Smart Sex, Smart Love with Dr Joe Kort
Psychotherapist, life coach and author, Dr Joe Kort is breaking through the taboos of the most intimate of subjects, to bring leading experts together to talk all things sex and relationships. There’s always room for improving sex and together, Joe Kort and his guests delve deeper into the most personal of human behavior, getting right under the covers to discuss the different paths we take towards pleasure. #pleasure #sex https://www.facebook.com/joekort/ https://twitter.com/drjoekort www.JoeKort.com
Smart Sex, Smart Love with Dr Joe Kort
Dan Savage on Straight Men Who Hook Up with Men, Sides, and the Sexuality Conversations We Avoid
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Dan Savage is an internationally known sex advice columnist, author, activist, podcaster, and longtime host of the Savage Lovecast. For decades, his work has helped shape public conversations about sex, relationships, dating, marriage, monogamy, non-monogamy, LGBTQ+ issues, kink, sexual honesty, and modern intimacy. He is also known for coining terms such as monogamish, pegging, and GGG, and for speaking openly about the topics many people are afraid to discuss.
In this conversation, Dan Savage and Dr. Joe Kort explore why so many couples avoid honest conversations about sex, desire, monogamy, cheating, and relationship agreements. Dan discusses why some relationships are more complicated than simple rules about betrayal, why sexless marriages can create painful emotional and sexual deprivation, and why there may be situations where the answer is not as simple as “just leave.”
They also discuss monogamy, non-monogamy, and the importance of negotiating relationship agreements rather than assuming both partners define monogamy the same way. Dan shares how the term monogamish came from his own relationship experience and explains why some couples use it to describe sexual flexibility, while others use it simply to acknowledge that attraction to other people does not disappear in a committed relationship.
The conversation also looks at straight men who have sex with men, sexual identity, sexual behavior, kink, pegging, bondage, oral sex, and the difference between attraction, fantasy, opportunity, trauma reenactment, and identity. Dan and Dr. Kort discuss where they agree, where they challenge each other, and why it is important to make room for sexual fluidity without erasing the reality that some men may also be struggling with shame, secrecy, or a closeted identity. They also explore Joe’s work on sides, the broader meaning of sex beyond penetration, and why expanding the definition of sex can help people experience more pleasure and less pressure.
Dan and Dr. Kort also discuss gay identity, bisexuality, trans men, labels, generational differences, HIV/AIDS activism, queer shame, open relationships, age-gap relationships, kink at Pride, and what Dan calls “woke-washed homophobia.” They reflect on how language changes, why words like gay, queer, bisexual, homosexual, and straight can carry different meanings for different people, and why allowing people to define themselves does not mean we stop thinking critically about behavior, honesty, and self-awareness.
Listen to this Smart Sex, Smart Love episode as Dr. Joe Kort talks with Dan Savage about sex, cheating, monogamy, monogamish relationships, straight men who have sex with men, sides, pegging, kink, LGBTQ+ identity, sexual honesty, relationship agreements, queer culture, and the sexuality conversations most people avoid.
Welcome to Smart Sex, Smart Love, where talking about sex goes beyond the taboo, and talking about love goes beyond the honeymoon. Before conversations about nontraditional relationships, open marriages, non-monogamy, and modern sexuality became mainstream, my guest today was already having them publicly, fearlessly, and unapologetically, long before many of us were able to speak openly about these topics, he helped create the space for these conversations to happen. Honestly, I don't think I could be doing any of this work today that I'm doing without the path he helped pave decades earlier. My guest today is Dan Savage, internationally known sex advice columnist, author, activist, and host of a hugely popular savage love cast. For decades, Dan has been one of the most influential and outspoken voices on sex relationships, dating, marriage, monogamy, non-monogamy, LGBTQ issues, and modern intimacy. He's known for combining humor, honesty, and direct advice in ways that challenge people to think differently about sex and relationships. Dan also coined the term monogamish to describe relationships that are mostly monogamous with some agreed upon flexibility. He also coined the phrase GG, good giving and game, which we will discuss as well. Dan, welcome to the podcast.
DAN SAVAGE:Hey, thanks for having me.
JOE KORT:I'm so glad you could come on it, and I appreciate it. I have a list of questions, but I thought if we go off that list, it's all good. I want to just talk with you.
DAN SAVAGE:I have a way of interrupting people, and I can make one question last for a couple of hours, so feel free to cut me off when you're ready for the next one.
JOE KORT:All right, same, same with me. If I'm saying something, you can cut me off. All right, so all these years, like, how many years have you been doing this?
DAN SAVAGE:I started writing Savage Love in 1991 and I've been doing the Love Cast now for more than 1000 episodes, I think almost 20 years. The Savage Love Cast is one of the OG podcasts. Yeah, we were doing it back when we would call people and ask them to come on and have to explain what a podcast was.
JOE KORT:Yeah. Oh, wow.
DAN SAVAGE:And sometimes people wouldn't do it, like they were like, that's not radio, why would I bother. And now, of course, everybody on earth has a podcast, at least one. I have two.
JOE KORT:Oh, you have two. What's the ot her one?
DAN SAVAGE:Uh, after action report. It's just a fun weekly thing on Fridays now, where I chat with the listener of the lovecast about a new sexual thing they tried, and we have a debrief about how it went, whether it lived up their fantasies or not, whether they would do it again or not, and advice they might have for other people thinking about the same thing.
JOE KORT:Oh, all right, so I remember right, it was in writing written form before he were in the metro, there was something here, I can't remember what,
DAN SAVAGE:Metro Times,
JOE KORT:yeah, Metro Times, and I remember thinking, I can't believe that I'm reading this here, and I wonder, did you have any flack back then, because you were the same then now that you were now.
