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It’s celebration time! Major Supreme Court victories for marriage equality have Christopher and Eric dancing around the dinner table. Real-life married gay couple Alec Mapa and Jamie Hebert bring some hilarity to the party. But the festivities aren’t enough to stop fairly imbalanced newsman Breck Artery from making pointed points about Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden.

What you want to be for your partner and what you have a right to expect from your partner. Good in bed, you got to acquire those skills. Giving, sometimes you give pleasure without an expectation of an immediate return, you bank it. And you have to be game for anything, within reason…

DAN SAVAGE

The Dinner Party Show Podcast — Ep. 33
Dan Savage Interview Transcript

{This transcript is the Dan Savage interview portion of Episode 33}
{This transcript is provided as a courtesy and was transcribed as best as possible. Any errors or omissions in the transcript are unintentional. The recorded audio file of the podcast episode is considered the master of what was said.}

Christopher Rice: Welcome back to The Dinner Party Show. I’m Christopher Rice.

Eric Shaw Quinn: And I’m Eric Shaw Quinn.

Christopher Rice: And we are so excited about our next guest.

Eric Shaw Quinn: So excited.

Christopher Rice: If you’ve been anywhere near social media in the past few years, you’ve probably heard of the It Gets Better Project, a series of videos intended to prevent suicide among LGBT youth. That project was started by internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice columnist, Dan Savage, and his husband, Terry Miller. But for many years now, Dan Savage has been one of our most ferociously articulate and outspoken gay activists, known for his no-holds-barred responses to anti-gay public figures and politicians, wherever they may surface.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Well done.

Christopher Rice: Exactly. He also hosts the Savage Love Podcast, and he’s currently on the road promoting his new book, a collection of his essays and columns entitled American Savage, which we currently have for sale on our website at thedinnerpartyshow.com.   Dan Savage joins us now on The Dinner Party Show. Welcome.

Dan Savage: Thank you so much for having me. Champagne and tea and cookies. I’m in heaven.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Welcome to The Dinner Party.

Christopher Rice: We really rolled out the red carpet.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Well, we try and have a nice dinner party when we invite guests over. You put on the dog a bit, right?

Dan Savage: Yeah, right. Absolutely.

Christopher Rice: Absolutely. We’re also a little bit starstruck, I have to say.

Dan Savage: Oh, you’re too easily starstruck if you’re starstruck by me.

Eric Shaw Quinn: We’re pretty excited.

Christopher Rice: We really are. And you know, we were talking at lunch about where we wanted to start this interview, and I guess we were curious about the moment for you when you went from being columnist in Seattle to gay activist on the national stage. Was there a moment that you could pick out?

Dan Savage: Well, I was a gay activist before I started writing Savage Love. I was in ACT UP, I was a gay activist at college and before college many, many years ago. And it occurred to me when I was writing this column when it turned into a real job because at first, it was just going to be a joke. I was going to write this joke sex advice column for six months or a year where I treated straight people and straight sex with the same contempt that straight advice columnists had always treated gay people and gay sex with.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Perfect.

Dan Savage: And I thought it would last six months or a year, this one-note joke, but straight people really liked being treated with contempt. It was a new experience for them.

Christopher Rice: Really?

Dan Savage: And so, the column took off…

Eric Shaw Quinn: Presaging the whole 50 Shades of Gray thing, right?

Dan Savage: Yeah, apparently.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Yeah.

Dan Savage: And eventually, it occurred to me that, “Oh, I have this much better platform now for the activism I want to do, because I’ve conned all these straight people into reading me.” Because the column is almost always about straight sex and straight relationships. But then, if I pivot and I get on gay marriage, or I get on HIV, or I get on trans issues, or anything else, the straight people read out of habit because it’s usually about them. So they’ll just read these things that they would never read at any other time, and then every once in a while, I call them my flying monkeys.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Sneaky.

Dan Savage: I can call my readers out and say, “You should do this. You should redefine Rick Santorum’s last name. You should make a video and upload it talking about how it got better for you.”

Eric Shaw Quinn: My favorite.

Dan Savage: And it’s sort of like this is my activism now.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Right.

Christopher Rice: Right.

Dan Savage: My sex advice column is sort of sneaky activism where I trick straight people into doing things, and gay people into doing things I want them to do.

Christopher Rice: Right.

Eric Shaw Quinn: But it wasn’t the plan, it just sort of evolved in that way.

Dan Savage: Yes.

Eric Shaw Quinn: But there was a point at which, surely, where it became apparent, “Wow, I’m attracting considerably more attention than the greater Seattle area?”

Dan Savage: Yeah. Well, the column, after about 12 months, other papers started calling, asking to pick it up. So it’s been syndicated for 21 years now.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Wow.

Dan Savage: I’m getting letters now from people whose parents were reading my column before they were born.

Christopher Rice: Oh no.

Dan Savage: Who are now old enough to have sex problems of their own, which is just really depressing and makes you feel really old.

Christopher Rice: My original intro was going to be one of those awful, I remember you when, things that celebrities hate. But I do remember my first boyfriend…

Eric Shaw Quinn: My mother used to take me to see you.

Christopher Rice: Well, it wasn’t that long ago, but my first boyfriend brought me your writing and was like, “This is the guy. This is the guy who is out there fighting for us.” Because at the time, there were two really visible gay journalists. It was you and Andrew Sullivan. And at the time we weren’t all pretending Andrew Sullivan wasn’t a conservative. So it was a choice between the two.

Dan Savage: Right. Andrew Sullivan was right.

Christopher Rice: Yeah.

Dan Savage: That was Andrew Sullivan’s problem. He was right, but he was right too soon on issues that were really important.

Christopher Rice: Right.

Dan Savage: The things he harped on and was absolutely right about was, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” was military service,  and marriage. And eventually, the gay rights movement caught up with Andrew and now he sort of basks in this affection that when he first started writing, people pilloried him. People hated Andrew. And I was always a fan, I always really liked Andrew. I’m still a fan.

Christopher Rice: I always thought he was a beautiful writer as well. And Love Undetectable was a gorgeous book.

Dan Savage: Absolutely.

