American Savage

How can you live honestly in a world that punishes sexual truth? In American Savage, Dan Savage argues that morality, religion, and modern politics have all conspired to distort the conversation about sex, love, and family. His core claim is simple but radical: sustaining humane relationships and ethical lives requires telling the truth about human desire, institutions, and power. Savage uses his own biography – raised Catholic, grown gay, working as a sex columnist – to stitch together memoir, cultural criticism, and political commentary.

Across essays that range from marriage and death to healthcare and guns, Savage makes you confront hypocrisy and reimagine compassion. He rejects both puritanical moralism and liberal idealism that ignores biology. You’re invited to see sexuality as political, honesty as survival, and hope as activism – a series of intertwined arguments about what it means to live ethically in public and private life.

From Church to Doubt: Losing and Redefining Faith

Savage begins with Catholicism, a faith of ritual and contradiction. His father was a deacon and cop; his mother, a lay minister. Church was both home and paradox: a place of hymns and condemnation. Realizing he was gay made the doctrine untenable. He couldn’t reconcile the God who supposedly loves with teachings that damned his existence. When his mother died, he returned to church only to mourn – not to believe. Ritual became memory, not theology. You see grief transmuted into a meditation on religion’s duality: comfort and control.

Sexual Ethics Beyond Purity

Once out of the Church, Savage constructs a secular ethic around realism. Sex, he argues, isn’t sacred or shameful—it’s natural and relational. His idea of being GGG—Good, Giving, and Game—is a compass for everyday sex ethics. Practice skill, care about others’ pleasure, and be willing to experiment. That formula counters the Church’s view of sex as procreation-only and the culture’s view of sex as disposable hedonism. It’s about responsibility without repression.

Visibility as Political Action

Savage insists that coming out isn’t just personal courage—it’s a public good. From Merle Miller’s 1971 essay to his own It Gets Better Project, he traces how visibility saves lives. Seeing yourself mirrored in society changes outcomes for kids bullied for being queer. Activism, in Savage’s world, is storytelling. When gay men hold hands in public or bisexuals refuse erasure, they perform moral education—and push culture toward decency.

Marriage, Monogamy, and the Ethics of Compromise

Savage returns repeatedly to the idea that human fidelity must be humane. He coined “monogamish” to describe couples who are mostly monogamous but realistic about lapses or negotiated exceptions. In his essays like “It’s Never Okay to Cheat (Except When It Is),” he argues that rigid moralism destroys more families than compassionate flexibility ever will. Staying married through discretion, honesty, and forgiveness is sometimes the least-destructive path. You’re asked not to idolize purity but to evaluate harm honestly.

Science, Choice, and Orientation

Battling choicer rhetoric, Savage calls bluff on claims that orientation is a simple choice. He highlights genetic and epigenetic evidence and exposes the political manipulation behind “choice” arguments. His rhetorical challenge—telling politicians to try being gay if it’s so easy—drives the absurdity home. Science and lived truth meet activism: orientation isn’t moral theater; it’s biology plus identity, demanding equality under law.

Freedom, Family, and Policy

Beyond sexual politics, Savage engages broader policy questions—Obamacare’s limits, gun reform, and end-of-life choice. In his mother’s final hours, he contrasts religious obedience with compassion and autonomy. The moral throughline is consistent: dignity matters more than dogma. In health care or assisted death, choose humane pragmatism over ideological purity. His approach is realist ethics—solutions that minimize suffering even if they scandalize doctrine.

The book’s world view fuses personal pain with civic reasoning. Faith and sex, death and policy, love and hypocrisy are all expressions of how honesty reforms culture. Savage’s argument is neither libertine nor nihilist; it’s moral through realism. If you take one message away, it’s that radical empathy and transparent desire create both better relationships and better democracy.