DAN SAVAGE:Oh, tons of flack. The different, the thing that Savage Love did that nobody was doing in print, and only print existed then, was I let people use the language they actually used when they were talking about their sex life with their friends in a column in print in newspapers, instead of saying I performed fellatio, you could say I suck dick, and it was very rough and tumble. I described Savage Love when it started as a conversation I'm having at a bar with my friends about our sex lives after a couple of drinks, and that was a little revolutionary at the time, not to suck my own dick or anything, but when you wrote about sex publicly, particularly if you wrote an advice column, you kind of had to switch into this kind of Sanskrit that was some combo of the science of sex, but also therapy, what then was therapy culture, or you know, showing fealty to what we all believed ought to be true about sex and what we all believed everybody else should be doing that we might not be doing ourselves, and I didn't make people do that, and it was very rough and tumble, and there was a lot of pushback, especially because when I first started writing Savage Love, you know, now like a lot of people are like, oh, you're just gay cis men, and you like gay cis men, and gay cis men like you, and the irony is that my first haters were gay men who hated my column because the gay rights advice then from the gay rights activists was if they ask you what you do in bed, if they ask you who the woman is, what do you do in bed? You were supposed to say, I read, and I watch TV, and sometimes I sleep, and occasionally I make love with my partner. What do you do in bed? And you're supposed to be very defensive and not go into gory details about what might be different about gay sex, or how gay sex worked. And my theory, then, and I was an activist when I started writing stuff. I've been an activist since I went to college, and was we should answer that question until they're tired of the answer. We should answer that question until they're begging us to stop answering that question, because that curiosity that straight people then had about gay sex lives, which has really been exploded by their ability now to like get on any porn site and. Look at a gay sex life, was that was it a stumbling block in their acceptance of us, because they would see us and just think sex, and then if we wouldn't like put the sex thing to rest for them, they couldn't get past it. Yes, and so, like, I tell people who are sometimes like, oh, just you're all about gay cis men, or like, you're just, even though, like, I've had trans people in my column as guest experts for 28 years. I know the first trans person was platformed in Savage Love, as we might say now. Is that the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, as it was then called Against Defamation, called my column a hate crime and tried to get it pulled from circulation, or for syndication and circulation, because I used faggot in print. I came out of Act Up, I came out of Queer Nation. There was this whole movement then about reclaiming hate terms, like if we call ourselves faggots and sissies and fairies and dykes, then when they call us those words, those are our words, and they're not hateful anymore. And every letter to Savage Love for the first like seven or eight years began with Hey faggot, yeah, which I liked because I grew up reading Ann Landers and Dear Abby. It had the sort of like Chicago Big Flat A is Dear Abby, hey faggot, and
JOE KORT:it
DAN SAVAGE:showed because some of my, like, a lot of my questions were from straight people to come was just for straight people when I started writing it, and it showed that you could use that word with affection and respect, and kind of in group, or you could use it hatefully, because some of my questions were from people who are homophobic, and it just showed that it was intent that made a word a hate term, and not an arrangement of letters, necessarily.
JOE KORT:Well, I love how sex positive you've been all this time, and I, so I was, and I wasn't, so I was openly gay, you know. As HIV, I'm 63 years old, I don't have HIV, but I was, went through the whole AIDS crisis, but I was also kinky, and I couldn't accept it. So I went into sex addiction, and I became a sex addiction therapist. I know I'm, that's how I met David Lay, and he, like, helped me get out of the cult with the whole thing, but I still say stayed sex positive. I never hated you. I never thought I was never homophobic against you. I secretly hoping you would talk about my things, and I would learn from you, but I couldn't do it until I was in my 40s.
DAN SAVAGE:I was writing about kink from the from the jump in Savage Love, because people would write in and be able to anonymously ask a question, and I would answer questions about kink, and I'm Catholic, and of a certain age. I'm 61 and I have a bunch of kinks of my own that I don't go into in my writing, because that would violate my husband and boyfriend's privacy by they would be implicated, and I attribute the longevity of Savage Love, really, to Terry, my husband, because when I met him, I was doing the 90s sex columnist thing, where I was writing a device column, and a lot of times writing about myself and my own sex life and sexual adventures, and I met this really hot, long-haired Twinkie boy who's now a muscle daddy, and he said, "Oh, you write about, okay, you're that savage love guy, well, here's the deal, you can have sex with me or write about your sex life, but you can't do both, and so I chose him, and not writing about my sex life anymore, which I think is why Savage Love has had the longevity that it's had, because it was never - it stopped being about me after two years, it was only about my readers, and I remember all these other sex columns in the 90s that kind of came and went, and it was because after a while, as a reader, and I read all of them, I love advice columns and psycho columns, you would begin to feel like the writer wasn't doing things to do them, or because they wanted to do them, they were doing things for copy, and it became sus, the content kind of got like you got weirded out after a while, and because I never went down, or I didn't go any further down that road than I'd already gone by 1993 or five, when I met Terry, he really kind of saved the column from the extinction that most sex columns in the 90s experienced.
JOE KORT:Well, I would say that you stayed within integrity in the entire time. I think people would not agree with that, because of the language you use and the things you talk about, like integrity can't go along with kink and saying faggot or whatever, but it can, and you did
DAN SAVAGE:well. I also sometimes tell people that it's okay in certain circumstances to cheat, which a lot of people think demonstrates no integrity, but a lot of relationships, there's gray area, and there are instances where cheating might be the least worst option for all implicated, including the person being cheated on, and I would get these heartbreaking letters from people who'd been in long-term relationships they could not exit, where they'd been sexless for 10 or 15 years and were experiencing severe sexual deprivation. They were touch-starved, and they couldn't leave because, in some instances, they were dependent financially on their partner, which isn't a great reason to stay. Better to be poor and on your own than stuck with somebody because they pay their. Ills, but in other instances it would be somebody who was in what I had witnessed as a young gay man at the height of the AIDS crisis in a caretaker role in their relationship, where the other person had chronic illness or mentally chronically ill, and they stayed because they didn't want to abandon their partner, and a decade went by, and they'd done everything right. They did their fair share of the housework, or more of the housework. They maybe they had kids together, maybe the kids with special needs together, that they couldn't pair it solo or put in shuffle back and forth between two houses, and the choice was divorce and the chaos and impoverishment that often come with it, or doing what you need to do in order to stay married and stay sane, and doing it discreetly, and there are times when I would be like, okay, you'd probably be better if you cheated than if you left, and people would freak out, because you know everybody thinks if you want to touch somebody else with your penis, the right thing to do is to divorce your partner, tear up your kids' home, and rip the world of a marriage apart, as if sex is the only thing that defines marriage. And so people would say, you have no integrity. How dare you tell somebody that it's okay to cheat, or even to have any what I call the zone of a sexual autonomy, even to masturbate without their partner's permission. I would get letters people who weren't allowed to masturbate or whose porn consumption was being policed, and I would say, okay, masturbate in the shower, like when they ask you if you're watching porn, lie and say no, and people would, you know, you have, you have to be honest, you always have to answer every single question honestly, and you know, as somebody who's been married to the same person for almost 32 years, there are things I have lied to Terry about, and things he has lied to me about, and sometimes when those lies are in the rearview mirror, you're like, that was the right thing to do. I'm glad you lied
JOE KORT:to me, because we wouldn't still be together if you hadn't. I agree with you. I think people can't understand nuance, you know. I do a lot of social media myself, on TikTok, on Instagram, and whatever, Facebook. And if I talk about nuance, they can't understand. They say, "Well, you didn't say enough in the video, you didn't put research. I'm not.. it's not a Google Scholar I'm talking about. I'm on TikTok, I'm on Instagram. If you want to read this stuff, but they don't want to read this stuff, they don't want to learn the nuance.
DAN SAVAGE:All anybody wants you to do, if you're in my position, is tell everybody to break up. There was a study that showed that, like, 80% of the advice that are slash relationships on Reddit is everyone saying you must break up, you must break up, and telling somebody to break up is easy. Actually, breaking up with somebody is hard, and it may not always be in the best interest of the person being dumped, or the person doing the dumping, of their kids. I got tagged by some queer people in the 90s as socially conservative, because I would say that to people who were parents, you should stay together for the kids, not in an abusive relationship, not in a high conflict relationship that's a torture for kids to be in the middle of, but in a low conflict, relatively loving, peaceful, friendly-ish relationship that's moved toward companionate, perhaps. Yeah, you should, if you have kids, you've made a commitment to those kids that all things in all you know, if you possibly can, you're going to stay together.