Christopher Rice: But yeah, one of his first essays on gay marriage was called A Conservative Case for Gay Marriage.

Dan Savage: In The New Republic, in 1989, before anybody else was arguing it.

Christopher Rice:

Yeah.

Dan Savage:

He is really the intellectual father of this movement. We wouldn’t be here but for this Brit ex- patriate, conservative marriage guy coming here and starting to make these arguments and articulate them in ways that really moved people.

Christopher Rice: Right. But you were a lot more fun back then I’d have to say. You were talking about throwing stuff through the stained-glass window at the Pope.

Eric Shaw Quinn: You were the fun dad.

Dan Savage: I was.

Christopher Rice: You were getting really riled up.

Eric Shaw Quinn: You were the fun dad.

Dan Savage: And I was talking about fist fucking, and you know…

Christopher Rice: Right. Yeah.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Yeah.

Dan Savage: Somebody’s got to. I can swear, right?

Christopher Rice: Oh yeah.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Oh yeah.

Christopher Rice: We’re the internet, babe. It’s the wild, wild west on our show.

Eric Shaw Quinn: We couldn’t do a radio show if there was no swearing. It just wouldn’t work. We just couldn’t sustain it. My head would explode or something.

Christopher Rice: What is it you do when you do other radio shows? You go, “Don’t say fuck. Don’t say fuck.”

Eric Shaw Quinn: Oh my God, I walk down the hall… Yeah, “Don’t say fuck. Don’t say fuck. Don’t say fuck.” And then you go in, “So how the fuck are you? Oh, fuck.”

Christopher Rice:  I know. We were originally going to call this The Fuck Show. I want to talk about…

Eric Shaw Quinn: [inaudible].

Dan Savage: But that’s my podcast.

Christopher Rice: Right, we don’t want to intrude on your turf.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Yeah.

Christopher Rice: There is a surprise or something that I found surprising in your book, which was the first essay included in American Savage, is about your mother. And it is about how your feelings for your mother have inspired this kind of longing in you to return to the Catholic Church in a manner of speaking.

Dan Savage: And I have returned to the Catholic Church, I just haven’t returned to the sacraments or belief in imaginary friends or miraculous birth narratives. After my mother’s death, I was just sort of drawn back into these spaces where I could feel her presence. When you grow up, your parents move, they divorced in my case, remarried. And there was no tangible physical place you could go to sort of commune with the memory of your mom, or I couldn’t. And there was something about these Churches, the St. James Cathedral in Seattle, which is so like St. Ignatius Church in Chicago where four generations of my family had been married and buried, including my mother. And just to go back there, to be in that space, I sort of felt her presence. And I was drawn. I compare Catholicism to a virus that lays dormant in your body for so long. You forget you were ever infected until it kind of roars up and it roared up when my mother passed away.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Like all viruses, it’s incurable.

Dan Savage: Right.

Christopher Rice: Yeah.

Eric Shaw Quinn: But it’s…

Dan Savage: The reservoirs of it. My Catholicism was at undetectable levels and then…

Eric Shaw Quinn: Right. Then it flared back up.

Dan Savage: And now I need to adjust my drug regimen.

Christopher Rice: But I find that people with a heavy Catholic influence in their background often talk about how that affects the way they view the world and particularly the way they view culture. And for you, the way that you view sex. Is it the prism through which you see sex or have you worked to overcome it successfully?

Dan Savage: Well, people who read one of my columns, one advice column and stop sometimes say that I’m sort of, anything goes, and Mr. Permission Slips just telling people to go for it.

Christopher Rice: Right.

Dan Savage: But there’s a sexual ethic that runs through my column that, if you boil it down to just it’s essential component is do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Eric Shaw Quinn: That sounds like fun.

Dan Savage: With, what’s being done unto, having a really broad possible interpretation in the context of my column.

Christopher Rice: Right.

Dan Savage: But people need to be good and decent to each other. And there’s a right things to do and wrong things to do, right way to treat someone, wrong way to treat someone. I call people out in my column all the time who I think are being shitty and unfair to their sex partners or their lovers.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Yeah, because sometimes I think people are unaware. I don’t think people are even intentionally doing it, but through their own choices, they’re being inconsiderate or thoughtless to the people around them.

Christopher Rice: Blind choices, yeah.

Dan Savage: But what’s so amazing is people will be the, they are the villain in their story, but they write you this letter as if they’re the victim. And you have to go, “Bitch, please. You are the asshole here.”

Eric Shaw Quinn: Right.

Christopher Rice: Exactly.

Dan Savage: But people writing this letter say, “Who’s the asshole?” And half the time you have to go, “You are.”

Christopher Rice: Absolutely.

Eric Shaw Quinn: You are, Blanche, and sometimes they’re not even asking that.

Christopher Rice: Well, we’ll be back shortly to talk about who the real assholes are with Dan Savage, here on The Dinner Party Show.

[break]

Christopher Rice: Welcome back to The Dinner Party Show. I’m Christopher Rice.

Eric Shaw Quinn: And I’m Eric Shaw Quinn.

Christopher Rice: And our presence is being graced by super activist and super journalist, Dan Savage. Founder of the It Gets Better Project, and author of the new book, American Savage, which is a collection of his essays. You’re on the road promoting it now. Are you exhausted?

Dan Savage: I am. Writing a book…

Eric Shaw Quinn: This is the end of the tour, right?

Dan Savage: As you know.

Christopher Rice: Yeah.

Dan Savage:

This is very end of the tour.

Christopher Rice: And as Eric knows as well, yes.

Dan Savage: As you both know, it’s exhausting and lonely and you don’t see people for a while. And then you go on a book tour and you’re suddenly meeting a lot of people and you have no immunity, you haven’t been exposed to anything. You immediately get the flu, and the cold, and the bird flu, and SARS. I’ve been on the road for three weeks and sick every day.

Christopher Rice: Yes. Yeah, it totally happens. But I was going to ask you, because I was wondering about that with you, and I thought that maybe you lived a more interactive day-to-day life than a novelist does, because we’re complete shut-ins. If it weren’t for the show, Eric and I would never leave our homes.

