(Dan Savage; right, the cover of Savage’s new book, American Savage)
What’s unique to Savage, though, is that unlike many contemporary media pundits—Rachel Maddow, Rush Limbaugh and the like—he’s managed to court criticism from both ends of the political spectrum. “The righteous indignation of some folks in LGBT Land is kind of hilarious,” he admits. “That’s my day. It begins reading tweets from right-wing Christians and right-wing nut jobs saying I’m this sex radical, gay, butt-fucking monster that’s here to overthrow all things decent and moral. And then there’s the Tumblr, social justice, queer blogger saying I’m a hetero-normative, conservative, closet Republican sellout here to destroy the gay liberation movement,” Savage says. “You do just have to laugh. It’s like wow, I can’t be both of these things at once. I can’t be both the queer menace and the deep-cover operative of social conservatives.”
“It isn’t easy to shut your brain off and go, ‘I’m just going to believe this bullshit,’” Savage says of the Catholic Church’s many questionable claims. “I do call myself culturally catholic. I live in a household full of catholic kitsch and sometimes slip into churches and sit in the back,” he declares. It wasn’t until he made some close Jewish friends as an adult that he was able to distinguish the difference between being a true believer and hanging on to some benign aspects of the culture. “It was actually seeing [my Jewish friends] at The Stranger get together and do the holidays, doing Rosh Hashanah and doing Passover, knowing that none of them were believers in anything,” he says. “That they were atheists, they ate bacon, but to see that culturally they were able to tap into their faith tradition in this way kind of gave me permission to say, ‘Well I can be culturally Catholic and not have to believe in the Pope, or that the Pope shits hard-boiled eggs or whatever we’re supposed to believe.’”