JOE KORT:Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:and you can in a lot of cases where on our relationship on Reddit they will tell you to break the up. I
JOE KORT:know, and as a therapist, even with the couples that with the cheating, or the couples with the parent, you know, the parenting, and don't want to stay together, I say to them, before maybe before you, you move into a cheating mode or break in the agreement. Let's talk to your partner, but let's get you to do that. It doesn't go well. People are like, I know I'm not having sex with you, I know I'm not going to do this, and you're not going to go get it anywhere else either. And then they're in a bind.
DAN SAVAGE:That blows my mind. Like, a monogamous sexless relationship to me means your spouse is the only person you're not having sex with you're monogamously sexist. You are the person I don't have sex with. That means I'm free to have sex with anybody else I know. And there is a kind of misandry at play in a lot of the sex and relationship advice industrial complex, because it's most - a lot of it's written by women. A lot of the people who follow me are women. A woman is likely to ask for directions. That's a cliche difference between men and women. The man won't ask for directions, gets lost driving. The woman will ask for directions. Women write in right. And where I forgot, we were talking about
JOE KORT:just the whole idea of, I'll say, talk to your partner about it. Oh, yeah, okay,
DAN SAVAGE:yeah, talk to your partner about it,
JOE KORT:and then they say,"No, I don't want that. You're not doing it. I'm not doing it with you. And I do think this. I don't want to fuck you,
DAN SAVAGE:but I don't want you to fuck anybody else. Yeah,
JOE KORT:right. And so that I got into,
DAN SAVAGE:I got in trouble with that very early in the relationship, because most people who read advice columns and write to them are women, and I would say to. Women kind of more bluntly and brusquely then than I would now like, and this is this screws up the sex stuff a little bit, but like, don't buy a cow you're not going to milk. I also say to men, if you got penetrated every time you said yes to sex, you would say yes less often. If your ass got fucked every time you said yes, you would probably say yes less often to sex, and you have to understand that if you're a straight man with a wife, every time you ask for sex, you're asking her to be penetrated, and she might not be in the mood. You're likelier to get have as much sex as gay men do if you cannot do penetrative sex every single time you have
JOE KORT:it. Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:and that a hand job or a blow job is not a sad consolation prize that you have a right to be aggrieved about, but sex that you should be happy about, and so, like, I was always kind of balancing, like telling the truth to women, don't buy cows, you're not going to milk, right? Yeah, like I make sure that my boyfriend and husband are coming on a regular basis, it's part of my responsibility, part of the commitment that I've made to them, but I also say to men, like sex should be broadly defined, and you will have more of it the broader your definition
JOE KORT:is, and a lot of, a lot
DAN SAVAGE:of men, particularly straight men, have very narrow definitions of sex,
JOE KORT:very, that's why I came up with side, right, because side wasn't just about not having penetration, it was about all the foreplay that is the main play for so many people. Do you know how many gay men hate me for this? How much hate negativity I get, it blows my mind.
DAN SAVAGE:And yet I think the hate and negativity exists in inverse proportion to how widely embraced it's
JOE KORT:been.
DAN SAVAGE:I see it all the time, sides on people's profiles online. I'm not on Grindr myself, I'm too old, and I was never really on the apps, except a little bit when they first appeared, just to see what they were like, and the culture was like. But after sides exploded, I asked friends of mine who are on Grindr, Do you see sides? And yes, they constantly see it in people's profiles. I think it's been really useful, from one like neologism machine, respect, like monogamish pegging, GG, Santorum. I wish sides was mine. I wish I could have claimed Tom's bottom sides.
JOE KORT:Thanks. I don't think I have it in me for another one, but this one I like, and I like that they're using it as a verb. So, I side for a while, I side while I date. It's like it's becoming a thing,
DAN SAVAGE:same as some people use top or bottom as an identity, and some people use top or bottom as a verb.
JOE KORT:Oh, that's true. That's true,
DAN SAVAGE:and it, it, you know, some people, it is the identity, like I only top, I am 100% top. I'm speaking hypothetically, not of myself necessarily, and for others it's like the activity they're describing, or what they're up for right now, or that night. And I think side functions the same way, and just like topping, bottoming, siding, like pegging, peg, peg, pegged, pegging, you can conjugate it easily, and it's just rolls off the tongue.
JOE KORT:Now, tell people what pegging is. Did you create that term?
DAN SAVAGE:Yeah. Oh, you're pegging. Is one of my neologisms. Oh, I didn't know
JOE KORT:that. I thought it came from somebody said it came from pirates that would make them sit on a.. I don't even know where you know you ever hear this. Make the. yeah, yeah,
DAN SAVAGE:that was I did a contest because Savage Love in the 90s and early aughts, the Babe Land toys in Babeland, and all these feminist woman-owned, dyke-owned sex toy shops popped up in urban areas, and suddenly straight people who would walk by them or could pop into them saw all these strap on harnesses and dildos, and then along come the internet, and they would see that, like, oh, what do lesbians do in bed? Well, a lot of them are fucking each other with strap on dildos, and I started getting questions all the time from straight guys saying, I want to be fucked in the ass by a woman with strap on dildo, and it was when Savage Love is only in print, and that's a lot of words I would have to like cut and cut and cut and cut to make my columns get to down to word count, 1200 words, that's what Savage Love was. Now it's like 2500 words, because it's the internet and I can go along, and so I asked my readers to let's have a contest, or somebody wrote in asking me to have a contest to come up with a term for it, and pegging was suggested, Bob was suggested, and somebody said somebody cited the like thing about pirates having inverted stools on ships where the peg boys had to sit to keep their asses open all the time, as if a loose ass is preferable, and that got cited, and then my readers voted, and despite the vociferous objections of my Aunt Peggy chose peg.
JOE KORT:Wow, all right. So then talk about the other words like monogamish. Tell people what that means.
DAN SAVAGE:The history of monogamish, Terry and I came out as when I wrote the kid. Was about Terry and I adopting and becoming parents. The very, like, first chapter, the first two pages, I said we were in a monogamous relationship when I wrote the commitment, which was about our decision to marry. We were no longer monogamous, and wouldn't be hard if you started flipping over rocks in Seattle to find evidence that we had not been monogamous for a while, and I was worried that we would get busted. I would worry that somebody would like, because a religious right was going through my garbage at the time. We were advocates for same-sex marriage and just targets, and I was worried somebody would write something and accuse us of having lied when we adopted that. We claimed to be monogamous, and we weren't, but we had been, and we no longer were, so in the commitment, my book about marriage, I, the third page, I made it land on the same page, talked about no longer being monogamous, and then a lot of people, including gay men, would make assumptions about our lives that weren't accurate, about us being on the apps, or us being in the bars, or us having orgies in our house, or tons of sex with tons of people, which is possible for gay men. I'm always telling straight men that straight men would do everything gay men do if straight men could, but straight men can't, because women won't.
