LIVE: Dan Savage

[0] It's unbelievably flattering to think that three people that special would come out and sing.

[1] The Armchair asked her theme song.

[2] It's kind of hard to accept.

[3] I am so, so, so happy to be in Seattle.

[4] I'm not placating you.

[5] I've spent more time here than any city other than L .A. and Detroit.

[6] The infamous Bree, Marysville, her parents are here tonight, Greg and Carol.

[7] So to have been accepted as a family member in their house for nine years going up to Marysville was so special.

[8] I'm so, so grateful to be here.

[9] I'm so flattered that you guys all came out.

[10] Another special thing, my favorite interview of all time, my beautiful mom, Laura, is here tonight.

[11] So many wonderful women in my life.

[12] My mom, I got a real perfect soulmate in a very, very miniature package.

[13] You guys know her as the woodland creature from Atlanta, Georgia.

[14] Please welcome Monica Padma!

[15] I love Seattle.

[16] Oh, it's really nice here.

[17] You should try ecstasy here tonight.

[18] Okay.

[19] Yeah, go to Gasworks Park.

[20] Maybe somebody brought some.

[21] Can share.

[22] The very kind folks at Lazy Boy always supply us with this furniture, and then we donate it.

[23] And tomorrow it's going to Habitat for Humanity, so thank you, Lazy Boy for doing it.

[24] Thank you, Lazy Boy.

[25] Oh, I want to share a pet peeve about Lazy Boy.

[26] So, my wife and I had a very famous feud about a lazy boy that I had in our house that she was unhappy about, and it was in front of the viewing area of the TV.

[27] It became kind of a thing.

[28] She was very anti -lazy boy.

[29] I was very pro -lazy boy.

[30] I've always believed in the product as a trusted brand.

[31] I don't know if anyone's watched TV lately, but guess who's selling fucking lazy boys?

[32] Her!

[33] She has a very cute face.

[34] She can sell anything.

[35] Yeah.

[36] And that's that.

[37] That's all you can do.

[38] Also, she didn't have a problem with lazy boy.

[39] She had a problem with you.

[40] Okay, okay, that makes sense.

[41] We wanted to have a guest tonight that was somebody that was really important to Seattle.

[42] And this is somebody I've humongous fan of for years and never had the pleasure of meeting until backstage this evening.

[43] Tonight we have for you the pride, the feather in the cap of Seattle, the one and only, Dan Savage, please come out.

[44] Mr. Savage.

[45] Welcome.

[46] It is my hope that this ends up being the pervious episode we've ever recorded.

[47] That's why I wanted to make sure my mother was here and my ex -girlfriend's parents.

[48] It was really important to me that they all just really find out the underbelly of my imagination.

[49] I guess right out of the gates, first of all, you've had an incredibly successful, long -running podcast, Savage Lovecast, which is so great.

[50] I've listened to countless episodes.

[51] I'm always fascinated with the comfort level you have talking about nearly anything, which I think is a unique quality.

[52] Unique to gay men generally.

[53] Is it unique to gay men generally?

[54] Well, you can't be gay if you don't open your mouth and say something that other people sometimes are going to have a problem with.

[55] You know, I think the problem for straight people is that it's not hard to just be straight.

[56] You know, if you looked your mother in the eye when you were 15 years old and said, Mom, I put dicks in my mouth.

[57] Uh -huh.

[58] Talking about anything else with anyone else is never as scary.

[59] It's just that one basic fundamental conversation with your mom.

[60] Yeah, that is true.

[61] Yeah, it's like everything else is a cakewalk thereafter.

[62] Yeah, that makes a bit of sense.

[63] Is that the phrasing you used when you told your mom?

[64] Is that the exact phrasing?

[65] It's not the expression I used, but the look on her face meant that's what she heard.

[66] Sure, sure, sure.

[67] as I remember the way you told me is you said let me take this out of my mouth that's the mother that's how kids come out these days because they Skype to do it but you're not from the background that would lead me to guess that you were going to be so vocally pro -sex pro many things an activist in many ways you went to a Catholic school your parents were very Catholic yeah hyper Catholic my dad was deacons used to be like novices are women who are going to become nuns, they're like apprentice nuns and deacons were apprentice priests and in the 70s to address the priest shortage, the Catholic Church created the permanent deaconate where you could become a deacon and just stay that way and so married Catholic men could be deacons and the deal they made with the church was if your wife died you would become a priest which kind of put fingers crossed.