Eric Shaw Quinn: And it’s really only two blocks from where we live to the studio. So we just sort of, it’s just kind of a… Yeah, it’s a put up job.

Christopher Rice: Yeah. Right. But is there an editorial office that you have to go into for The Stranger?

Dan Savage: Where I go about once or twice a week, where I have an office, which is just stacks of papers and crap.

Eric Shaw Quinn: It’s like Patsy on Absolutely Fabulous.

Dan Savage: Actually, it kind of is. I was the editor for many years and now I’m the editorial director, which is being the Queen of England. I am consulted and ignored, I can’t actually affect policy, I’m not allowed to really have a vocal position.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Do you go to parades and wave like that?

Dan Savage: I do a little bit for The Stranger, yeah.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Good, excellent. I think you could totally pull that off.

Christopher Rice: Excellent. Okay. We were talking earlier about your column and how you receive letters from people who believe they are the victims of their stories, when really they’re the villains of their stories.

Eric Shaw Quinn: I hate that.

Christopher Rice: But you have two acronyms, which…

Eric Shaw Quinn: I’m going to stop writing you.

Christopher Rice: Have I told you about his acronyms? GGG and POA. Did I get that right?

Dan Savage: No. CPOS.

Christopher Rice: No. I think this is good, giving,  and game, right?

Dan Savage: Right.

Christopher Rice: And that is your definition of any sort of healthy sexual relationship.

Dan Savage: What you want to be for your partner and what you have a right to expect from your partner. Good in bed, you got to acquire those skills. Giving, sometimes you give pleasure without an expectation of an immediate return, you bank it.

Christopher Rice: Right.

Dan Savage: And sometimes…

Eric Shaw Quinn: Score keeping.

Dan Savage: And you have to be game for anything, within reason, you don’t have to let somebody shit in your mouth, but you want to sort of be down with your partner’s quirks and kinks.

Christopher Rice: Right.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Oh, or even say that. Jesus.

Dan Savage: And you want to be an indulgent giving partner. And not the person who says no, and not the person who frustrates.

Christopher Rice: Okay. But then there’s POA, which is like the counterbalance, right?

Dan Savage: Oh, price of admission.

Christopher Rice: Price of admission, right.

Dan Savage: Yes.

Christopher Rice: Like with Eric, you can’t poo in his mouth, obviously.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Or even talk about it because, wow. Yeah.

Dan Savage: So if a necrophiliac fell in love with you, he might be willing to pay that price of admission to be with you, he will sacrifice shitting in your mouth.

Christopher Rice: Right, exactly.

Dan Savage: And that’s the price of admission he will pay.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Oh, yeah.

Dan Savage: And people have a hard time with that in relationships, there’s these little things. And I don’t think shitting in someone’s mouth is a little thing, but maybe there’s these little things that annoy them about their partner that they’re always trying to correct and always trying to fix. And they get fight, fight, fight. And it’s a source of conflict. And if you can just identify those things that you can live with and go, I’m going to pay the, I’m going to ignore that. That’s part of the price of admission for my husband to ride this ride, I’m going to pay this price of admission. He’s a bit of a slob. And I pick up after him. And for years I tried to get him to pick up after himself and that was a lot more work than just picking up after him.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Oh, so much more. Yeah. So much more.

Christopher Rice: Totally.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Now, how did you become, you trained as in theater, right?

Dan Savage: Yeah.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Your degree is in theater. How did you become the, I know that the advice columnist for sex. It’s not like you’re coming from this Doctor Laura background or whatever.

Dan Savage: No. And she doesn’t even have a psychology degree.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Fake degree, right? Yeah.

Dan Savage: Well, you look up advice in the dictionary it says opinion about what could or should be done. The only qualification you need to give your opinion is some fool fucking asked you for it.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Right.

Dan Savage: And fools ask me for my opinion all the time.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Excellent.

Dan Savage: But I grew up reading Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren.

Eric Shaw Quinn: I was going to say, because you got good advice there.

Dan Savage: Xavier Hollander, who is the Happy Hooker…

Christopher Rice: Oh yeah!

Eric Shaw Quinn: I love Xavier!

Dan Savage:  …Ask the Madam, the Column in Penthouse magazine in the seventies and eighties. I read that and my mother was sort of the Doctor Phil of the neighborhood and I was a little sissy boy who stayed home all the time so I would be there while she was at these coffee clutches, giving advice to the neighbor ladies and listening to their problems and sort of, I didn’t realize it, but when this column was sort of dumped in my lap, I had kind of been in training all my life to be an advice columnist.

Christopher Rice: Interesting.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Yeah. The story I’ve read, the best advice maybe that you ever gave was to your friend who was starting the paper to have an advice column.

Dan Savage: Right. I met this guy, the Tim Keck, the founder of The Onion sold The Onion. He invented writing bullshit in the AP style. That’s Tim Keck. Right?

Eric Shaw Quinn: Love it. He’s a genius.

Dan Savage: He is. Everything has flowed from that pot-addled brainstorm of his and Chris Johnson’s. He was moving to Seattle to start a paper. I said, “Oh, you should have an advice column. Everybody reads advice columns.” He said, “Excellent advice. Why don’t you write the advice column?”

Christopher Rice: Oh shit.

Dan Savage: And I wasn’t angling for the gig. It wasn’t like, I hope he gives it to me.

Christopher Rice: Yeah.

Dan Savage: I was just being a bossy cow and telling someone what to do.

Christopher Rice: Right.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Right. Of course.

Christopher Rice: But that happens. You come up with the idea and you get guilted into doing it.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Yeah, you do it.

Dan Savage: Right.

Christopher Rice: Yeah, exactly.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Well, it turned out good advice.

Dan Savage:  It did turn out, I didn’t know where the clitoris was when I first started writing a sex advice call for straight people. And you can read all about that in my new book.

Christopher Rice: And that brings us to one of our other points. You had a message for Maggie Gallagher. I’m not sure if anyone here knows who Maggie Gallagher is.

Eric Shaw Quinn: The lovely and charming…

Christopher Rice: She said that she felt you weren’t qualified to give sex advice to straight people based on the fact that you were gay. But you pointed out some obvious facets of who Maggie Gallagher gets sex advice from.