JOE KORT:Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:straight men have an external check on spinning out of control sexually. Gay men, we have to find that check internally, or we can really dash ourselves against the rocks, and the assumption people were making about Terry and I were insane. And so, in a column, I was just like, we are much more monogamous than not, like when we're having sex, it's almost always with each other, except once in a while, especially when we were parents of a young child, like logistically, yeah, was when Grandma would come for the weekend, and we would get a weekend away. It was when it was possible, which it rarely was. And I said, we're much more monogamous than not. You could describe us as monogamish, and it just took off, and people embraced it, and straight people started using it. It's all over field, it's all over OkCupid.
JOE KORT:I love
DAN SAVAGE:it, and I, I really encourage people to use it, even if it, even if you are sexually monogamous. Some people use it just to mean we allow for the fact that we still desire others. We may not be acting on it, or it may, there may come a time when we do allow each other to act on it, but monogamyths in the culture came to me not just that you don't fuck anybody else, but that you don't want to, because you're in love, and if you're in love, you're only wanting to have sex with this one person, and we beat that lie into people's heads, and then it does tremendous damage to their relationships, because you're constantly confronted with evidence that your partner, who's made a monogamous commitment to you, still fucking wants to fuck other people.
JOE KORT:Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:and I have people lose their minds about that, like I get - I used to get letters, like my boyfriend looked at the barista, and like it's like I'm not enough, and I'm like, yeah, you're not, you're not enough, right? Your boyfriend wanted to fuck the barista. Why is this news? Like, do you not want to fuck your personal trainer? Is there nobody on TV that you would want to fuck if you had a moment to fuck them, and it was okay with your partner, or you weren't partnered? And yet, even if people could recognize in themselves desire for others as not a threat to their commitment, or not something they violate their commitment to do, when they perceived it in their partner, they would go absolutely insane. And a lot of people embrace monogamish just to mean we are monogamous, but we are not threatened by the fact that we still are attracted to other people.
JOE KORT:I start with a question, I say, "Have you negotiated your monogamy, and people look at me like, what are you, what is there to negotiate? Can you look at porn? Can you masturbate without your partner knowing? Can you have a flirtation online? Can you have sex with somebody on a webcam who's in Romania? And one partner's like, no, we're monogamous, and the other one's like, no, I do that. And then it has a fight in my office, but it needs to be talked about instead of secret, you know,
DAN SAVAGE:yeah, needs to be negotiated. Gay men are really good at that. One of the things I had the privilege of doing in the 90s and the odds was really encouraging straight people to be gayer and gay people to be maybe a little straighter.
JOE KORT:Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:and I never met a gay couple where monogamy wasn't an active choice, it wasn't opt-in, it wasn't a default setting, and it involved a negotiation on what monogamy was and how it was defined by the couple, whereas straight people, I think way more so then than now, at least in urban communities, would just default into assumptions about monogamy, they would be default monogamous, they would assume that each other was monogamous, and that they both defined monogamy the exact same way, which maybe sometimes would be true, Yahtzee, they would hit the jackpot, and they would both define monogamy the exact same way, but often it came out that they didn't, and then one partner would feel like they had been cheated on when all they. And all that had happened is their partner had had a wank in the shower.
JOE KORT:What do you think about gay men who are against monogamy? I mean, there's some really hardcore in the Midwest here, very like you're with the man I could have been with, and I can't believe that you're not monogamous with your.. oh, gay men
DAN SAVAGE:who are against non-monogamy, yeah, against monogamy.
JOE KORT:Oh no, I meant that non-monogamy, yeah.
DAN SAVAGE:Oh my god, you see them whining all the time, particularly on threads. Hundreds of 1000s of gay men take to threads every day to complain that no other gay men are monogamous and they can't find a monogamous partner.
JOE KORT:Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:and I'm like, maybe you guys could fuck each other if I'm seeing hundreds of you a day on threads. How are you not being able to find each other? I don't know, I don't know, like I think it's a maturity thing, you know. When my husband, I met my husband, he's 23 and he was, we're monogamous, and if you ever cheat on me, it's over, and I was like, okay, sure, not my preferred setup, but it was the height of the HIV AIDS pandemic, and Terry was all that, as far as I was concerned, and I agreed to it. And then, when we were about to become parents, I was like, not, we must open the relationship, but it can't be that if one or the other of us cheats, it's over. That wouldn't be fair to a child we're bringing into our lives, because we're men and gay men, and the odds that one or the other or both of us will cheat are high. And so what I asked him for, which I think all people should do when they marry or have kids, was not if monogamy is important to them as it was to Terry at the time, which is also evidence that people evolve and what they want changes, is to agree that if there is an infidelity that you won't default to, it's over, you will default to is repair possible, and you know, fucked your sister on your wedding night, probably not something you could ever forgive or get past. Yeah, 20 years into a long-term relationship, in a period of relatively low ebb sexually between the two of you, and you have kids together in the stresses of daily life, got a hand job, had a happy ending massage, and you found out about it, probably something that you could get past.
JOE KORT:I know that's one of the biggest issues, right? And that's all Esther Perel's work, which I adore. I adore her work. I use it. Oh my god, you were just with her. I thought that was great. But now we're talking about breaking contracts, and you know, cheating. So I've been dying to talk to you about the work I do with straight men who have sex with men to get your take about it. I want to hear what you think about. Have you heard my stuff on that? Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:I have heard your stuff.
JOE KORT:Okay,
DAN SAVAGE:and I'm torn.
JOE KORT:All right, I want to hear it.
DAN SAVAGE:There are two wolves inside me, and one wolf says, I tell people I had sex with girls when I was 15, and nobody says you can't be gay.
JOE KORT:That's right,
DAN SAVAGE:right,
JOE KORT:that's right,
DAN SAVAGE:because gayness is rock fucking solid. When you say you're gay, everybody believes you. Straightness people may doubt or pick apart because people have an incentive to identify as straight, whether they are or not. Yes, and so straightness is fragile in a way that gayness is not, and so one wolf inside me is like, I want to live in a world where a straight identified or straight guy can have had sex with the one guy at college, or some guy he met when he was 30, or in a three way, and be able to be honest and open about that without everybody, including gay men and straight women and bi women saying to him, well, you couldn't have done that if you weren't gay. That to me, I think, is a difference. There's a distinction here with a difference between that incidental homosexual activity, which can't really be compared to the heterosexual activity I engaged in under duress. Right, I thought I had to learn how to do this. Nobody who's a straight guy thinks I have to learn how to suck a dick to save my life, right? Right, I have to, you know, I hollowed out a girl and used her as a closet for a while. No straight guy ever does that with another man. Yeah, but like men who have sex with men, which, when I was deep in HIV AIDS activism and organizations, we were compelled to use, because not all men who have sex with men identify as gay or bi, and I found it exhausting, and you know, it was sort of before we started talking about pregnant people, like, what do you mean? Men who have sex with men who do not identify as gay, which you sometimes see made into an endless initialism.
