The Savage within How did this North Side Catholic boy, the son of a Chicago homicide cop, become America's down-and-dirty (and gay) sex columnist -- and, now, defender of the Left?
By Sid Smith Tribune arts critic Published December 6, 2002
[clip] Fans of his column, including the 75 or so men and women in their 20s who turned out for his reading at the Comix Revolution bookstore in Evanston recently, admit surprise at this political side.
But they respond: The question-and-answer session is more about the Iraq war (Savage is a supporter of military intervention) than sex.
Those acquainted with him in his Berlin days knew a bright, funny, fast-talking and opinionated teenager. Now, at 38, he's a bright, funny, fast-talking and opinionated essayist on the Left.
With sinning so easy to come by in America, does he feel he's preaching to the converted?
"We've won the cultural war but not the rhetorical war," he says. "There are tons of right-wing scolds saying all adulterers are bad, all pot smokers are bad. America's political rhetoric is so out of touch with the lives Americans actually lead.
"It's time to put a little mettle into the spines of sinners." ---- Here's an excerpt from the introduction to Dan Savage's "Skipping Towards Gomorrah," published in September by Dutton:
Some social conservatives, like Robert Bork, the author of the bible of social conservatives, "Slouching Towards Gomorrah," go so far as to argue that our founding fathers were just kidding around about the pursuit of happiness (in the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence). It was, at best, a rhetorical flourish on Thomas Jefferson's part, not anything we should take seriously, much less act on. Bork, ironically, is a leading proponent of the "original intent" movement in legal theory, which argues that judges should base their rulings solely on the intent of our founding fathers, which can be divined through a close reading of our nation's founding documents. Except, of course, for the first lines in our nation's first document. That "pursuit of happiness" stuff? That's just poetry. Americans shouldn't be free "to choose which virtues to practice or not practice," Bork argues, as that would entail, "the privatization of our morality, if you will, the `pursuit of happiness,' as each of us defines happiness." (Morality is apparently the only thing social conservatives don't want to privatize.) The pursuit of happiness is so rank and unpleasant a concept for Bork that he sticks it between quote marks as if he were holding it with a pair of tongs.