[68] It kind of put a bounty on your Catholic mama's head because if they need more priests there's one real good way to get them.

[69] My dad was in the very first class of the permanent deaconate.

[70] And growing up, there's this expression like a preacher's kid, like you're the preachers kid.

[71] Your dad was up there in the pulpit.

[72] I was a Catholic preacher's kid and that my dad was up on the altar every Sunday, helping to say mass, giving the homily, doing everything a priest does except the transubstantiation hocus pocus.

[73] That's the bread that becomes the sacrament, yeah.

[74] Right.

[75] That's how Catholic we were.

[76] My mom was a Catholic lay minister.

[77] I went to the seminary.

[78] Yeah.

[79] But we had sort of a Jesuit kind of education.

[80] You have to win an argument to get fed in a kind of Jesuit household like ours.

[81] Yeah, Jesuits are basically atheist Catholics.

[82] Okay.

[83] They're like hyper -rational Catholics.

[84] We're like, yeah, yeah, transubstantiation and Mary floated up to heaven, whatever.

[85] But I'm a Catholic.

[86] Do you recall the internal dialogue while you were a kid and dad was up there?

[87] And did you have a good relationship with dad?

[88] No. Okay, great.

[89] We do now, but then it was very strained.

[90] Like, that cliche, you know, you didn't have a really good relationship with your dad.

[91] That's what made you gay.

[92] No, I was gay, and that really fucked up my relationship with my dad.

[93] Religious conservatives and people who criticize gay people and want to argue that we are not born, we're made.

[94] Get that exactly backwards.

[95] It's not that shitty relationship with dad made you gay.

[96] Being gay distanced you from your father in this weird way, because he knew what was up.

[97] He did.

[98] Yeah.

[99] Like, my parents were of that generation, because I'm 54.

[100] They were of the generation that looked at Liberace and didn't think he was gay.

[101] Yeah, that's one of the great mysteries to me. He won a lawsuit against a British newspaper that implied he might be gay, and he won damages that then that British newspaper tabloid conservative newspaper tried to claim back from him his estate after he died of AIDS.

[102] Oh, they wanted the money back.

[103] Yeah, because obviously he'd been gay.

[104] But the thing was for...

[105] Wait, are we sure?

[106] We're sure.

[107] Yeah, we're sure.

[108] I saw the HBO show with Michael Douglas.

[109] It has to be true.

[110] But anyway, getting back to my parents, they looked at Liberace and didn't think he was gay because to think someone was gay was to think the worst thing you could think of that person and it made you a bad person to think that.

[111] So they looked at me listening to Camelot in the dining room on the A -track tape.

[112] And when they asked me what I wanted for my 13th birthday in Chicago, I said, tickets to a chorus line, which was touring.

[113] Yeah, that's a bit of a red flag for me, yeah.

[114] And then a few years later, I come out and they're like, what?

[115] What?

[116] I said, you went to Chorus Line with me. Don't you remember?

[117] My enthusiasm.

[118] My glee.

[119] You put that question to my brothers and they wanted to go to a Bears game and I was like, chorus line.

[120] And yet they didn't think I was gay.

[121] I want to say this just right out loud.

[122] Anyone who's getting something out of religion, I'm so for it.

[123] I just want to say that.

[124] I'm so for anybody who's getting something out of anything.

[125] So I'm not bashing anything.

[126] I'm just speaking for me personally.

[127] I just want to say that.

[128] I just want to add, however, that you have to take responsibility for the fact.

[129] that your belief system exists on a continuum that takes us to pogroms and Spanish inquisitions and persecuting people.

[130] Sure, sure, sure.

[131] No, I do think that's something that people of faith have to accept and wrestle with.

[132] It's part of the responsibility of faith.

[133] My parents wrestled with that as people of faith.

[134] I think if you are devoutly Catholic or any one of these religions, it wouldn't kill you to acknowledge that to your point and own it and then work through it.

[135] I think that would be productive and cool.

[136] Because you want to be one of those people of faith who helps inoculate faith against those kinds of abuses.

[137] Yes.

[138] Not just blind to it and then led into the committing those kinds of abuses.

[139] Now with all that said, I just never bought in.

[140] I believed.

[141] You did?

[142] Yeah.

[143] That's what I was curious about.

[144] So when you were a young boy and your father was up there, albeit a complicated relationship, what were your thoughts during that time?

[145] Well, I thought Mass was incredibly boring.

[146] Oh, yeah.

