Dan Savage - Savage Love

Savage Love

In 1991, Savage was living in Madison, Wisconsin, and working as a manager at a local video store that specialized in independent film titles. There, Savage befriended Tim Keck, co-founder of The Onion, who announced that he was moving to Seattle to help start an alternative weekly newspaper titled The Stranger. Savage "made the offhand comment that forever altered life: 'Make sure your paper has an advice column—everybody claims to hate 'em, but everybody seems to read 'em'." Savage typed up a sample column, and to Savage's surprise Keck offered him the job.

Savage stated in a February 2006 interview in The Onion's A.V. Club (which publishes his column) that he began the column with the express purpose of providing mocking advice to heterosexuals, since most straight advice columnists were "clueless" when responding to letters from gay people. Savage wanted to call the column "Hey Faggot!" in an effort to reclaim a hate word. His editors at the time refused his choice of column name, but for the first several years of the column, he attached "Hey Faggot!" at the beginning of each printed letter as a salutation." In his February 25, 1999 column, Savage announced that he was retiring the phrase, claiming that the reclamation was successful.

He has written in a number of columns about "straight rights" concerns, such as the HPV vaccine and the morning-after pill, stating in his November 9, 2005, column that "he right-wingers and the fundies and the sex-phobes don't just have it in for the queers. They're coming for your asses too."