Dan Savage leaves them laughing at the Vogue

On paper, the idea of listening to someone standing in front of an audience and answering questions doesn’t sound like the most riveting of evenings, but sex advice columnist Dan Savage makes it work. At the Vogue Theatre on Saturday (January 21), Savage spent almost two hours answering questions from a packed audience, keeping them in giggles nearly the entire time.

An evening with Dan Savage is hardly a formal affair. Walking out on stage in jeans, a T-shirt, and a zip-up hoodie with a handful of audience-submitted questions, he stuck his tongue out at the audience and held a sandwich in the air.

“Anyone want this?” Savage asked. “It was in my dressing room, but I already ate.”

He started off the night on a slightly sombre note, acknowledging the recent death of freestyle skier Sarah Burke, and credited her for helping his teenage son get through his “obnoxious straight boy phase of believing that girls weren’t capable of anything.”

He then launched into the question-and-answer format, offering advice on everything on whether or not to have an orgy with several of your neighbours (an adamant “No. Do you really need me to elaborate?”) to how to go without sex for three months while your partner is in another country (“Suffer, suffer like I did,” he stated, referencing his recent tour around U.S. college campuses for an upcoming TV program he’s working on for MTV.)

None of the advice given would come as a surprise to regular readers of Savage’s syndicated column or listeners of his podcast but that didn’t make the evening any less entertaining. Savage is a hilarious speaker and doesn’t miss a chance to make a joke. When asked, “Can you explain the mechanics of face-to-face missionary anal sex?”, Savage laughed and provided the basics, then added “Get thee to an XTubery!”

Even when the questions were ones he’d heard a thousand times before, Savage answered graciously and comically. On how to spice up a relationship, he had simple advice: not in the bed, not in the house. “Tell your partner that you’re going to have sex four times this week, but it can’t be in your bed or in your house. But they have to figure out the details.”

Savage drew on a lot of personal experiences (including those with his “husband in Canada, boyfriend in America”, Terry Miller) and the experiences of friends when offering up his advice, most of which ran along the same lines: open communication is the key to any relationship. Do you tend to cry during sex? Let your lover know before you have sex, and give them the opportunity to be there for you if and when you break down. Worried about how a woman will react to you prematurely ejaculating? Be upfront about it and remind her that your forearm never goes limp. Want to open up your relationship or explore a new kink with your partner? Just talk about it. Savage recounted a cautionary tale of a woman who had found out her husband had been cheating on her after the woman he had been sleeping with had emailed her about all the kinky things her husband had be doing with her. The wife sadly acknowledged that everything her husband had been doing with his mistress were things she would have gladly done herself if only he had talked to her about it. Communication, as Savage pointed out, would likely have prevented the infidelity.

Savage talked about the evolution of the column in the two decades he’s been writing Savage Love—“I’m now giving sex advice to the children of the people I gave sex advice to when I started,” he acknowledged—and pulled no punches when discussing accusations of transphobia that have been levelled against him, discussing the issue in a direct and honest way. “If I’m the enemy of trans activists, then the community has already lost,” he said, before talking about recent developments in Sweden that require transgender individuals to undergo sterilization before they are legally allowed to change their sex.

Some of Savage’s most amusing answers included references to current political events and figures. How do you open up a marriage? “Well, first you sleep with a much younger mistress for six years. Then you tell your second wife you’d like an open marriage,” Savage said in reference to Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich. Gingrich was a source of a lot of ire over the course of the night, as was fellow GOP hopeful Rick Santorum.

Canadian politicians were the subjects of scorn as well. After cries of “Redefine Stephen Harper!”, Savage shook his head and said that wouldn’t be fair to all the Stephens out there. “Part of the reason santorum could be redefined is that there aren’t that many of them out there. I almost feel bad for the other Santorums. It’s kind of like being a Quisling in the 1940s.”

After an hour and 40 minutes, Savage finally exhausted the stack of questions and said good night to the audience. “We love you, Vancouver. Terry told me to say that. And thanks for the marriage license.”

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