[147] church itself, the physical place, because we were Catholics and it was Northside and old Catholic, was beautiful.

[148] And so it appealed to, like, my little inner gay gift, aesthetically.

[149] Yeah, yeah.

[150] Colorful.

[151] And I found the whole thing tedious.

[152] But I believed it.

[153] I believed that.

[154] I believed that Jesus was the son of God.

[155] I believed somehow in the son, father, holy ghost, three and one package deal.

[156] I'm really glad that I ended up being gay because there was this moment where I sort of realized I was gay and then thought, okay, what the church is telling me about me ain't right.

[157] They're wrong about that.

[158] And some people, well, gay people, like, who were raised in conservative or anti -queer religious traditions, will then just shift to, like, a less homophobic or not homophobic faith community, sort of editing out what, you know, brings them into conflict with faith.

[159] And what I did, even, I was a kid, and I just started, like, pulling at the thread of that garment and the whole thing was unraveling in front of my eyes like they're wrong about me what else are they wrong about yeah and then even going you know i read the bible like cover to cover three or four times there's two books i've read cover to cover three times the bible and rise and fall of the third rike oh you're rising fall too yeah that's a beast of a book and i and i like to read it when i'm super depressed and i don't know why that is exactly um but you know i began to read the bible and critically without you know the the spectacles or blinders of faith and you know there are two creation myths, one right after the other, at the beginning of Genesis, where things are created in entirely different orders.

[160] And so they both can't literally be true.

[161] Not that Catholics believe that the Bible is the inerrant literal word of God.

[162] Right.

[163] But then, like, even in the New Testament, shit just started to fall apart.

[164] And it was my sexuality that prompted me to take that critical look.

[165] And I am so glad I'm a cock sucker because I might have just coasted a lot.

[166] I could be Ross do that today if I had.

[167] and wanted to put a dick in my mouth and tell my mom about it.

[168] And what age was that?

[169] Like 14, 15, not that I came out at that age, but...

[170] Right.

[171] When I read your history and I knew that you ended up basically going to a kind of preparatory school, a Catholic school, that people would go if they were going to end up in the seminary or try to become a priest.

[172] It's called a preparatory seminary.

[173] And it's a big building with like 300 Catholic boys thinking about being priests entirely staffed by priests.

[174] Uh -huh.

[175] And this was the late 70s, early 80s.

[176] And there were two Catholic priests in their 20s who had an office, and the plaque on the door said disciplinarian.

[177] And they sat in their office all day long to have Catholic high school boys sent to them to be spanked.

[178] That was their job as Catholic priests.

[179] Spanked?

[180] And after they eliminated that position, I didn't want to be Catholic priest anymore.

[181] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[182] Yeah, you're right.

[183] What's the point?

[184] But I...

[185] That's when it really fell apart for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[186] Wait, was there stuff going on?

[187] I mean, obviously there were stuff going on.

[188] There's all sorts of Catholic sex abuse scandals and all sorts of priests and children who were damaged and adults were damaged by predatory priests.

[189] But nothing ever happened to me. And I was like a chicken covered in bacon grease sitting in the middle of a bunch of hyenas.

[190] Sure, sure, yeah.

[191] I worked, I didn't just go to the seminary with all these crazy priests.

[192] You were whistling chorus line tunes and stuff.

[193] Maybe it was just, you know.

[194] No, it actually made you a mark.

[195] Like, so many young Catholic gay boys were prayed upon by priests because the priest relied on your own sense of shame and complicity to keep you silent.

[196] You had a secret as well.

[197] Right.

[198] Yeah, you were already practiced at keeping a secret.

[199] I was never molested by a priest, but you couldn't go to your parents and say this happened to me without drawing attention to your sexuality.

[200] And so many Catholic priests, even like bishops in the last couple of years, have blamed the children for seducing the priests.

[201] So if they'll say that to a newspaper, 18.

[202] Have you ever tried to tell your kid they can't have ice cream?

[203] It's almost impossible to not.

[204] Well, who told your kid they can get ice cream out of the pants of a priest?

[205] Was there a moment at all that you considered when you were in that school, wow, if I take this path into being a priest, I will avoid having to ever deal with this whole sexuality issue.

[206] That's why I was there.

[207] I was realizing I was gay in like seventh, eighth grade, and I chose this place because I thought I can never come out.

[208] I can never tell my parents I'm gay.

[209] So my options are find some woman that I can lie to forever, and that conflicted with my Catholic values.

[210] You couldn't use someone like that.