Dan Savage: Maggie Gallagher thinks that I shouldn’t give sex advice to straight people because I don’t know what women are like because I don’t fuck them. But she thinks that everyone should take orders from the Pope who doesn’t fuck women either.

Eric Shaw Quinn: And his crowd.

Dan Savage: If the standard by which straight people should take sex and relationship and marital and reproductive advice is, do you fuck women? Then the entire Catholic Church is excluded…

Eric Shaw Quinn: Right off list…

Dan Savage: …from meddling in the lives of straight sexually active people.

Eric Shaw Quinn: At least visually. Yeah.

Christopher Rice: Absolutely. We have so many questions from our Facebook listeners that I want to get to in the next segment, but so I’m racing through some of the highlights from your books, but this was another great one. You say Truthers believe that 9/11 was an inside job. Birthers believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Deathers believe Osama Bin Laden is alive and well in living in the Lincoln bedroom. And Herman Kane is a Choicer because like other Choicers, he believes despite all evidence to the contrary, that people make an active conscious decision to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual. So what exactly did you ask Herman Kane to do?

Dan Savage: I call it the choice or challenge. Whenever I meet somebody, sometimes I go on Christian radio or conservative groups. Whenever somebody says it being gay is a choice and I determine that they’re straight, I asked them to prove it. Prove that being gay is a choice by choosing it right now, suck my cock. And it’s amazing that this ability to just win the argument you can, that you think there’s a switch and our brains that you can flip and make yourself gay. You win. I will videotape with my phone. I will make a video of you sucking my dick and I will say, this guy wins. It’s totally true. He chose to be gay in this moment and gave me a wicked, terrible, amateur hour blow job.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Worst case scenario, you might get a blow job.

Dan Savage: From an amateur.

 Christopher Rice: From an amateur.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Well, there’s that. As long as they don’t have braces.

Christopher Rice: Well a self-proclaimed amateur. Maybe.

Dan Savage: That’s true. You never know when you’re going to run into a 10 hazard in a situation like that.

Christopher Rice: Right. You see how it goes in the video. They allegedly straight guys end up giving great blow jobs, but that’s a topic for…

Dan Savage: They give the blow job that they wished they had gotten at some point in their straight life that they didn’t because they weren’t sleeping with men.

Christopher Rice: Exactly. Exactly. Well, we have so much to talk about with Dan Savage here on The Dinner Party Show. We’re heading getting into the dessert portion of the evening where we will be…

Eric Shaw Quinn: Everyone’s favorite.

Christopher Rice: …fielding questions from our party people on the Facebook page. But in the meantime, we have a special report from our critic at large, Jordan Ampersand, I understand was in studio this week. Okay. That should go well.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Oh, it always does.

Christopher Rice: Yes, absolutely.

Eric Shaw Quinn: The studio isn’t burned down. That’s what you need to know.

Christopher Rice: Okay, excellent. So next up, Eric Shaw Quinn talks with Jordan Ampersand, and then we’re back here with Dan Savage for dessert.

[comedy sketch]

Christopher Rice: Welcome back to The Dinner Party Show. I’m Christopher Rice.

Eric Shaw Quinn: And I’m Eric Shaw Quinn.

Christopher Rice: And being served up for dessert this evening is Dan Savage, the super activist, super journalist, super advice columnist as we’ve been calling him all evening.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Extra Special dessert.

Christopher Rice: Absolutely. We have tons of questions for you from our Party People, which is what we call our Facebook listeners. And I’m not actually holding those in the right hand, currently.

Eric Shaw Quinn: But we’ve hidden them from Christopher somewhere in the studio.

Christopher Rice: Absolutely. And we will be announcing the winner of the contest. We’re giving away a signed copy of your book, Dan, to one of our question askers this evening. We’ll be announcing that later in the show.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Very exciting.

Christopher Rice: Absolutely. We have this question from Jason Mark who’s a loyal listener. He’s curious to know if you felt that the it gets better idea got hijacked by anyone who maybe didn’t have similar interests, and he refers to a group of Mormon students from BYU who started making a sort of similar video in which they said, I once had same sex attractions. It gets better.

Dan Savage: There were some alternate reality bizarro world that gets better videos. We got grief from some people because after it began to explode, on the advice of Tim Keck, the founder of The Stranger, we had everything copyrighted and trademarked internationally. And some people thought, oh, we were trying to make money. We were going to sell t-shirts and airports like those Life is Good t-shirts and try to trade on this, the success of it.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Life is Good is trademarked.

Dan Savage: Yeah.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Wow. Can that be?

Dan Savage: And the point, the reason we did it though, is because we were worried that some people might hijack it. And there was a group in Sweden that started an anti-gay It Gets Better Project and we were able to, because we had the trademark internationally, shut them down.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Good for you.

Dan Savage: But we can’t stop people from doing bizarro world sort of, it gets better riffs nor would we want to. When an anti-gay group or some psycho does and it gets better sort of parody, they’re actually acknowledging the power and the force and the reach of the It Gets Better Project in a way that I don’t think that they realize.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Right.

Dan Savage: So I’m not going to, I don’t lose sleep over the Mormon bizarros.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Like Brokeback parodies, did a great press for Brokeback.

Dan Savage: Yeah, absolutely.

Christopher Rice: Yeah, absolutely. Was there anyone you wanted to get involved that didn’t?

Dan Savage: An elected Republican official.

Christopher Rice: Wow.

Dan Savage: The bar wasn’t set so high. The bar was you just don’t want queer kids to kill themselves. You didn’t have to sign off on the whole LGBT civil rights agenda. We had the video from Barack Obama before he was for marriage. It wasn’t like you had to sign off on everything and then you could participate. And we couldn’t get a single elected Republican official to participat,e national figure. No Republican senators, no Republican congressmen, no Republican governors, no Republican, anybody. Certainly not Sarah Palin. And we get into this trouble with the Project, there’s 150,000 videos now and the It Gets Better Projects in Paraguay and Uruguay and Vietnam and Chile and Australia and the UK.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Oh my God.

