That mouthful of a title is just an (to quote Mitt Romney) “inelegant” way of saying that noted gay activist Dan Savage dropped by a Barnes and Noble to promote his new book, and also answer some questions from the audience. Many know Dan from his numerous appearances on Real Time with Bill Maher and as the guy behind the “It Gets Better” campaign for bullied gay teenagers.
The problem is that it wasn’t just Dan who was speaking last night. There were two older gay gentlemen—–neither of them particularly interesting, but under the false impression they were—–who dominated the conversation, one of them just talking in circles about arcane gay academia (any time someone goes on at length about a piece that ran in the New York Times and starts talking about the writer of that piece like he’s well-known, I lose interest) and skipping over a lot of the general issues that anyone who’s not taking a college class on gay rights would actually be interested in.
And then the questions from the audience came and nearly every one of them seemed to focus on…sigh, that NY Times article and whether the writer of it was a homophobe. It’s all very inside-baseball stuff for anyone outside the Upper West Side, but Dan did manage to make a few interesting points whenever he was allowed to get a thought out without getting get off.
1. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, “For a long time, the issue of being gay was discussed entirely without gay people. The people who might actually know the most about it were completely locked out of the conversation.” Into the closet and out of the conversation.
2. “It’s gotten better because straight people have gotten better.” He said that he can remember a time when straight people wouldn’t even want him to talk to their kids—–like it was some contagious disease they would catch if exposed to it—–and now straight people are, in general, a lot more tolerant than they were even a decade ago. [While still noting that there is still a lot of work to be done, particularly in red states.]
3. Then he got personal, telling a story about what being gay meant to him, and how, at the time he was a young teenager, it meant there was a world of things he could never do, like join the military, get married, adopt children, etc. And now he can do nearly all of them…while still cracking that he would never actually want to join the Marines, but it’s nice that he could.