JOE KORT:Yes, yeah,
DAN SAVAGE:MSW, with all the rest of it initialized. And I would think, if you're having sex with men on the regular, it's not that you can't publicly identify. Is straight, but you can't identify to the guy whose ass you're fucking, or who's fucking your ass, as straight. You're having a lot of gay sex.
JOE KORT:Yes, gay sex. And I
DAN SAVAGE:don't think that that's not the same thing as, like, the straight sex I had under duress when I was 15 years old, or you were, it was the vibe in the moment to suck a dick in a three way with a woman who wanted to see you suck a dick, and you were kind of performing that for her, and you went there, but you're not like in the glory holes at the dirty movie theater every night sucking dicks,
JOE KORT:yes,
DAN SAVAGE:and so like I think words should mean things, and I think straight should mean heterosexual, and that you're, you're having sex with opposite-sex partners, recognizing, you know, there is gay sex under duress, we call it situational homosexuality.
JOE KORT:Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:prisons, pirate ships, British boarding schools, those are the three big examples. So there are straight guys out there who've had gay sex under duress, but that's not the same thing as seeking out male sex partners, and what I found exhausting about MSW, men who have sex, or whatever, MSM, especially when I was working in HIV AIDS activism, was so much of our time and effort was burned up trying to figure out how to reach these guys who did not want to be reached, because for them to be reached with safe sex messages required them to identify with gay guys and bi guys, or to see themselves not as straight, but like Roy Cohn and Angels in America, straight, but you know, a straight guy who fucks men, but like, as gay and implicated in as being at risk for HIV aids, which was gay coded, and you just couldn't reach these guys, there was no reaching them.
JOE KORT:Yeah, right.
DAN SAVAGE:And we would fail to reach gay and bi guys we could reach, because we were burning up so much of our time working on these guys who did not want to be reached, so I read your stuff, and I listen to your stuff, and I follow you on Instagram, and I see these posts, and I'm just like,
JOE KORT:good, no, maybe I'm
DAN SAVAGE:traumatized, maybe I have PTSD from HIV AIDS activism in the 80s and 90s, but well, let
JOE KORT:me just, if I could, so because so many people feel the way you do, right? There's even something on Reddit that says I want someone to take Joe Court down on the, you know, like they're so against me. So, the deal is this: a lot of these guys, some of them, they want to get fucked, they want, they turn to their wives or their girlfriends, would you peg me? No, that's gay, why would you want to be pegged? So, he turns to men, so that he could get fucked, he's not attracted to the guy that's fucking him, like a gay or bi guys, like this hot guy's fucking me. I like getting fucked, the guy will say, and my wife won't do it, or I'm into this kink. I want to be, be you know, slap someone around, be spit on, you know, the whole back and forth. I would never want to do that with my wife, but I can find a guy to do it, and it's not, I'm not attracted to that guy, but I can find a guy
DAN SAVAGE:to do it for free.
JOE KORT:Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:you see a lot of that in the kink scene. You see a lot of guys who, especially straight guys, are into heavy bondage, and gay guys have the gear who are into bondage. I call it the model train set in the basement, whatever that is in maleness that might inspire someone to build an enormous model train set in their basement. No woman has ever done that.
JOE KORT:Yeah,
DAN SAVAGE:like the gay guy into bondage will have all the gear and a play space, and the straight woman into bondage will have fuzzy pink handcuffs and maybe some rope. Right,
JOE KORT:right.
DAN SAVAGE:And the straight guy who's seen a lot of like heavy bondage porn, who wants that experience, will often seek out gay guys, and I, you know, have a lot of friends in the gay king scene, and I hear from them all the time about the straight guys they play with, but
JOE KORT:what,
DAN SAVAGE:there's a third person in the room that the straight guy is there to have sex with the bondage,
JOE KORT:yes, not
DAN SAVAGE:with the guy, yes, to get fucked in the ass, yes, the gay guy is facilitating an erotic experience between that straight guy and the bondage he's wants to experience and is aroused by, he's not in the dungeon tied up because he wants to suck a dick,
JOE KORT:but he will do it if it's part of being submissive, but it doesn't mean some, some, some will do it, and there's actually research now, I think I read this from Justin Lee Miller's stuff, where the guy have a straight men have a fetish about sucking dick. It's not about the guy, they're not looking up, they're just thinking about and wanting to suck dick. Yeah, or it could be forced by, or they want to do it, but it has nothing to do with the guy. They're not attracted to him. It's sexual fluidity,
DAN SAVAGE:I guess. I guess I want to live in this world, because one of the things I think the emergence of the modern gay rights movement, one of the problems it created for us is it made it impossible for a lot of guys who might engage in incidental homosexual activity to continue to do that, because they might be perceived to be gay or self. Received to be gay.
JOE KORT:Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:and so I do think that sometimes, like, I get really high, and I think evolutionarily, like, what is the purpose of homosexuality? And sometimes I think it was to sop up some of the excess male heterosexual energy, desire, because women are often out of commission, they're having a period, or they just had a baby, or the breastfeeding, and you needed, you needed a flashlight around, right? There was, they used to call it trade. I'm thinking of God Stewart, I don't remember his first name, he was this pornographer, author in the 50s and 60s, he documented his own sex life, and there was just a lot of gay men interacting with straight men under the mouth as a mouth principle.
JOE KORT:Yeah,
DAN SAVAGE:and I've always wanted, like, a kind of.. I have.. I am.. I am unlike some other gay men in that, like, heterosexuality and males is a huge turnoff for me. I want my boyfriend to be so gay that the International Space Station goes over our house, and they're like, "Look at that gay guy walking down the street. I want.. I like guys who read gay. I'm not like.. I've never been.. I've always had, like, a little bit of sympathy for those gay guys who would say I'm only attracted to straight guys. But I think it was maybe better when there was more incidental homosexual activity without gay identity.
JOE KORT:Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:better for straight guys, and of course for those gay guys who are into straight guys, which I am not
JOE KORT:right. And that's why I do this work so much, because there isn't room for that. Women get to have sex with other women, they can be lugs. You've heard of lugs, lesbian until graduation, right? But gay straight men can never have.. if I sucked a dick, it means I'm getting fired.
DAN SAVAGE:Yeah, right. One of the things that happened to me when I started writing Savage Love was I was 26 years old, and I didn't really know anything. It's been such an education for me, which I've really enjoyed, especially when experts like you share your time and expertise with me. My readers, you've come on my show, you've given advice to my column, I'm so appreciative, and I learned so much from everyone that I have access to because of the column and the podcast. But when I first started writing, when I was 26 years old, and I didn't know where the clitoris was, and I put it in the wrong place the first time I wrote about it, because you couldn't just Google clitoris and find a map, you had to go open a book, and I didn't open a book, I suddenly had, like, I didn't like straight guys, my own brother's family excluded, and, like, I carried around a lot of anger from being having been bullied as a kid, and I suddenly felt real sympathy for straight guys because although they run the world and have in a lot of ways run it into the ground, it, like I said before, their heterosexuality is really fragile and they're paranoid, and so they can't have a feeling, they can't have an expressive voice with modulation, they can't like musicals, they can't like having their nipples touched, and if they do, their girlfriend will send me a letter saying I think my boyfriend's gay because he likes having his nipples placed.