Savage’s story begins in a house where vestments and police uniforms hung side by side. You see why ritual imprinted him; it taught order, rhythm, and guilt. Early doubts sprouted the moment his sexuality clashed with catechism. The Church’s claim that love was universal but sex was sinful toward him collapsed under logic. His exit wasn’t rebellion—it was coherence: refusing a framework that punished authenticity.

Loss and Return

His mother’s death pulled him back through cathedral doors. He revisited St. James not for absolution but to inhabit memory. Ritual, he writes, impersonates consolation—it’s grief’s scaffolding. Yet each papal decree on contraception or LGBTQ families revives his moral distance. The Church is geography for mourning, not home for belief.

Sexual Ethics and Hypocrisy

Savage ridicules the Church’s fixation on procreation as the goal of sex. People have sex for bonding, intimacy, fun—reasons seen across species. He highlights absurd parity in Church documents: masturbation is as “disordered” as homosexuality. Most straight Catholics quietly use contraception and masturbate; their selective invisibility protects them. Visibility, he concludes, is punishment’s trigger. The Church’s sexual moralism isn’t universal—it’s selective enforcement. Seeing that exposes the institution’s hypocrisy and fuels his ethical independence.

Religion thus becomes a formative antagonist—both teacher and warning. Savage keeps the aesthetics of ritual but discards its authority. For readers raised within sacred systems, that relationship to faith feels familiar: you don’t escape heritage; you reinterpret it through honest doubt.

Savage’s practical sexuality ethic—GGG: Good, Giving, Game—is the book’s foundation for intimate morality. He teaches that sexual skill and generosity sustain relationships where repression poisons them. Being Good means taking care and technique seriously; Giving means prioritizing your partner’s pleasure; Game means curiosity and willingness. These principles make relationships adaptive, not brittle.

Negotiation and the Price of Admission

Alongside GGG is Savage’s idea of the Price of Admission: the compromises you make to preserve partnership. No one gets a frictionless relationship. If you value the bond more than total fulfillment, you accept certain disappointments intentionally. He urges couples to discuss sexual needs and trade-offs directly—where desire thrives through mutual respect rather than silence.

Kink and Consent

Savage advocates transparent disclosure for kinks. Tell partners within months, frame it as an invitation, not demand. Vanilla partners, he argues, should pause before rejecting: curiosity isn’t corruption. For both sides, consent and safety are sacred. He buttresses GGG with research by Amy Muise and Debby Herbenick showing communal sexual motivation predicts relationship longevity. Sex, when handled with generosity, creates the emotional glue for everyday survival.

This ethic undercuts puritanism while maintaining moral seriousness. Savage’s formula is sex-positive without being reckless: honesty, negotiation, giving. That triad—far more demanding than abstinence—builds what he calls "adult sexual citizenship."

Savage detonates the nationalist myth that monogamy equals virtue. He starts from the moral rule—cheating is wrong—and then works through human grief to show exceptions. In letters from readers, he sees thousands trapped in sexless marriages, suffering quietly. His thesis: sometimes infidelity, handled with care and privacy, sustains families better than divorce or lifelong frustration.

Ethics of the Least Bad Choice

When sex vanishes due to illness or permanent disinterest, rigid fidelity may destroy emotional health. He urges discreet, safe outlets—condoms, testing, emotional containment. You judge moral behavior by harm mitigation, not purity. This realism scandalizes moralizers but comforts actual humans managing decades-long partnerships.

Grading Marriage on a Curve

Savage’s curve theory—if you’ve been faithful for decades and slip once, you’re good at monogamy. He reframes fidelity as skill and maintenance, not identity test. Stability for children and shared history outweigh singular violations. It’s a pragmatic compassion that redefines moral adulthood: reckon consequences honestly instead of defending impossible ideals.

You finish understanding why Savage’s readers trust him—he doesn’t condone betrayal; he reframes the math of mercy. He champions realism that saves rather than purity that destroys.

