When Dan Savage talked to host Bianca Martin on the City Cast Madison podcast, it was a bit of a homecoming.
Most people know Savage as the country’s longest-running sex advice columnist, who has been writing his “Savage Love” column since 1991 and recording his “Savage Lovecast” since 2007. Add in his several books and his amateur erotic “HUMP! Film Festival,” which returns to the Barrymore Theatre on April 19, and perhaps nobody knows more about what Americans do when the lights go out than Savage.
But you might not know that Savage spent a little time in Madison. Here’s how it formed him as both a writer and an activist.
Getting Savage
Savage moved to Madison from West Berlin in 1990, where he worked at Four Star Video Heaven. On the podcast, Savage said he enjoyed his time in Madison, eating at Himal Chuli and The Plaza, and navigating relationships in the city’s gay club scene.
“I was still learning when I was in Madison, not that I wasn’t good at monogamy, but monogamy wasn’t good for me,” he said.
Savage befriended Tim Keck, who co-founded The Onion, as chronicled in Christine Wenc’s book “Funny Because It’s True,” and started writing “Savage Love” while he was working at the video store.
When Keck moved to Seattle the next year, Savage went with him and brought “Savage Love” to The Stranger, the influential alt-weekly Keck founded.
ACT UP was a national movement known for confrontational tactics in fighting for awareness of the AIDS epidemic. (NIH History Online / Flickr)
‘Acting Radical’
Savage’s time in Madison coincided with the rise of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power), a grassroots movement of activists who used public demonstrations and in-your-face tactics, such as “die-ins,” to push for civil rights for the LGBTQ+ community and against indifference to the AIDS epidemic.
Then-Gov. Tommy Thompson and the Wisconsin Department of Corrections were frequent targets of ACT UP Madison for the department’s treatment of inmates with AIDS and HIV. Savage was part of the Madison chapter, and can be seen in archival footage on the steps of the Capitol wearing a T-shirt reading “SILENCE = DEATH.”
ACT-UP’s aggressive strategies fit Savage’s approach to activism perfectly. “The only way we can get our issues addressed is by acting radical, lying down on sidewalks, screaming and yelling and making radical demands and saying extreme things,” Savage was quoted saying at the time. “And then when we do that — which is the only way we can get press — we’re dismissed for our extremism.”
The Future of Acting Up
Savage now says that the energy and the joy that ACT UP activists displayed in the face of so much death for gay people was itself a powerful kind of activism against the forces of homophobia. He thinks it points a way forward for today’s protest movement.
“It drove them crazy when they saw that we were still joyful, that we were still having sex,” he said. “When they saw us making art and pornography and theater and dancing, because they wanted us curled up on the floor in the fetal position, unable to do anything. And we did everything, which included demonstrating and organizing and challenging and confronting. But also partying and loving each other.”