JOE KORT:Yes, and guys think worry about it too,
DAN SAVAGE:or he liked having a finger in his butt, which I was giving him a blowjob. We were six to nineing, I would get a letter, we were six to nine, and he was eating my pussy, I'd come three times, I was sucking his dick, and I put a finger in his ass, and he loved it. Is he gay? And it's like, lady, he was eating your pussy,
JOE KORT:you know. I have a line: your anus doesn't have a sexual orientation. It doesn't know whether it's gay, straight, or bi. It
DAN SAVAGE:does have a button in it that, if you press it, you will turn gay. Very careful, it's next to the prostate is not the prostate, but if you, you flip that trigger, flip that switch, man, you're in trouble. I mean, that's what I would say to people. There isn't like a button in your butt that you press that turns you gay, that's not how it works. And, but back to, like, straight guys having sex with their straight guys, absent same-sex attraction and desire, is it just straight guys using other men as flashlights? Yes,
JOE KORT:yes, yeah. And in their head, it's a nuance. I'm imagining myself being able to be submissive. I can't be submissive with my wife. Some of it is, I will say, as a therapist, trauma reenactment, where they were abused as children by male predators and perpetrators, and so they're reenacting their trauma urges, it's not sexual urges, so that's another, and people always get that, people always get when it's for money, oh, when it's for money, that makes sense. Well, why is money a way that you can have sex with men, and that makes it okay, but if he just goes and does it because he wants to act out a fantasy, he wants to have some headspace where he can experience male to male sex without being attracted to men. Does that make sense?
DAN SAVAGE:No,
JOE KORT:because no, it
DAN SAVAGE:does. It doesn't. It doesn't like I want to experience male to male sex without being attracted to men. Okay, wait. Oh, and that meant I had to get on Grindr, I had to go to a gay bar, I had to like go look for the sex that I am not. Doesn't attract me, like there's sexual opportunism, I think, often in that mouth is a mouth stuff.
JOE KORT:Yeah,
DAN SAVAGE:I got a great letter at Savage Love a few years ago from a straight guy, one of the new model straight guys who's very concerned about being an ally, who mentioned to a gay friend, his best friend, that he hadn't gotten a blow job for years, he'd been with the girl for a while, they'd broken up, she didn't like to suck his dick, and he'd never had an enthusiastic
JOE KORT:one,
DAN SAVAGE:and his gay friend looked at me, went, I always like your dick, and the, and he was like, I'm worried, because he's like, the guy had given him a bunch of blowjobs, and he was worried, he was using his friend like a flashlight, taking advantage, and wrote to me, and asked me, I'm like, "Ask your friend, actually, send me your friend's email, I'll ask your friend. And so I got his friend on the phone, and had this great conversation that I put in the column about why he was sucking his straight friend's dick, and whether there was anything in it for him, and guess what, there was he loved sucking his dick. Yeah, but the straight guy was worried, and was using it, using his friend's mouth as a flashlight. Yes, close its eyes and think of England or girls.
JOE KORT:Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:but also he didn't go to a gay bar or get on Grindr and lurk, and how else would he find?
JOE KORT:But they have to do those things. How else are they going to find these guys? Used to be Craigslist. They don't, we don't have that anymore.
DAN SAVAGE:Oh my god, I would point women to Craigslist when that first was huge.
JOE KORT:Yeah,
DAN SAVAGE:to say, like, this is what happens when you will not suck your husband's dicks. Yeah, like, we exist in a world where they can find somebody who'll suck their dick, and it might be a dude.
JOE KORT:Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:but that's the desire. I mean, I guess maybe that does make sense, like they're they're so desirous of just having their dick sucked.
JOE KORT:Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:I vaguely recall
JOE KORT:you're driven to get it to be met, and but see what people do online is they're saying if you're in this gay behavior, then you're gay, and we've spent, I feel like our entire career saying no, we're not reduced to our behavior. If I'm never sexual another day in my life, I am still a gay guy, and what people do. Well, and then we think about there are gay men that enjoy trans men who haven't had bottom surgery, and they enjoy giving cunnilingus, they enjoy fucking his pussy, and they'll say, well, that's bi. No, it doesn't mean it's bi just because it's a female natal body part doesn't mean that it's bisexuality. I don't know what you think of that.
DAN SAVAGE:Oh, is that no? No, like I'm happy to slip my neck into this news. There's gayness, and then there's homosexuality. I do think gayness is broad enough to encompass gay men, cis gay men who are attracted to masculinity and genitalia is irrelevant, but a homosexual, and I don't homosexual, okay, a homosexual is attracted to nacho. There are people out there who argue that if you're into somebody because, like, he's got a hairy chest and the kind of beard you like and is muscular in the way you like, and he has a pussy, and then you don't want to fuck him because he has a pussy, that's transphobic, and I push back against that way. It is bullshit to argue that when it comes to sexual attraction, only secondary sex characteristics can matter, but if the primary sex characteristic matters, that's bigotry, that's just crazy talk. That said, I have gay friends who have sex with trans men. Yeah, I know gay trans men who are close friends of mine. My husband's best friend is a gay trans man who's at our house all the time, and, and I love him. That said, the gay men who have sex with gay trans men, gayness encompasses that. I don't think I like words to mean things like we were saying earlier, and I think homosexuality means same-sex attracted, and we used to talk about now there are trans people out there claiming trans women who say they're biological women, and when transits was first explained to me 35 years ago by my first trans friend, what I was told was biologically male was her sex, but her gender identity was in conflict with her sex, and so to resolve that conflict, she brought her body as closely into alignment with her gender identity as possible, but was the transition was from was from male sex to womanhood, not to female sex. Yeah, female sex. And I think the womanhood is capacious enough to include trans women, I think. Gay is capacious enough to include trans, gay trans men, and gay cis men who are attracted to trans men. But then we need terms like biologically female, or homosexual, or bisexual, or heterosexual.
