Dan Savage and Maine: One step Forward. . .

Boys! Girls! Friends! Lovers!

I know I'm late on this, but I saw Milk for the first time a little over a week ago. Granted, this guy will never run for public office in Seattle; his activist streak is more comfortable in popular culture, where he can enliven his community at the same time as he can make lots of money doing so. But in watching the poll results for the Maine vote last night, I couldn't help but think that someone in the public sphere would have to take it up. The overtly organizational ends of that movement are too busy having the President placate them to fight back with any real amount of force.

I was in college when I was first introduced his to work. It was in the back of the Theater section of the Chicago Reader, an amazingly huge free weekly publication where every week I would plumb through the classifieds for work (that I never got,) twist my head around the crossword (which I never finished,) and laugh my ass off at his column. it wasn't so much the relationship work that interested me. Don't get me wrong-- as far as advice columns go, what drew me to Savage was its absolute candor; what drew me to Savage's writing style were primarily two things: first, he's mean and still incisive. Second, he can't help but inject his own activist streak into his advice column. Of course, the funniest instance was the santorum affair; but his rants about everything from Prop 8 to the recent Hate Crimes legislations have been fun. After years of tirades and active, articulate (if vitriolic) regular commentary on every gay issue to come down the pike since I began reading him seven years ago, here's what he said about the brou-ha-ha from last night.

"Fuck you Maggie, wherever you are."

I have no idea who Maggie is (and I'm sure given the obscurity of this start-up, I might never find out.) On the other hand the terseness of Savage's response is pretty telling. At the middle of the decade the GOP made killing gay marriage a rallying point around which conservatives could unify. For us straight folk to even have a remote say in gays' right to marry was absolutely out of my imagination; for us to suddenly assume that gay marriage will sully the sanctity of marriage (as if it were ever sanctified int he first place) is equally insane. The moment you try to tell any of the Gun-and-Bible crowd that, of course, you'll be decried a blasphemer and, as such, never be allowed to sit at Christmas dinner ever again.

Of course Savage isn't the only gay writer of prominence with a national appeal. Kushner is brilliant, but nobody sees plays except us crazy theatre kids. Sullivan's exceedingly bright, but he has always seemed to me to be a William Baldwin or Gore Vidal for our generation-- too erudite, too haughty, too. . . wordy. The LGBT Community is looking for its next Harvey Milk, and at a time when he seems to be needed most,

On the other hand, Maine, congratulations: the fiercest prominent opposition your bigotry seems to have gotten thus far is a big old "Fuck you, Maggie." Whoever she is.