http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2012/10/17/dan-savage-book-calls-him-first-gay-celebrity
The popular advice column Savage Love, long authored by Seattle’s own Dan Savage, started out as a joke.
That’s what the New York Times’ Mark Oppenheimer tells us in his new e-book titled “Dan Savage: The First Gay Celebrity.” He detailed the story in a preview piece for Salon.com.
An excerpt:
“At the beginning, it was going to be a joke,” Savage tells me, when I visit him in Seattle. Our day-long conversation has moved from his office at the Stranger, where he sits at Ann Landers’ old desk, which he bought at auction, to the cafe in the back of the Elliott Bay Book Co., a Seattle institution where other customers nod at Savage hopefully, hoping he will recognize them. “We weren’t getting paid. I was going to do this as a lark for a few months then move back to Berlin” — where he had been living with his boyfriend. In the first column, the readers’ letters were written by colleagues at the Stranger, and they all began with the jokey address “Hey, fa**ot.” That was the last time fellow staffers had to write the letters; soon there was steady mail from readers, who picked up on Savage’s preferred salutation.
Oppenheimer’s book points out that Savage was openly gay from the beginning, unlike celebrities such as Elton John and Ellen DeGeneres. It’s available for purchase for $2.99 on Amazon or $1.99 via ganxy.com. (There’s also a chapter-long preview available.)
Savage was often on Olbermann:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Savage
senator from Pennsylvania, made comments to a reporter comparing homosexual sex to bestiality and incest in 2003, Savage assailed Santorum in his column. Later, he sponsored a contest that led to the term santorum being used to refer to "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes a byproduct of anal sex".[33] Savage set up a website to spread the definition.[34] In 2010, Savage offered to remove his website if Rick Santorum would agree to donate US$5 million to a gay rights group.[35][36] The organization, Freedom to Marry, advocates on behalf of same-sex marriage in the United States.[36][37] Savage told Mother Jones in 2010, "If Rick Santorum wants to make a $5 million donation to [the gay marriage group] Freedom to Marry, I will take it down. Interest starts accruing now."[38]
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Savage strongly supported the war in Iraq in the pages of The Stranger in October 2002.[42] By the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003, however, he had somewhat softened his argument.[43]
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