Dan Savage: And all of that 150,000 videos, fewer than 300 are politicians, celebrities, and corporations and sports teams. But those are the ones we talk about all the time. And for my money, the most valuable ones are the everyday average ordinary LGBT people that no one has ever heard of. And what we hear from the kids who the project reaches and helps is that those are the videos that really spoke to them.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Like the peer-to-peer communications. Yeah, I think so because that seems true. If you’re a zillionaire celebrity, what isn’t better?

Dan Savage: Hearing from Ke$ha that it gets better. Better is one thing. And God bless Ke$ha, she was a really early contributor to the project.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Yes, absolutely.

Dan Savage: But hearing from some lesbian from a very similar background to yours who has a real job and a real community and a real life that’s just average, that she loves her life too and that you can live an average…you don’t have to be Ellen to be happy and loved and successful as a lesbian.

Eric Shaw Quinn: It doesn’t hurt. But yeah.

Christopher Rice: It’s a great campaign. But it also occasions like that question, what is better mean and is better for Ellen different than better for guy trying to be out gay guy in Columbia, South Carolina.

Dan Savage: We didn’t say it gets utopian. We didn’t say it gets awesomely perfect, but life ultimately is disillusion, disease, and death. It’s still better than high school.

Eric Shaw Quinn: We also didn’t say that.

Dan Savage: It’s still better than high school. It gets better than middle school, it gets better than high school and you make it better for yourself. You build that life for yourself.

Eric Shaw Quinn: I got better is what really happened for me. I stopped like…assholes still kept saying horrible things and the laws still kept being terrible. And we still had to have, oh, the conversations this week of listening to people on the other side say what they think about what I ought to be doing in the bedroom. That’s still not better, but I’m better. I’m living in a better place.

Dan Savage: And those people are fewer in number.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Thank God.

Dan Savage: The polls are moving our way. It got better for us because straight people got better about us. We need to claim that victory that we have a majority of heterosexuals now in this country are on our side.

Eric Shaw Quinn: And you get a big shout-out for helping make that a big national conversation.

Dan Savage: Well, thank you.

Christopher Rice: You really do. And I think the other thing too, and we were talking about this a little bit during one of our breaks here, is to what extent does social media really elevate isolated fringe figures? I have the sense with when I log onto my Facebook feed, I would think, I don’t know what random representative, or I wouldn’t know what random representative in, I don’t know, pick a state, pick a fly over state, even though that’s a pejorative term, would be saying hatefully about gay people if eight of my Facebook friends weren’t reposting it every five minutes. At what point do we say, okay, this is a low hanging fruit, if you will.

Dan Savage: Well, I actually think it’s important for us to keep track of that shit. One of the things that I think was going on with the LGBT kind of youth suicide despair crisis was all of us who’d fled and gotten out didn’t realize that it was kind of getting worse for them in the flyover countries. It used to be 50 years ago, you talked to gay men in their eighties and they’ll say, when I was a teenager, I thought I was the only one in the world. I’d never heard of gay people, but neither had his peers at the time. Now everybody knows about gay people. So that gay guy who when he was 15, 50 years ago could fly under the radar in his little town. The queer kid in that little town now cannot fly under the radar and is being bullied and picked on. And that anti-gay hate that is sloshing around out there, that the Family Research Council and the American Family Association is just pumped into the culture. The people who are really suffering, not us out and over it and done with queers living in the big city, they can’t get us. What they’re getting are the kids who are trapped in those communities still who haven’t been able to get out yet. And they’re suffering almost more extreme levels of bullying and name-calling than we did when we were kids. Guys my age, when we were kids, because people didn’t think every weird kid was a fag. Because most of my kids when I was in high middle school, didn’t know what a fag was.

Christopher Rice: Wow.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Plus they’re also hearing Rick Santorum or whoever out of context. There’s no buffer for them. That’s the thing that upsets me the most about people like that is that I don’t give a shit anymore what Rick Santorum says. But the kids are hearing that. What I always want to say to people, what about the children? I always want to say, what if your kids are gay?

Dan Savage: Right. And the kids, it’s not so much that even the gay kids hearing it is the problem. Straight kids watch their parents in shitty flyover states. They watch their parents beat up gay people at the ballot box and beat gay people with their checkbooks. They go to church on Sunday, some shitty megachurch hell hole in the suburbs. The pastors beating up gay people from the pulpit and straight kids are lapping all this up and they’re being told that gay people were in attack on the family, an attack on their family. And then mom and dad go to the ballot box and vote against gay people’s rights. But that kid goes to school and there’s the queer kid. And he’s watching all the adults in his life beat the shit out of the queers. And he feels that he has that same license. Only he’s going to do it with his fists and in the hallway at the school to an actual living, breathing, vulnerable human being.

Eric Shaw Quinn: A child.

Dan Savage: As opposed to the abstractions that the pastor and the mom and dad are attacking. They don’t know any gay people, but their children know gay people.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Right.

Dan Savage: Because at every high school, middle school in this country, there are gay kids.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Right. Absolutely.

Dan Savage: And lesbian kids. And bi kids and trans kids.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Yeah. Do you think for too long, we just sent the message of get out when you can? I mean was that partially what it gets better was about? It was about trying to actually make a better world for them where they were right now?

Dan Savage: The Project can end bullying and the Project can improve the lot of kids who are trapped. And we have to remember that there are some kids who are in such dire circumstances, they can make no move. They can just go underground and wait and flee.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Yeah, and tough it out.

Dan Savage: Yeah and those are the kids our hearts kind of ache for. The kid who is growing up in a part of the country, in a town where there isn’t a GSA in the school. Where their parents are bullying them to where they cannot come out. They cannot make it better for themselves. They cannot be the kid who forms the GSA. They just have to tough it out. I think the message we sent to a lot of kids that was unhelpful was coming out is the end of all your troubles.

Christopher Rice: Oh yeah.

Dan Savage: And coming out is as we know.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Just the beginning.

Dan Savage: The beginning of new troubles.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Right.

Christopher Rice: The beginning of new troubles.

Dan Savage: Better troubles, often troubles that can lead to…

Eric Shaw Quinn: The ones we should have been having all along probably.

