Dan Savage, the ribald and dedicated sex advice columnist who pens “Savage Love” for indie papers around the country, is many things: an author (with four books, including his acclaimed The Kid), an editor (of Seattle’s weekly The Stranger), a playwright (he founded Seattle’s Greek Active Theater) and a media pundit (the leftist liberal raised hackles when he took over friend, and conservative, Andrew Sullivan’s influential blog for a week earlier this month). Oh, and he’s Catholic ("I'm Catholic—in a cultural sense, not an eat-the-wafer, say-the-rosary, burn-down-the-women's-health-center sense.)

Six years ago Savage added “father” to his list of monikers when he and boyfriend Terry adopted DJ. And, with the publication of his new book, The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family, the 41-year-old admits he’s one more thing: a husband.

AfterElton.com: What I love about The Commitment is that it's a pretty frank look at the ambivalence a lot of people—gay and straight—have about marriage. Do you think there's a lot of pressure on queers to keep that ambivalence to ourselves?
Dan Savage: One of the interesting stats coming out of Canada, post-gay marriage being legalized, is how few same-sex couples actually seem to be taking advantage of their new rights. I'm actually kind of surprised by this—and delighted. I worried that a lot of gays and lesbians would marry to prove a point, which is a terrible reason to marry. A "go slow" approach is much wiser, I think. And, yes, it is evidence of a certain ambivalence, but an ambivalence that will decrease over time. For a lot of adult homos, marriage was one of those things that being gay freed you from having to think about. Now it's a possibility, but not everyone who couldn't get married wanted to. Also, marriage is, I think, a much less attractive option for a lot of men. There are four thousand different bridal magazines and not one groomal magazine. I think there's something to that.

AE: You and your boyfriend got a lot of pressure almost from your mom. How different do you think this is experience is for someone whose mother isn't supportive, doesn’t actively want her gay son to get married?
DS: Well, it sucks if your parents aren't supportive. But you gotta live your life, parents be damned. Your parents not approving would, I think, leaven the day with a certain pang, a little stab in the heart. But no gays or lesbians would be openly gay or lesbian if we didn't risk a little parental disapproval, and work through it.

AE: Your son DJ's feeling about what marriage means clearly changed during the duration of the novel. Are his feelings about gender changing as well?
DS: Nope. I'm pretty convinced our son is straight, and I expect his feelings about gender to change when most little straight boys do: When he hits puberty and girls are suddenly much more interesting. He's got progressive parents, and we live in a progressive city, and he's going to date progressive girls, with any luck, and that will help him to want to change, grow, evolve. Parents can only expose their kids to their positions, I think, not beat them into their heads, you know?

AE: I loved when you were talking about the wedding expo. I was at one recently and felt like I was surrounded by pod people. Do you think lesbians and gays are making changes in that $70 billion industry?
DS: I think we'll make a dent in it, but not a change. And the dent will be tiny. Remember, we're only a tiny percentage of the population. Three-ish to five-ish percent. And not everyone who's gay is out, and not everyone who's out is partnered, and not everyone who's partnered wants to marry. So, yeah, they'll come after our money, and we will be marketed to and accommodated, but I don't think we'll be seeing butch dykes on the cover of Brides magazine anytime soon.

AE: I was stunned to see that the new constitutional amendment in Ohio had opened up inroads for domestic violence laws to no longer apply to them since they aren't married to the women they're abusing. What other consequences do you see from the anti same sex marriage backlash?
DS: For straight people? Not a lot—unless you count not being able to get a decent hair cut in, say, Virginia. Gay people are going to be migrating from increasingly hostile places like Texas and Virginia to places that are tolerant, places like New York, California, and Washington state. As more gays and lesbians arrive in these places, they'll become even more tolerant, and more attractive to gays and lesbians who don't want to live under the emerging anti-gay Jim Crow laws in states that are hostile to us. We have always been migrants—we migrate from our families, emotionally; we migrate to big cities not only because they're tolerant but also because we have to clump up. We're such a tiny minority and we're evenly dispersed at birth. If you're born gay in a town with 100 people in it, you have to move or live alone all your life.

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