himself. Anyone who takes such an extreme measure sends a message to the world that they thought there was something wrong with them. So if you don’t think there’s anything wrong with you, quit acting like such a fag, stop worrying what others think about you, and don’t kill yourself…OK?

That’s really all the advice you’ll ever need.

But thirty years after graduating from high school, Dan Savage is STILL acting like a fag and stewing over what was apparently some tremendous emotional scarring. Aided and abetted by such perennially bullied and oppressed entities such as Apple, Microsoft, and the US federal government—a bully if there ever was one—Dan has launched one of those “nonprofit” things called “It Gets Better” to help protect teenagers from being bullied. (Never mind that according to some studies, it doesn’t get better.)

Instead of “It Gets Better,” how about “Get Over It!” or even “Get Over Yourself!” or maybe “Didn’t You Graduate From High School a Long Time Ago?”

In order to protect the natural civil right to whine about your terrible experiences in high school for the rest of your life, the government will have to create jobs for lawyers and activists and clerks and propagandists and investigators and forensic technicians. Whereas a long time ago in a land far away American gays wanted the government to get out of their bedrooms, now they want you to give the government your lunch money so they don’t feel bullied.

Forget about rights and justice and equality and tolerance and all those other words they always use but never understand. This seems to be nothing more than a case of the squeaky wheel getting the K-Y Jelly.