Savage Love A-Z

A bestiary of good sex.

Like so many, I started reading Dan Savage for prurient kicks — every week, I’d pick up Toronto’s free weekly NOW Magazine and check the club listings, movie reviews, municipal scandal reporting, and then I’d look around the subway car before turning to his syndicated Savage Love column.

Savage’s sex advice column exposed (!) me to a much wider spectrum of human sexuality than I encountered even in the radical, politicized, sex-positive, queer-friendly circles I ran in, and Savage’s frank, fully, raunchy and empathic replies were even more eye-opening.

That’s Savage’s brilliant bait-and-switch: come for graphic sexual content, stay for thoughtful and well-thought-through philosophy — a philosophy that is forgiving when it needs to be (see, e.g., Savage’s famous tolerance for cheating as more normal than anyone admits).

But also blistering when warranted, as with Savage’s catchphrase “Dump the motherfucker already” (abbreviate to DTMFA to preserve space in his syndicated column), with which he chides people who are trying to make it work with someone who is fundamentally unworkable.

For more than a decade, Savage has run a wildly successful and even more entertaining podcast version of his column, the Savage Lovecast, featuring guest-experts, recorded audience reactions, and…