Savage calls U.S. sex education malpractice. From "Sex Dread," he shows how abstinence-only programs produce ignorance and harm rather than virtue. Teens aren’t protected by silence; they’re endangered by it. He cites data: states with abstinence-only curriculums have higher teen pregnancy and STI rates. Teaching only mechanics and fear excludes the core human context—pleasure, consent, and communication.

Beyond Reproduction

Even “comprehensive” curriculums treat sex like disaster prevention, not life skill. Savage praises Al Vernacchio’s pedagogy and websites like Scarleteen for modeling candid discussion. Students ask how to be good at intimacy, not just safe from disease. He argues that teaching pleasure and negotiation forms responsible adults, not libertines.

Curriculum Reform

Savage’s plan is concrete: teach anatomy comprehensively (including clitoral function), roleplay consent conversations, include LGBTQ identity and kink awareness as normal topics. That’s education for real life, not ideological purity. Pleasure, he says, is part of safety—because mutual satisfaction decreases coercion and confusion.

By tying pedagogy to ethics, Savage turns biology class into moral terrain. In his hands, “teach pleasure” becomes revolutionary civic policy: you produce citizens capable of empathy and communication rather than shame and silence.

Savage dismantles myths around sexual orientation and bisexuality with science and testimony. First, he targets “choicers”—politicians claiming being gay is a moral decision—and exposes how their argument justifies denying rights. He invokes evidence: genetics, prenatal hormones, and epigenetic markers all influence orientation. Then he tests logic: no one chose to be straight. If choice were real, reversal would be common—but isn’t.

Bisexual Erasure and Study Bias

Savage reflects on his own earlier disbelief in bisexuality and revises it through research. Northwestern’s behavior-based study (2011) confirmed male bisexual arousal patterns once subjects were chosen realistically. Previous studies failed because they recruited via gay channels or used identity-only criteria. He integrates cultural examples: MTV editing bisexual scenes, straight marriages hiding bi lives. Visibility, he concludes, is both statistical and moral necessity.

Truth as Liberation

Savage urges every queer person who can safely do so to come out—not only for personal freedom but for social contagion of tolerance. Hidden bisexuals perpetuate myth by vanishing into heteronormativity. Like Merle Miller’s “sick and tired of hearing demeaning bullshit,” Savage channels anger into activism. Visibility changes culture faster than persuasion alone.

In combination, science and disclosure collapse prejudice. Savage’s approach mixes empirical realism with emotional urgency: the truth of bodies, told aloud, becomes civic overhaul.

Savage extends equality debates to parenting. He and husband Terry used adoption—and their memoir The Kid—as proof of possibility. He traces the surge in gay adoptions and exposes conservative misinformation about child outcomes. Using evidence from UCLA and pediatric associations, he proves that kids with same-sex parents fare just as well—often better—than those from hetero homes in stability and cognitive measures.

Debunking Myths

Savage dismantles the Regnerus study for conflating broken families with deliberate same-sex parenting. He points out how homophobia ironically increases queer parent numbers, as closeted gays marry and later come out with children. The argument flips historical stigma into demographic fact.

Policy Implications

For Savage, family equals stability regardless of gender. Preventing qualified couples from adopting hurts kids most of all. His moral frame remains pragmatic: children’s welfare—not dogma—defines policy ethics. The takeaway is civic: if you value family, embrace love wherever it appears.

Gay parenting in Savage’s telling becomes redemption of culture’s failure—a reminder that inclusion benefits everyone, from the orphan to the voter.

Savage defends public fetish culture—International Mr. Leather, Folsom Street Fair—as community not chaos. Critics like Peter LaBarbera photograph events for outrage, yet the images are already public. Savage calls that hypocrisy: what offends them is not behavior but visibility itself. These gatherings, he argues, teach safety, consent, and charity. They are harm reduction masquerading as spectacle.