JOE KORT:But what about sexual fluidity? Like, sexual fluidity is that could be heteroflexible or homoflex. Bowl,
DAN SAVAGE:absolutely. It could be right, and that can be situational. Yes, situational heterosexual, homosexuality could be situational heterosexuality too. I've used for years this layer cake analogy that sexual identity is like a three layers of one cake, and the first layer is what you want to do, and the second layer is what you are doing, and the top layer is what you tell people, that's how you identify, that's the top of the cake, and the more neatly aligned those layers are, the less messy a cake you have sitting in front of you. There can be some rounding up, like I know guys who are bi who identify as gay because they're romantically attracted to men. All the relationships have been with men. Yes, a lot of women don't want to sleep with bi guys, and so they just stopped trying. And so, you know, I know bi guys who are bi who've not had sex with a woman for 20 years. Some of them are HIV positive, and like explaining that and bisexuality to a woman is really hard, and so they identify as gay, but their cakes are a little, like a little out of alignment, because they're actually bi, and yet what you tell people isn't just what's true about what you want to do or what you are doing, it's how you want to be perceived in what's most accurate, and my friend, who's by his paws, and it's only ever been with men for the last 20 years, feels it's most accurate for him to say gay with an asterisk, which means he'll explain later if you get in a relationship or time goes by or you get to be friends, he'll explain later, but he, like, says he's gay and allows people to perceive him as gay, and then you know he's not closeted about being bi, like mostly it's not he's saying he's gay, he identifies as gay, it's mostly people assuming he's gay, like he's got a boyfriend and he goes to gay bars and he goes to gay sex clubs, and it's just moves through the world like a gay man would, and so I think his cake, although it's a little kitty wumpus, is still a cake.
JOE KORT:Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:and the devil you remember, Ted Haggard,
JOE KORT:yes, yes,
DAN SAVAGE:TV, the mega church pastor, who is George W. Bush's faith leader, who was a messy closet case, he said he was straight. Do I have to believe him?
JOE KORT:No. know
DAN SAVAGE:he still have to, yeah, he was seeing Hooker has a male rant boy and was doing math and was just a messy closet case, and so, like, some people, their cake is just a disaster, and I don't, I don't feel like we've made identity sacrosanct, where if somebody says they're X, they're X, and you're a monster if you say they're not. And then my example is always like, especially to young people, Gen Z, millennials, Google Ted Haggard and read his wiki page, and then come tell me I have to respect his how he identifies and not see him for the fucking messy, malignant closet case that he was,
JOE KORT:which I love about you, and I want to talk about something else that you did once that you coined another term, but before we do that, I would have to know more about.. I don't know him personally, so I would have to know more about why he's doing what he's doing, what he's drawn to. I love what you said, and I'm going to take it away with me. Is there's a third person in the room, that's why the straight guy can be sexual with other men, because the kink, because the gear, because the cross dressing, whatever it is, that's really what I'm saying. What
DAN SAVAGE:I will allow for, there are maybe straight men out there having sex with other men who are straight, I think a significant percentage of those men are just messy closet cases, because there are so many social incentives to not identify as gay or bi, but they're not in that cohort of men who are having sex with men who claim that they're straight. Yeah, there will be men who are just like there for the bondage or they're for the blow job they can't get from the wife. Yes, you want to fuck a face, and they've never been with a woman who can be face fucked, right? Yes, they want to do so they'll do it with a guy. Yep, I think those guys exist. I also think a lot of guys are hiding behind those guys. Oh, I agree. Who are Ted Haggards? Yeah, just messy fucking closet cases.
JOE KORT:Okay, I totally agree with you on that. I just.. I asked these guys when they come in my office, my questions are, did you have any youthful noticing? The straight guys don't have youthful noticing of other boys, they don't.. they're not even homophobic. They read my books better than any gay guy. There's my books are dog-eared, they're highlighted, and that's one of the signs in my mind. I'm like, you must not be gay, because you read my whole book, you know,
DAN SAVAGE:I'm gay, and I've read your whole book on this topic, except all my marginalia, all my notes in the margins are just, oh, come on,
JOE KORT:I love, see, I love that, I do not mind being challenged, because it makes me think differently, or makes me reinforce, and you know, push back on it a little bit, but no, I've. Glad you, at least you could say about the third person in the room, and that you understand there are messy closet cases. 100% I would never say people accuse me sitting with people taking their money helping closet cases believe they're straight. I don't do that. I would never do that, but I know a straight man and how to help him understand that when I see one in my room.
DAN SAVAGE:So, have you had somebody in the room who claims to be a straight man having sex with men, and you're like, haha, no, you're a fag.
JOE KORT:I don't say that, but yes, I think that. Okay, good to hear. Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:because I don't want to enable the closet, and I'm 61 years old, and I came out in high school, which is not wasn't common for gay men of my generation.
JOE KORT:Yes,
DAN SAVAGE:there's this wonderful moment in heated rivalry, we should talk about that.
JOE KORT:Yeah,
DAN SAVAGE:where Shane comes out to Ilio, who's been fucking him for years, and tells him he's gay and feels like he's screwing everything up because he's the gay one, and that makes it worse, because he's got feelings that makes it more complicated. And what I loved about that moment was like that was me, and because they said it in this hockey universe you could bring back these tropes of like the gay experience from like 4050 years ago, and I just remember having sex with guys who were clearly gay like me, but were straight identified and would blame me for what they were doing, like I was this aggressor predator, including a guy who was 23 when I was 16, that I was the predator because I desired him in a way that he did not desire me, and I'm very reactive to that kind of closeted emotional abuse.
JOE KORT:Yeah, I am too. I feel exactly, because I'm 63 right. We're in the same generation, and I don't like that either. And I would never want to support that, nor would I even try. I have said to men, and to their wives, you have what I would think is a gay profile. I'm not a gay whisperer, right? I can't tell you whether you're gay, straight, or bi, but I can tell you that your profile doesn't sound straight at all. It sounds like, because of, and mostly it's because their attraction is to men, to males,
DAN SAVAGE:not their opportunism.
JOE KORT:No, no, no, not their optimism, not like the other straight guys. But can we talk for a minute about Santorium?
DAN SAVAGE:Yeah, Santorum. I'm not
JOE KORT:saying it right. I just want you to know that when you did this, my husband, who has Asperger's and never laughs, laughed out loud with me for years, because he loved that you did that. So, can we talk about it?
DAN SAVAGE:Yeah, it was the 90s, man, and Rick Santorum was a two-term senator from Pennsylvania at the time, and a rising star in Republican politics, floated as a potential presidential candidate for the Republicans, and he gave an interview to the AP, where he compared gays and lesbians to people who fuck dogs and gay marriage to bestiality. And a reader, again, it was a reader who wrote in and said he should never, like, there was a bit of a storm of controversy about it. George Bush even said that that was uncalled for, and there was a little bit of a controversy. He never apologized, and a reader wrote in and said he should never be able to live this down, so we should redefine his last name to mean something filthy. And I put that in the column, and readers sent suggestions in. There were dozens of them. Include one of them that I remember that wasn't the winning suggestion was, would the doctor would say to you, are you experiencing any burning sensation during urination? That they should just say any santorem, but somebody wrote in with this, which just cleaned up in the voting, because we had an online site for people to vote. The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. A lot of people think the word that really makes that sentence is frothy, because it's provocative. I think it's sometimes because if you're doing anal sex right, there's no people matter. And that won the vote, took off, it became the top Google result when you search for Rick Santorum. And then in 2012 when he ran for president, there were all these stories, and he did pretty well in 2012 all these stories about how he had a Google problem, because these people who saw him at these Republican debates with a million candidates were Googling him and getting the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes a private mental text, and people thought that Santor meant that, and that he, that was his name, like, you know, somebody's named Taylor, and they think, and so people like, how could you run for president if your last name means that, and he, he was really mad at me, and
JOE KORT:he begged you to take it down, didn't
DAN SAVAGE:he? He demanded I take it down, and I demanded he donate a million dollars to the Game Lives, Lines, information, or something.
