Internationally acclaimed sex advice columnist Dan Savage came to WOW Hall on Thursday night to speak to about 300 members of the Eugene community.
As part of his introduction, Savage explained how he got into the sex columnist business.
“We thought it’d be funny for a fag to write a sex advice column mostly for straight people,” Savage said.
He added that before his column Savage Love, advice columns were “incompetent, ill-informed, inept advice from old straight ladies who didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about.”
“The only qualification you need to give advice is being asked for it,” Savage said.
It’s all about having opinions, he said.
Questions throughout the evening ranged from asking Savage what to do about having an extraordinarily small vagina and methods of measuring oneself for a cock ring to asking him what to tell a young girl who fears publicly acknowledging that she is gay for fear of reprisal from her Jehovah’s Witness family.
“I hate religion,” he said.
“People don’t fly planes into buildings because they’re restaurant critics,” he said. “Only religion makes people do that sort of crap to their children.”
Savage didn’t hesitate in his answer.
“What do you do? My advice to a kid in that situation is: lie to your family. It’s what they’re demanding of you. While they have power over you, lie. Do not risk telling the truth. You don’t want her doing survival prostitution on the streets after her parents throw her out because you gave her some gay pride rap that sounded great but was really not tailored for her circumstances. She needs to come out when she can survive.”
It’s sad, he said, when “the family is more in love with their idiot religion than they are with their actual flesh-and-blood daughter.”
But he said his advice isn’t just for gay people.
When he gets letters from straight people asking who he thinks he is as a gay man giving advice about heterosexual sex, Savage said he scoffs at their naiveté. Savage said before he came out he studied his heterosexual friends and “learned to be straight. I learned walk straight, talk straight and act straight and pass as straight and fuck straight.”
So regardless of the orientation he considers himself an expert on sex.
“They are projecting their ignorance of homosexuality on me and assuming that I, as a gay person, must be as ignorant of heterosexuality as they, straight people are, of homosexuality. That, of course, is not possible,” said Savage.
Savage said his blunt style is nothing more than the way people actually talk. In his column, he likes to use adult language because it is how people really talk with their friends. He said there’s no need to make it sound more professional just to avoid everyday profanity. That, he said, is censorship; it’s fake it’s wrong and it’s unnecessary. The concept of a family newspaper-a newspaper to read to the kids at bedtime-is ludicrous.
In his defense, Savage said it’s important to talk about sex in the newspaper.
“Sex is one of the things adults think about more than anything else,” he said. “If you’re a newspaper for adults and you’re not writing about sex, you lose credibility with your adult readers when you patronize them by saying ‘a-asterisk- asterisk- asterisk’.”
“A television reporter just asked me ‘would you let your child read your column?’ Fuck no. My child wouldn’t read it, he doesn’t want to read it; he doesn’t care.”
“My newspaper’s in my house; my kid never cracks it open. He doesn’t give a shit about the political reporting, the music reviews or my column,” Savage said. “He would read my column if there were maybe Twinkies embedded in it.”
The audience laughed wildly.
“Children aren’t interested in publications that are for adults,” he said.
But by the time they hit puberty, they should be reading Savage Love, he said. At that age teens are curious about their bodies anyway and they should have the information in Savage Love accessible to them, he said.
Savage claimed that the sex education taught in public schools today is so bad that it would be better to just get rid of it altogether. When asked whether he had ever thought of designing his own sex education curriculum, Savage nodded.
“It’s called the Internet,” he said.
Savage never stopped giving advice. He had this to say to University students:
“Enjoy your sexuality now while you’re young and hot. Act on your fetishes now because if you wait till you’re 50, you’ll have to pay people. You can get it for free now,” he joked. “And be safe and be responsible and don’t knock anybody up.”
University freshman Jason Kroll attended the lecture and said he reads Savage’s column regularly. He said that he came for the entertainment and comedic aspect Savage’s lectures usually include.
“I was surprised he came to Eugene,” said Kroll. “It just seems like he wouldn’t make an effort to come here.”
Savage came to speak to support the Eugene Weekly newspaper, which has garnered attention recently for running Savage’s often controversial column.
Eugene Weekly Editor Ted Taylor, who introduced Savage, considered the evening a hit.
“It was a real inspiring event,” said Taylor. “I was actually expecting people to get up and be critical, but if they were here, they were very quiet.”
Taylor said donations at the door raised about $2,000 for HIV Alliance, Sexual Assault Support Services (SASS) and Planned Parenthood.