ReadyPost Dan Savage
This past Tuesday I went to go hear Dan Savage read from his new book, The Commitment, a story about gay marriage and family. Mr. Savage writes a syndicated sex column, "Savage Love," and is on the staff at our own weekly newspaper, The Stranger. I was casually excited in that way you get when you know someone's vaguely famous and you don't really follow them but want to be able to say you saw them back in the day, like when Arrested Development came to William and Mary. At any rate, by the time we showed up it was standing room only, and we're waiting around scratching ourselves and I'm looking at all these suspicously queer-looking fellows (and ladies) everywhere when I suddenly ponder to myself: is this a gay bookstore? None of the books advertised on the walls looked especially gay, but I knew Savage was gay and from the looks of the other patrons, I was in homo-domo. I put the whole thing out of my head for a while, but the deal was sealed when the gay owner of the bookstore got up to introduce Mr. Savage, and at that point it all came together as a stranger apparates out of the fog. I enjoy blazing neurons in my brain, and sudden realizations like that make me smile. Or, when I'm standing near the top of a really tall building and I look down at the street and then scan up a neighboring building, which always makes me feel pleasantly nauseous I think because of the perspective shifts.
The excerpts were from a road trip he and his partner took a year ago to protest the former crisis of gay marriage. I enjoy the cognitive dissonance of a former crisis that never got resolved. The plot centered around particular travails involving the couple's 6-year-old son, who comes down with a bad case of diaper rash, and the general horror of raising children. This one time, they stop in Somewhere, South Dakota and the kid wakes up in the middle of the night screaming that his butthole hurts because he's got this awful rash. So there they are, in some small motel, trying to clean this kid's ass while he screams "no daddy don't do that! my butthole hurts!" and everyone's sure that the cops are going to bust in and arrest the whole bunch. When this fails to happen, the author's nervous tension turns to anger over the seeming nonchalance of the other patrons in the face of very audible screams of incestual pederasty. It's the sort of thing that makes me think, "haha! please pass the condoms."
That's the moral for today: practice safe sex. And make sure you have a third party witness the consent (ideally, a pneumatic Brazilian).
Anyways, the prose was very easy and flowing (and kind of gay, I think) and managed to convey accurately what it is like to raise kids (full disclosure: I have no kids). Ultimately, I think the point was merely to combine an On The Road with a story about family for gay people, and this is something I've always found strange: There's never anything particularly novel in gay stories; by and large they seem to follow the same formulas as any other story, except the protagonists are homosexuals. Perhaps that's part of the point, that the gay subculture just wants their 'own' versions of similar tales, just like they make black movies with all black people and the token white guy. My least favorite token white guy was the bus driver in Spike Lee's movie "Get On The Bus." Alternatively, another possibility is that such 'gay' stories are merely to inform an otherwise heterosexual audience that gay people have the same sorts of very human struggles that all of us endure - and yet seem to be convinced are unique - in areas of love, life, work, etc.
Have I concentrated too much on the gay side of things? I mean, it was a book about gay marriage written by a gay person being read in a gay bookstore in the gay neighborhood; I call them as I see them.
The Q&A afterwards was also fun; except for some of the throwaway liberal lines, Mr. Savage spoke a little about recent tours he has done (he periodically travels around to college campuses and talks to people about sex). If he comes to your school, try to go see him. Especially if you go to a prude school like, for example, one that shall remain nameless. Next up, he's writing a book about why we should take sex education out of schools and it sounds promising.
The excerpts were from a road trip he and his partner took a year ago to protest the former crisis of gay marriage. I enjoy the cognitive dissonance of a former crisis that never got resolved. The plot centered around particular travails involving the couple's 6-year-old son, who comes down with a bad case of diaper rash, and the general horror of raising children. This one time, they stop in Somewhere, South Dakota and the kid wakes up in the middle of the night screaming that his butthole hurts because he's got this awful rash. So there they are, in some small motel, trying to clean this kid's ass while he screams "no daddy don't do that! my butthole hurts!" and everyone's sure that the cops are going to bust in and arrest the whole bunch. When this fails to happen, the author's nervous tension turns to anger over the seeming nonchalance of the other patrons in the face of very audible screams of incestual pederasty. It's the sort of thing that makes me think, "haha! please pass the condoms."
That's the moral for today: practice safe sex. And make sure you have a third party witness the consent (ideally, a pneumatic Brazilian).
Anyways, the prose was very easy and flowing (and kind of gay, I think) and managed to convey accurately what it is like to raise kids (full disclosure: I have no kids). Ultimately, I think the point was merely to combine an On The Road with a story about family for gay people, and this is something I've always found strange: There's never anything particularly novel in gay stories; by and large they seem to follow the same formulas as any other story, except the protagonists are homosexuals. Perhaps that's part of the point, that the gay subculture just wants their 'own' versions of similar tales, just like they make black movies with all black people and the token white guy. My least favorite token white guy was the bus driver in Spike Lee's movie "Get On The Bus." Alternatively, another possibility is that such 'gay' stories are merely to inform an otherwise heterosexual audience that gay people have the same sorts of very human struggles that all of us endure - and yet seem to be convinced are unique - in areas of love, life, work, etc.
Have I concentrated too much on the gay side of things? I mean, it was a book about gay marriage written by a gay person being read in a gay bookstore in the gay neighborhood; I call them as I see them.
The Q&A afterwards was also fun; except for some of the throwaway liberal lines, Mr. Savage spoke a little about recent tours he has done (he periodically travels around to college campuses and talks to people about sex). If he comes to your school, try to go see him. Especially if you go to a prude school like, for example, one that shall remain nameless. Next up, he's writing a book about why we should take sex education out of schools and it sounds promising.
posted by desmond at 1:52 PM
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