JOE KORT:I know I remember this,
DAN SAVAGE:and people were like, "Oh my god, he has kids, and I'm like, "Oh my god, I have kids, and he gets on the television and says, "The only reason a gay couple would ever adopt is because they want to rape a boy. That's
JOE KORT:right,
DAN SAVAGE:and my kid heard him say that when my kid was nine, and so fuck you. Kids, what about our kids? Yes,
JOE KORT:yes,
DAN SAVAGE:and anyway, yeah, it was one of the greatest hits. It's still a really useful term, I know. It was a byproduct of anal sex that almost everybody has anal sex is familiar with from time to time, and it needed a word. I love it. It stuck,
JOE KORT:and you're just such a smart guy, you know. You're.. I could.. I wish I could be as quick, you as you are. And the sarcasm that you use is.. is not done in a mean spirit. I don't think it's mean-spirited. I think it's done in the way that you could be direct. And my husband is very much like you, and he's super smart. And so we both just think the world of you, and I'm so glad that I had you on the show. Do you want to say anything for the final time that we're together?
DAN SAVAGE:Oh my god, I don't know, I don't know what to say. Don't use meth, and all these gay boys, like in their 20s, who are getting on K, like don't fucking use K, and don't have every orgasm with a popper bottle under your nose, because then you won't be able to have an orgasm without a popper bottle under your nose, and yeah, if there are gay boys out there listening, like yeah, you should. I always tell straight people they should have more sex than they do, and I tell gay men we should have less sex than we can, and there's a balance,
JOE KORT:yeah,
DAN SAVAGE:that can be struck.
JOE KORT:Now, what do you think of this new generation of gay men? I mean, they're different, right? Don't you see that there's a lot of different.. what do you see some of the differences being?
DAN SAVAGE:I just think there's an internet distortion field, because the sexphobic queer incels who aren't having sex at all are really loud online because they have nothing and no one else to do, and so even you see the age gap discourse raging when you see no can't get pride raging. Yes, it's almost always these like queer incels who have no real world, or you know, you see the people screaming and yelling about how non-monogamous gay men are the worst. It's like, well, okay, then don't fuck us. You don't want to be with somebody who's in an open relationship, don't. And then you look at the people who are driving these little internet sort of outrages about age gaps or non-monogamy or kink at pride or whatever it might be, and when I really like, sometimes I do. I have a lot of time on my hands. Sometimes I'll go through their feeds, and I'm just like, oh, this person is online all the time and is alone, and they have a theory of sex and relationships that hasn't been tested against the reality of sex relationships, and we should ignore them more than we already do. I don't know anybody who wants to be in an open relationship who's like, oh, there's a bunch of people on Twitter who think this is wrong, so I won't. Yeah, I
JOE KORT:know, I know, I never thought about the terms queer incels, but that's exactly what it
DAN SAVAGE:is. Yeah, and woke homophobes, like woke washed homophobia, I think is a real problem, and I sometimes find myself, you know, my boyfriend is much younger than I am. There's an age gap there, big enough to buy you a drink in any bar in America. Our age gap, and my husband's boyfriend is much younger than him. And so we have like guys in their 20s and 30s who are our friends, who are in our lives by dint of those relationships. It's one of the perks of open relationships and age gap relationships. Some people will say, like, oh my god, there's a 20 year age gap, what do you have to talk about? I'm like, we talk about everything. Yes, and I can tell them about.. I had a.. oh my god, I wrote about this. I got this treatment for sun damage on my arms that left scabs up and down my arms, and I said to one of my young friends,'Oh my god, it looks like I have KS. And he said, 'What's that? And then I said, 'It's an opportunistic infection. And he said, 'What's that? And I looked at him and said, You're on prep. Do you know how AIDS killed people in museum? AIDS, the virus killed you. And I was like, no, the virus destroyed your immune system, and then a million other things killed you. And he now knows all that, because yes, because we met because of an age gap relationship, right? Love that. So there's good and there's perks, but there's.. I was going someplace with that, now I can't remember. I went on and on. It occurred to me later, The Wisdom of the Scares, the
JOE KORT:woke washed homophobia, though. Oh, yeah, said
DAN SAVAGE:to a young friend recently that it wasn't a compliment when my straight friends in 1980 said they liked me because I wasn't like other gay men, and it's not a compliment when your queer friends tell you that they like you because you're not like other gay cis men, it's really not.
JOE KORT:That's so well said. I, because I'm a therapist, I can't say the things you say or the way you say it. I wish I could. I've seen other therapists try to do it. It does not go well for them, and so I will never be. I can talk like you with friendships and my personal life, but never unlike nothing. So, you're the man to do it.
DAN SAVAGE:People come to you to figure
JOE KORT:it out
DAN SAVAGE:for themselves, and to be to have somebody there with them on a journey to help illuminate. People come to me just to be told what to do brusquely, and that's what therapists can't do. You can't say do this. Yeah, I can say do this, and that's what people come to me for. It's not what people come to you for. So, you shouldn't say
JOE KORT:that. No, you're right. I shouldn't, and I will never will. Even online, I don't do it. All right, so how can people find you? Dan
DAN SAVAGE:Savage dot love is where Savage Love still runs in a bunch of newspapers, highly edited form, because I write it long now, but for my column, for my podcast, Savage Lovecast, for after-action report, Savage dot love, and there's an Ask Dan link there where you can send me a question in as email for the column, or you can do a voice memo and record it and send it to me for the Lovecast.
JOE KORT:All right, we'll put this all up too when it's when we're ready to publish this. I can't tell you how much I appreciate you. We're willing to.. I was on your podcast, and I was so happy, and it made me feel so good that you honored the side. You know, that.. that my biggest professional moment, really.
DAN SAVAGE:Anybody who has a problem with that, and it's.. you're going to be in the.. I'm in the Oxford English Dictionary now. Yeah, pegging is in there, and the citation is my column where it originated, which, if you're a geek about language and English language and writing, like you have a citation in the OED, you're immortal. One day, sides is going to be in the OED, and you will have the citation, and you will be with me, immortal.
JOE KORT:I would love that. Thank you so much for coming on my show. All right, so if you want to hear more, you can go to Smartsex Smart love.com I'm also on Spotify, and Apple and Amazon and everywhere you can hear podcasts, and you can follow me on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. It's at Dr. Joe Court, D R J O E K O R T. Thanks for listening. I hope you like the show, and I'll see you next time. Stay safe and stay healthy,
Unknown:you.