Dan Savage: …sex and fulfillment and partners. But you’re going to get your heart stomped on. You’re going to be betrayed. And I was never a Pollyanna, Jeffrey Dahmer, remember him? He ate my friend Tony. I wasn’t one of those guys in the bars thinking, oh, because everybody here is gay, everybody’s good, and on my side and my gay brothers. Part of me was thinking there could be another gay cannibal in this room for me. And I can’t be sanguine…

Eric Shaw Quinn: I’ve been discriminated more against more in the gay community than I ever have in the straight community.

Dan Savage: Because you live in the gay community.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Yeah. Because that’s where I live and that’s who’s around me. And we’re just still people. We’re 10% of everybody.

Dan Savage: Right.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Great guys, but also terrible guys.

Dan Savage: And we actually have a higher percentage of terrible. We can’t argue that because of what we’re put through by the culture, homophobia, and rejection, and the shit that floats around that we commit suicide at higher rates. We drink at higher rates. We abuse drugs, abuse sex. That there’s these pathologies that we tie to homophobia and rightly so. But then we can’t turn around and say, but we’re healthier. We have to understand that a lot of gay men are kind of walking wounded, have been really damaged. And your trick as an out gay adult is to work on yourself to undo the damage and to make sure you’re avoiding people who haven’t done that work and are still limping around, damaged. And to not have them in your life. And not move through life as an openly gay person thinking, all gay people are my brothers. All straight people don’t like each other, all Jews don’t like each other, all Catholics don’t like each other.

Eric Shaw Quinn: No group.

Christopher Rice: There is this sense.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Great challenge to coming together as a community has been that we are as diverse a community as there is. We are 10% of all of those groups.

Dan Savage: And the people who really become ex-gays and become very bitter and lash out at the gay community. There are people who had this irrational expectation of what it would be like to be out. That being out would be some sort of endless birthday party thrown for you by your mom.

Eric Shaw Quinn: That would fix it.

Dan Savage: As opposed to there’s a space and an opportunity for you to gather some good people around you and create your own community in the gay community. But the gay community is not a bunch of people who love and support you and have your back.

Christopher Rice: Yeah, absolutely. And because you opened the door to this topic, we saw the closing of one of the quote “leading beacons” in the ex-gay movement this past week. The Exodus Ministry is closed. We have a lot of listeners who want to know what your thoughts are on that. And particularly if their apology was quote “enough”?

Dan Savage: No. People are dead. There are people who went through Exodus who committed suicide. There are people whose relationships with their families were forever destroyed because they failed to change. That Exodus didn’t work for them when Exodus was telling their parents that their program had worked for others. And so people rejected their children who stayed gay. Not because they failed, but because Exodus was bullshit and it failed them and couldn’t help them.

So Alan What’s-his-face saying that he’s very sorry for the hurt he might have caused without saying there’s blood on my hands that an ocean will not wash off wasn’t enough. And they’re reforming and coming out of some new group. And Allen Chambers says he’s still against gay marriage. He still believes in a biblical model for sexuality. So he really hasn’t come around. But I think you’re seeing with organizations like Exodus and the Marin Foundation is this kind of shifting gears. Like the sick, sinful, perverted, they are hateful attacking the family, this bullshit that they were selling the culture about us for 40 years since Stonewall, people aren’t buying it anymore. So they’re shifting to God hates fags but now with hugs. That, “I’m sorry…

Eric Shaw Quinn: That’s lovely.

Dan Savage: …I’m sorry that I did these hurtful things. But God still fucking hates you. Just so we’re clear, but will you hug me now?” Like No. Fuck you. You’re still a part of the problem.

Christopher Rice: We have a listener, Todd Berry, who’s curious to know what you think Chambers should do specifically to make amends. If you were God, Dan Savage, what would you have Chambers do?

Dan Savage: I would have chambers cleaning bathrooms in gay youth centers and organizations with his tongue for the rest of his fucking life. And maybe that’s exactly what he wants. So I would have to see.

Christopher Rice: Maybe. Eric?

Eric Shaw Quinn: That might actually, yeah, that might make him happier.

Dan Savage: We would have to hook him up to a penile seismograph to make sure he wasn’t getting a boner from that. I want that to be hell for him. But he should devote himself to a lifetime of service. Like most of the people were forced into Exodus were gay teenagers and lesbian teenagers.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Right. Of course. Because adults are…

Dan Savage: And a lot of those kids were really fucking harmed and many many many many of them committed suicide as a result of being told that they weren’t right with God, and if they just worked hard enough and prayed hard enough, and if God really was loved them, that God would change them. And it didn’t work. And that instilled so much despair that they literally killed themselves. Allen Chambers should shut the fuck up and go the fuck away, and clean toilets somewhere for the rest of his life in silent contemplation of his sins.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Yeah.

Dan Savage: If I was God, I’m clearly a very Catholic God.

Christopher Rice: Yes, absolutely. Eric, if you were God, what would you have Alan Chambers do?

Eric Shaw Quinn: Well, maybe I wouldn’t go the bathroom cleaning route, but I think yeah, devote yourself to actual Christian service for the very people that you said that you harmed. That to me would be an actual, that would be retributive. That would be a way in which to actually make an amends. To show that you’ve changed your behavior because an apology is not amending your behavior.

Dan Savage: An apology and forming a new ministry. They’re forming a new organization. I’m very down on religion. So many of them are just pyramid schemes and scams and money grubbing. He’s just forming some new money grubbing orgs. He never has to work an honest day in his life.

Christopher Rice: Right. We have a question from Mike Martinez. He wants to know how do you keep your cool when faced with an obvious bigot on a Q&A panel? This sounds like a great opportunity to talk about your sit down with one Brian Brown.

Eric Shaw Quinn: An answer to a challenge.

Christopher Rice: Absolutely.

Dan Savage: Brian Brown came to my house for dinner. That was a fun and exhausting…

Eric Shaw Quinn: Who’s the head of a hateful organization if you don’t know.

Dan Savage: The National Organization for Marriage.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Not the star of FX.

