How Seattle Helped Launch Dan Savage’s LGBTQ Advocacy

Dan Savage’s Seattle story began with a professional opportunity and grew into a lasting connection to LGBTQ journalism and advocacy.

Savage was born in Chicago in 1964 and studied acting at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. After spending two years in West Berlin, he moved to Madison, Wisconsin. There, he became friends with Tim Keck, who had co-founded the alternative newspaper The Onion.

When Keck later moved to Seattle, Savage followed. Keck had founded The Stranger and offered Savage a position as an advice columnist after reading a sample column. That opportunity became the foundation for Savage Love, the sex and relationship advice feature through which Savage developed a broad readership and a distinctive public voice.

Savage’s work has addressed sexuality, relationships and questions relevant to LGBTQ people, while also placing him among the country’s prominent LGBTQ advocates. The column eventually expanded beyond print through the Savage Lovecast podcast. In 2001, Savage and his readership also helped establish the term “pegging” for a sexual practice involving a woman penetrating a man with a strap-on dildo, illustrating the column’s role in bringing language for previously less-discussed topics into wider circulation.

His Seattle-based journalism has also connected to youth-focused LGBTQ activism. In 2010, Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, launched the It Gets Better Project. The initiative was created to help prevent suicide among LGBTQ youth, extending Savage’s public work beyond advice writing and into organized advocacy.

Savage’s career has crossed several creative fields. Along with journalism and activism, he has worked as a theater director and has sometimes used the professional name Keenan Hollahan. Still, his connection to Seattle is especially significant because the city provided the setting for his early work at The Stranger, the platform that helped turn a sample advice column into a long-running national project.

For Seattle’s LGBTQ community, that history places Savage within the city’s tradition of independent media and outspoken advocacy. His path from acting student to advice columnist, podcaster and activist shows how local publishing can give a wider audience to conversations about sex, identity, relationships and safety.

Source and reuse information This backgrounder adapts factual material from “Dan Savage” on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Savage The adapted text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. This story has not been independently reviewed or fact-checked.

Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://viaf.org/viaf/251043971 - https://web.archive.org/web/20121209013144/http://www.kingcounty.gov/exec/news/release/2012/December/MEDayWa.aspx - https://web.archive.org/web/20160215215312/http://www.exberliner.com/features/people/dan-savage-interview/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20080219202931/http://lamp.dailypennsylvanian.com/blogs/index.php?page=post&section=2&id=364 - https://theatre.illinois.edu/?p=5175 - https://web.archive.org/web/20080708192859/http://www.lib.msu.edu/comics/rri/brri/bear.htm Image rights Original illustrative artwork created from story keywords. It is illustrative, not a documentary photograph.