Alex Henderson

Q&A With Dan Savage: Outspoken Sex Columnist Discusses HUMP Festival, Sex Education

By Alex Henderson

This year, Dan Savage will be celebrating the 26^th anniversary of his sex column Savage Love. The Seattle resident has come a long way since 1991, when Savage Love debuted in Seattle’s alternative weekly The Stranger — and he has since written six books, organized an amateur adult film festival (HUMP), hosted his own podcast (The Savage Lovecast), co-founded The It Gets Better Project (a nonprofit designed to prevent suicide among LGBT youth) and engaged in a heated war of words with former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and other social conservatives.

During a recent interview, Savage (now 52) discussed the evolution of his column, HUMP, sex education and the current political and social climate in the U.S.

Sexual Health Magazine: What inspired you to create HUMP back in 2005?

Dan Savage: A co-worker of mine at The Stranger, my home paper, and I were joking about announcing a call for submissions for an amateur porn film festival to see what we could get in the mail. The idea was just to have fun. We thought, “Would people make amateur porn to be screened at a film festival?” The answer was yes, people would do it. We got tons of submissions that first year. Then, we had to book a theater, and the question became: would people come and sit in a movie theater next to strangers in the dark to watch pornography the way their grandparents used to? And the answer to that question was “yes” because all the screenings immediately sold out. The original goal was entertainment, and the thing took off and started to have a life of its own.

Sexual Health: In what ways does the amateur porn with HUMP differ from the commercial straight or gay porn?

Savage: I have a lot of friends who work in commercial porn. I have some friends who are porn stars, and they do good work. But it’s aimed at a mass audience, and it can be a little performative. There are a lot of conventions in commercial pornography. What separates the porn made at home with HUMP from commercial porn is that it’s always so personal. The films are made by people for the fun and pleasure and joy of it. You never sit through a HUMP film and think, “Oh, they’re just going through the motions.” You always look at people in HUMP films and think, “This is what they love to do, and they really wanted to share it.”

Sexual Health: How is the current social and political climate influencing HUMP?

Savage: The weird thing in the timing of the festival this year is that I had to host a screening the night after the (2016 presidential) election, and people were pretty devastated. A lot of people were in the theater looking like they weren’t sure this was where they should be or needed to be. It felt like the world was on fire, and here we were at a porn film festival. I got up there and gave some remarks about how it’s important, as we fight, to still make room in our lives for joy and pleasure and sex and pornography and intimacy and community. Those things — taking the time out to party, have fun and have sex and make art, including porn — kept our spirits up during the fight against the AIDS epidemic and the Reagan and Bush Administrations. Joy and pleasure and diversion isn’t necessarily a distraction from the fight; it’s a requirement, and it can be an act of defiance so long as it’s not the only thing you do.

Sexual Health: HUMP featured Make America Great Again hats last year, although in an ironic way — not unlike your use of the term “santorum.”

Savage: Yes, that’s exactly how they were used. When we do the call for submissions every year, we ask the filmmaker to include a prop in their movies if they want to — they don’t have to — so that audiences will know these movies were made just for HUMP and can have fun watching out for the prop and see it pop up in odd and creative ways. The awkward thing this year at HUMP was the red “Make America Great Again” hats, which was the last thing anyone wanted to see after the election. We did the call for submissions more than a year ago — back when everyone believed Donald Trump couldn’t win the primary, let alone the election. And so, the hats were a little traumatizing. But if you come to HUMP, you are going to see a lot of those hats used in ways that Donald Trump and other Republicans wouldn’t care for.

Sexual Health: U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has a long history of being both a drug warrior and a culture warrior. President Trump has been going out of his way to appeal to social conservatives and the Christian Right.

Savage: Trump is playing the part of a social conservative. Trump is a performer and a clown, and he is playing the part of a social conservative. Trump is a famously philandering, thrice married adulterer who brags about all of his sexual conquests. And yet, here he is threatening abortion rights and appointing people who may threaten legal marijuana in the states that have enacted cannabis reform. The hypocrisy is just rank.

Sexual Health: The Christian Right doesn’t seem to have a problem with Trump’s history.

Savage: They don’t care. The whole Republican and religious conservative project has revealed itself to be just about power and not about principle. Some of the Religious Right leaders who were screaming about how Bill Clinton got a blowjob and we couldn’t tolerate that kind of immorality and how it set a terrible example for our children all happily endorsed and campaigned for Donald Fucking Trump because it’s about power. That’s why Republicans jettison their opposition to deficits. Donald Trump is going to explode the deficit, and so is (House Speaker Paul) Ryan — and they don’t care. It’s just about power. It’s about punishing the poor and persecuting minorities, and they will write any check and go into any debt required to do that.

Sexual Health: In what ways have you seen attitudes towards porn evolve over the years? In what ways do 2017 attitudes differ from the 1980s or 1990s?   