Christopher Rice: Yeah. Right. Not the Australian actor who was so handsome and charming. This is what is he Maggie Gallagher’s replacement or?

Dan Savage: Yeah. He took over after Maggie Gallagher who founded the organization, National Organization of Marriage left. And he challenged me to a debate and he said, anytime, anywhere. I could name the time and the place. And what he wanted was for me to fill an auditorium with screaming queers because their whole argument now is that we’re the intolerant ones. And so he wanted to be shouted down and then to be able to release a video saying, “Look how intolerant they are.”

And I’m dumb. I’m not that dumb to give Brian Brown the optics and the video he wanted. So he said, anytime, anywhere. So I said my house after dinner, just you and me. So that neither of us could play to the peanut gallery, but it wouldn’t give him what he wanted. And because I didn’t think he was dumb enough to then come to my house for dinner because it would give me what I wanted, which was Brian Brown’s people who would watch us to see that Terry and I don’t have horns. We have a very normal home life. This is our son. I didn’t think he would…

Eric Shaw Quinn: Do you have a buffalo on the wall?

Dan Savage: We do have a buffalo. And a six foot plaster Jesus. I didn’t think he would say yes. So I didn’t tell Terry in advance that I had invited Brian Brown to dinner.

Christopher Rice: Wow.

Dan Savage: And a lot of it…

Eric Shaw Quinn: Surprise, Honey.

Dan Savage: There was a lot of debate after the debate was released. A lot of people arguing online on the YouTube clips and blogs about who won the debate, Brian Brown or me. And if you read the chapter I wrote about it, you will see that my husband Terry, he won the debate. There was some stuff that went down after the camera stopped rolling and Terry clearly was the winner. But how do you keep your cool? You just remember that you’re not really, if you get into an argument in a public forum with someone like that, you’re not really arguing with that person. Brian Brown wasn’t going to bring me around to the anti-marriage, anti-gay side and I wasn’t going to bring him around.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Absolutely.

Dan Savage: We were talking, each of us were talking to the “persuadables” who might be tuning in. And we have to be confident, as we’ve seen with the polling data and all the positive movement in our direction that persuadables, when they fall, they fall for us. They come over to our side. So you need to, when you speak with somebody like that, it’s an opportunity. You need to be sort of charming and confident that the people you’re actually talking to, which is not the bigot, but the persuadables who are listening in, that you have a better advantage. You have a better chance of winning them over than your opponent does.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Just a little doubt. And since we’re actually right, that’s pretty easy to bring about.

Dan Savage: It is.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Since God doesn’t actually weigh in on this kind of shit at all.

Dan Savage: Or Exist.

Eric Shaw Quinn: They don’t even follow any of the rules in that book to begin with.

Dan Savage: I know.

Christopher Rice: Yeah.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Why on earth would we enforce just this one? Just because they say so. Even though they don’t do any of the other stuff.

Dan Savage: Yeah. You can put us to death for sleeping with each other right after we finish putting your daughters to death for not being virgins on their wedding night.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Yeah.

Dan Savage: Like fair’s, fair.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Or killing you for wearing that polyester blend.

Dan Savage: Absolutely.

Christopher Rice: Yeah, absolutely. M. Ross Michaels says, “Dan, from my eyes, you have lived a wonderful life. A good life with a charming family and great intellect, much like the hosts of The Dinner Party Show.” Even though this is your weekly announcement that Eric and I are not a couple. If you are a tall British crime solver, find Eric on Facebook.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Please, please call me at home.

Christopher Rice: That’s his weakness. Today, you…

Eric Shaw Quinn: Or Henry Cavill. Just Henry Cavill, just come on by and the rest of you can go to hell.

Christopher Rice: Oh, you’re the gay guy who likes Senator Cavill.

Eric Shaw Quinn: I’m the one.

Dan Savage: I would just like to borrow Chord Overstreet for half an hour if he’s listening. Or two hours.

Eric Shaw Quinn: I think he lives within two or three blocks of here.

Christopher Rice: He does. And I’m waiting for Tom Daly to get just a little bit older. Okay. “Today, you, Dan, speak with a lot of teenagers and young adults, but what do you wish someone would’ve told you when you were a teenager or a young man in your twenties?”

Dan Savage: Oh my God. To get over myself. It really took my very first big important boyfriend who…I was struggling. I was Catholic. I was struggling with a lot of shame about my sexuality, and my desires, and my kinks, and everything else. And he was the first person who said, honey, sex is just supposed to be fun. Relax and enjoy it. What else can you do? Tommy, Tommy Ladd was his name and he was a wonderful guy and he really sort of brought me around. If Tommy’s attitude towards sex had been a part of a sex ed curriculum in high school, I think I would’ve been a lot healthier a lot sooner. As would everyone else. Everyone else would benefit from his…

Eric Shaw Quinn: The whole world.

Dan Savage: …loving blasé  attitude toward desire and sex and intimacy.

Christopher Rice: Absolutely.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Because why not? Right?

Christopher Rice: Absolutely.

Dan Savage: Up with people, he called it, right, up with people’s butts.

Christopher Rice: Excellent.

Eric Shaw Quinn: That’s the musical I want to see.

Christopher Rice: Okay. A similar question to earlier. This one from Chris Martin. He says, “how do you handle when you are confronted with bigotry and hate in the moment in a random sort of street corner encounter? And do you make it a priority to keep your cool and come out on quote “top”?” Which he puts in quotation marks.

Dan Savage: I make it a priority not to get murdered. I make it a priority.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Good call.

Dan Savage: Somebody calls you a faggot, you want to kill them, but you have to assess the risk and reward in a situation like that. And so there have been times when somebody called me a faggot and I don’t know, faggot. That word doesn’t bother me. And I’ve sort of laughed it off or joked with them about it and gotten in their faces. But there have been other times when I was like, you know what? There’s four of them and it’s a dark street and I’m not going to be Norma Rae at this moment and die because this is not worth it. So let them have their little victory. They called me a faggot and I’m going to go home and I’m going to suck my husband off and I’m going to win.

Christopher Rice: Eric smiles and waves.