Safety and Shame

BDSM’s real dangers often occur alone, hidden by religious shame—autoerotic fatalities like Reverend Gary Aldridge’s case. Savage shows how communal practice saves lives: safety monitors, protocols, and education make kink safer. If culture accepted erotic plurality, fewer tragedies would happen in secret closets.

Religion and Symbolism

He even links kink’s imagery to Catholic ritual—pain, submission, transcendence—repurposed from spiritual to erotic. That paradox humorously unites his religious and sexual chapters. Rejecting condemnation doesn’t mean rejecting symbolism; it means reimagining it.

Savage’s defense reframes visibility as therapeutic honesty. Communities born of taboo become laboratories for consent culture—the real moral achievement of sexual modernity.

Savage’s account of his mother’s death illuminates his politics of autonomy. Watching her suffocate from pulmonary fibrosis, he realized the cruelty of denying choice. Her decision to forgo further pain embodied dignity. From that moment flows his advocacy for Washington State’s Death with Dignity Act: a law protecting voluntary physician-assisted death.

Policy Over Dogma

He shows concrete outcomes—hundreds of assisted deaths, zero abuses, total voluntariness—and contrasts religious opposition. Like abortion, legalization doesn’t force participation; it preserves freedom. Savage argues compassion must trump theology: God need not dictate endings if humanity can choose mercy.

Family and Foresight

He urges every reader to have advance directives and discuss end-of-life desires early. Watching loved ones improvise under grief is preventable. The moral logic mirrors his sexual ethics: honesty before crisis prevents harm. Talk early, act kindly, trust autonomy.

Savage’s narrative transforms policy abstraction into human intimacy. Death with dignity becomes the clearest test of moral empathy—a choice between doctrine and mercy.

Savage’s essays on politics—from the Santorum internet campaign to gun reform and marriage equality—show how humor and anger mobilize public change. When Rick Santorum equated homosexuality with pedophilia and bestiality, readers coined a viral definition of his name, weaponizing wit against hate. Savage calls it equal-opportunity satire: ridicule proportionate to persecution.

Marriage Equality and Double Standards

At the dinner debate with Brian Brown of NOM, Savage dismantled natural-law arguments by exposing inconsistencies—infertile couples, religious divorce acceptance, biblical slavery texts. The confrontation ended when Savage’s husband told Brown to leave, underscoring civility’s limits: tolerance doesn’t require tolerating intolerance indefinitely. Shortly after, marriage equality won at the ballot box in multiple states.

Guns and Policy Pragmatism

In mass-shooting essays, Savage echoes his larger philosophy: replace denial with humane pragmatism. Support universal checks, limit assault weapons, treat gun safety like road safety. Incremental reform is moral realism—a recurring theme of his politics. He extends the same compassion logic from bedrooms to ballots.

Together, these chapters reveal Savage’s faith in activism and satire as civic medicine. Public speech, humor, and regulation—all grounded in empathy—are tools for social repair.

Savage approaches Obamacare through moral pragmatism: a partial solution better than cruelty. He credits PPACA for banning discrimination and expanding access while condemning its preservation of private profit structures. It’s “lesser evil,” he says—saving lives but leaving injustice intact. He uses stories like Deamonte Driver’s death from untreated tooth infection to anchor abstraction in human suffering.

Political Hypocrisy

Savage skewers business owners threatening layoffs over small cost increases and conservative hypocrisy calling the law "socialist" despite its capitalist origins in the Heritage Foundation. He juxtaposes the Pope’s declaration of healthcare as a human right with American opposition driven by profit motives. These contradictions expose ethical blindness in policy debates.

Incremental Hope

Savage doesn’t romanticize compromise—he demands continued reform toward single-payer universality. Obamacare bends the cost curve, he says, but compassion should bend politics. He challenges readers to keep fighting for systems that prioritize care over corporations. Realism meets activism again: praise improvement, persist for justice.

In his healthcare commentary, Savage recasts citizenship as stewardship: you evaluate policy by whom it saves, not whom it pleases.