Savage: Access via the Internet is what changed everything. The moment you no longer had to walk into a dirty bookstore or walk into the part of the independent video rental shop where the porn was — and publicly out yourself as a consumer of porn — and could consume it anonymously on your computer, everything changed. We saw that interest in porn was practically universal, and we saw what people were really watching; we were able to quantify it. You were able to see how many hits something was getting, how many downloads something was getting — and that drove a lot of the evolution of porn and people’s tastes.

Sexual Health: What has porn taught us about sex?.

Savage: The porn consumption online and the data pile that it created showed that people’s sexual interests were really vast and varied. We could no longer pretend that everybody was turned on by a small handful of sex acts performed by people with one basic body type and one traditional gender expression. Those of us who have been writing about sex for a long time know that variance is the norm when it comes to human sexuality. What we think of as ‘normal’ sex — a man and a woman in the missionary position within marriage — is a minority of the sex that happens on a Saturday night. Porn and the Web and the digital data file that it created demonstrated that variance is the norm.

Sexual Health: The Bible Belt has some of the most vocal opponents of porn as well as some of the biggest consumers of it.

Savage: There’s that old expression “the armor of righteous”: that the louder you condemn something, the less likely people are to suspect you of it. So of course, places that consume the most pornography are the places that condemn it with the most aggressive posturing. Per capita, porn consumption is highest in Utah, which just declared porn a public health crisis. You see it with homosexuality: so many people who were public homophobes were revealed to be private cocksuckers themselves. Anyone who tells you they’re a conservative must be telling you a lot about what’s going on in their sex life.

Sexual Health: In what respects has sex education evolved in the United States in the years that you’ve been writing your Savage Love column? 

Savage: It’s gotten worse. I started writing the column in 1991, and along came abstinence education and the George W. Bush Administration. And abstinence education funding continued under Barack Obama. The science shows that abstinence education does not work, but the funding continued under Obama because Republicans held other things that were a greater priority hostage. Not only does abstinence education not work — it backfires and creates worse outcomes with unplanned pregnancies, teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. I looked at what was happening with sex education and thought, “Well, I’ll always have a job. If that’s what we call sex education in this country, there will always be incredibly misinformed young people out there who need their questions answered.” Even the sex ed that liberals and progressives think is pretty good — sex ed that acknowledges premarital sex and urges people to use condoms — is often not very good. It’s just reproductive biology: this is how you make a baby, maybe avoid sexually transmitted infections. What it doesn’t cover is pleasure. What it doesn’t cover is consent. We’re never going to have what the Dutch have for sex education. Canada got the French, Australia got the convicts, and we got the Puritans.

Sexual Health: What is the most common sex-related question that you are asked these days?

Savage: It used to be, writing my column 25 years ago, that a lot of people wanted definitions or referrals. What’s a butt plug? Where can I find the swingers’ club in my city? And I would write a column about what a butt plug is. I would refer people to swingers’ clubs. But now, if you want to know what a butt plug is, you can Google it. And every swingers’ club has its own website; so, you don’t need referrals. You don’t need definitions of butt plugs anymore. Most of the questions these days are situational ethics, which is a harder column to write. Questions like, “This shitty thing happened. I blame my partner, my partner blames me, everything’s really fucked up; so, who’s right and who’s wrong?” You have to adjudicate, and it’s harder to write those columns. Sometimes, I really miss the days where my columns were all, “This is what a butt plug is, and this is how it works.”

Sexual Health: In the 1990s, you got a lot of BDSMquestions and a lot of anal questions along the lines of, “I’m a straight man, and I’m fantasizing about my wife using a strap-on dildo on me. Does that mean I’m a repressed gay man?”

Savage: (Laughs) I still get those questions. There is a lot of paranoia because of our shitty sex ed. There is a lot of paranoia about how you get to be gay, and a lot of young people think that gay is a trap door you can accidently fall through. If you like having your butt played with and you’re a straight guy, that can grow like a cancer until you have gay lymphoma and you’re totally gay. And there are young men who like to have their nipples played with: my boyfriend likes me to play with his nipples, does that mean he is gay? Because of shitty sex ed, that paranoia has not ceased. We have sex ed that can’t cover pleasure, and gay sex is ultimate pleasure. They’re not covering gay sex at all. People aren’t smart about what makes you gay, and it’s all very frustrating.

Sexual Health: What are some of your plans for the Savage Lovecast?

Savage: We’re doing more live shows. Doing a podcast is lonely work because you’re alone at a computer with a microphone; so, it’s nice to get out and be with a crowd and have more immediate feedback than you get when you write a column or release a podcast. We just keep doing what we’re doing with the podcast: answering people’s questions, asking listeners to get off their computers and go do something. We’re asking people right now to go to ITMFA.org and buy some merch. ITMFA Stands for Impeach the Motherfucker Already, which is my rallying cry for the Trump Administration. We’re raising money by selling merch for Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and the International Refugees Assistance Project. So, our plans for the podcast for the future are to keep doing what we’re doing: answer questions, have great guests, hopefully try to be amusing and diverting but also, encourage people to be active and engaged.•••