Eric Shaw Quinn: I wave. Yeah. I’m like, “Hi!” They drive through the neighborhood, through West Hollywood and yell out the windows and I wave. “Hi!”

Christopher Rice: Yeah.

Dan Savage: I used to do this in Chicago cause there was a lot more gay bashers who’d cruise Halsted, which is the main drag of Boystown in Chicago when I was a teenager and going to gay bars. And I would always ride my bike down there. And a car would go by and they would scream, faggot. And I was notorious among my friends because I would already have a rock in my hand. We would walk down the street and I’d find a rock on the ground and as soon as that car screamed faggot at us, I would step out into the street, I would shatter their windshield, and then I would run into a gay bar because what were they going to do then?

Christopher Rice: That’s genius.

Dan Savage: And then they had to drive back to the suburbs and explain to their parents why and where how their windshield was….

Christopher Rice: Their windshield was cracked.

Dan Savage: No, not cracked…

Christopher Rice: Destroyed.

Dan Savage: I would whip that rock.

Eric Shaw Quinn: You really got a big rock.

Dan Savage: I was a Chicago Catholic motherfucker from the North Side.

Christopher Rice: Excellent.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Tough Irish boy.

Dan Savage: I was a sissy and nervous and afraid, but I was also not going to take it.

Christopher Rice: And you had a good throwing arm.

Dan Savage: And I had a good throw. And then good running legs right after the throwing, there was the running part.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Running is the key to the strategy. And we’re not, don’t try this at home. We’re professionals here.

Christopher Rice: Yeah. All right. So Rick Santorum, we have a question from…

Eric Shaw Quinn: Well done. Just beautifully done.

Dan Savage: Thank you.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Periodically, I just log on a few times.

Dan Savage: I appreciate it.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Just to add to the count.

Dan Savage: Keep spreading Santorum.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Just to keep it up there to the top. Yeah.

Christopher Rice: This is the question. I’m just going to read it verbatim from our page. Christopher Ott would like to know. He says he’s a Pennsylvanian. “We got Santorum out of the Senate. How do we get Santorum out of the carpet?” Now, I’d like to add, I’d like that to add to that. What do you think is next for the living breathing Santorum?

Dan Savage: Well, quickly, Ryan Landry, who’s this hilarious sort of drag burlesque performer that I worked with years ago, but I think he’s in P-Town now. Has a wonderful song called All the Sheets are Brown because the town is Gay, about Provincetown. You’re worried about Santorum on the carpet. You need to go with brown shag or a lovely deeply richly colored, patterned Persian rug because then you’re not going to see the stains.

Christopher Rice: Yes, absolutely.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Yes, model, yes.

Dan Savage: But if you’re doing anal, the new definition of Santorum, the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter, that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex. For my money, the most important word is sometimes because if you’re doing anal sex right, there is no Santorum. The senator or the substance. No Santorum at all.

Eric Shaw Quinn: That would be great.

Dan Savage: So if you’re getting Santorum on your carpet regularly, you need more fiber in your diet. You need to take a crap before you get fucked in the ass. You don’t anal sex with your ass full of shit for the same reason you don’t have oral sex with your mouthful of food. It makes a mess.

Christopher Rice: I was hoping you’d say that. I read that in your book just the other night. I was like, oh good. Because I didn’t have to say it.

Dan Savage: I worked it in.

Christopher Rice: You worked it in.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Well done.

Christopher Rice: So the living, breathing, fire breathing, horned Rick Santorum, what do you think is next for him?

Dan Savage: He’s going to run for president in 2016. He’s going to do really well. He may even get the Republican nomination.

Christopher Rice: Jesus, you think so?

Eric Shaw Quinn: Wouldn’t that be great?

Dan Savage: It would be awesome. It would be best thing that happened to the Democrats. He won 11 states in 2012 and then went on to lose to the guy who went on to lose to the Democrat, lost him Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama. Ronald Reagan won 11 states in ’76 and went on to lose to the guy who went on to lose to the Democrat in ’76, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter won. So Santorum sees in that the blessing of St. Ronald zombie Reagan. And he’s out there talking about that now. And Republicans have always nominated the next in line and that could very well be Rick Santorum.

Christopher Rice: So are you ready?

Dan Savage: I embraced, if Rick Santorum wins by some like cataclysmic…

Eric Shaw Quinn: I can’t imagine.

Dan Savage: …chain of…

Eric Shaw Quinn: But I still can’t imagine that Ronald Reagan will be elected president. So don’t ask me.

Dan Savage: Yeah, me either. But if he wins, I fully intend to move out of the country lest I be audited every six minutes.

Christopher Rice: But wouldn’t it be great?

Dan Savage: And the president has drones now and like a kill list. If Ronald Reagan is president or if Santorum’s president, I’m a dead man.

Christopher Rice: Right. But wouldn’t it be great for him to be asked in the debates on CNN about the Google hijacking of his last name?

Dan Savage: Google sponsored one of the debates and there’s pictures of Rick Santorum standing next to a huge, the Google on the wall.

Christopher Rice: Right.

Eric Shaw Quinn: That’s so perfect.

Dan Savage: It’s like Google Santorum, which was always my mantra.

Christopher Rice: Excellent. Well, Dan Savage, we could keep you here all evening. It’s been a joy to have you.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Come back again.

Christopher Rice: Please come back to The Dinner Party Show.

Dan Savage: I would love to. This was really fun.

Christopher Rice: Absolutely.

Dan Savage: I’ve never been served champagne before on a show.

Christopher Rice: Excellent.

Dan Savage: It’s delicious.

Christopher Rice: There’s plenty more where that came from.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Right. Always for you.

Christopher Rice: The new book is called American Savage. It’s available through our website and everywhere books are sold. And yeah. And we’ll be back very shortly to do a brief wrap up and to announce the winner of one of your signed books that you just very generously signed for us here at The Dinner Party Show. I’m Christopher Rice.

Eric Shaw Quinn: And I’m Eric Shaw Quinn.

Christopher Rice: And you’re listening to The Dinner Party Show.

Eric Shaw Quinn: Thanks Dan.

Dan Savage: Thank you guys very much. It was a pleasure.