[211] You couldn't treat someone like that.

[212] You wouldn't want to be treated like that.

[213] It violated the golden rule.

[214] And so I couldn't do that.

[215] And I thought, okay, so I'm going to be a priest.

[216] as so many other queer Catholic kids throughout history.

[217] Yeah, and I thought I can, I'll do this instead.

[218] And it would have been a terrible idea.

[219] And thank God for the, you know, it's the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

[220] What are the Stonewall riots?

[221] Forgive my ignorance.

[222] Well, there was a gay rights, queer rights movement pre Stonewall, and activists pre Stonewall and protests pre Stonewall.

[223] But Stonewall was a bar in New York City that the police raided toward the end of June in 1969, and rather than allow themselves to be beat up and dragged to paddy wagons, the crowd in Stonewall, I'm going to cry, talk about it, the crowd in Stonewall, which was a mixed crowd, people of color, white people, trans people, cross -dressers, drag queens, gay guys, they fought back against the cops.

[224] And there were three nights of riots in the village.

[225] And that kicked off the modern LGBT civil rights movement and really rolled out the concept of pride and, you know, the end of June being our, thank God the cops raided the bar, you know, not on November 10th, so we don't have to march in the cold at the end of June.

[226] Yeah, happy accident.

[227] And coincidentally enough, it was the day of Judy Garland's funeral was that day.

[228] Oh, that's serendipitous.

[229] And a lot of people, you know, have said apocryphly, the queers were fed up.

[230] They had to bury Judy Garland.

[231] They weren't going to put over the cops anymore.

[232] Yeah.

[233] So thank God, like that happened in 1969.

[234] I was going to the school in the late 70s, very early 80s, and there had been a progress in the idea that you could be a gay person, live a life out, that my only option wasn't the priesthood or the closet, that there was something else.

[235] And the gay rights, you know, it put it in front of me that I could live in a big house, wear dresses, and fuck boys, without getting ordained.

[236] Uh -huh.

[237] And live with some integrity and get to do all those things.

[238] And by boys, I mean adult men.

[239] Yes, with mustaches or not, you choose whatever.

[240] Not.

[241] Not, okay.

[242] I'm thinking of the 70s is pretty mustache heavy.

[243] It was a problem for me in the 70s.

[244] Like all the corn I could get my hands on like, Bert Reynolds.

[245] Sure.

[246] I found a Playgirl magazine when I was in my formative stage with Bert Reynolds in it.

[247] On the bearskin rug.

[248] I own it.

[249] I would put my thumb over his mustache with one hand while my other was occupied.

[250] Sure, sure.

[251] Sure.

[252] So prior to the Stonewall, then, there's no one really in the public eye that you can even look at or look to, right?

[253] That's living out loud at that point.

[254] Well, there was Paul Lind and Charles Nelson Riley.

[255] The deal that the culture made with, particularly gay men, gay white men pre -stonewall was, you know, here are some bushes in a park where if you go there, we're not going to arrest you often.

[256] Here's a bathhouse if you go there.

[257] And you can publicly sort of be.

[258] you can be Liberace, you can be Paul Lind.

[259] You can just never say you're gay so that we can pretend we don't know.

[260] The original Don't Ask, Don't Tell, kind of...

[261] Right, that was the deal for a very long time.

[262] So there were gay communities, gay people who were out to each other, but, you know, there were gay couples who lived together who had separate phones to their apartments, and one guy would answer his phone, and the other guy would never answer his phone.

[263] They would never answer each other's phones.

[264] Because if their families found out, they could be committed, lobotomized, they could lose their jobs, they could get thrown out of their apartment, if their landlord found out, It was a very tough way to live, and it made gay relationships unstable and not lasting.

[265] And then psychologists looked at that and said, well, being gay is obviously sick because their relationships are so fragile.

[266] I recently got in an argument with someone's dad about that same thing.

[267] Well, look at the rate of mental health issues.

[268] And I'm like, chicken or egg?

[269] It'd be completely excluded from your social group, and you don't think there will ever be a downriver result.

[270] Right.

[271] In mental, yes.

[272] Do you think because, and again, I speak anecdotal.

[273] living in Los Angeles where we have West Hollywood, which is, by the way, when I first moved to Los Angeles, I moved to Santa Monica, I was bored, I just moved there.

[274] I thought, I'm going to go get a cup of coffee.

[275] It was at night.

[276] I'm just going to drive down Santa Monica Boulevard.

[277] The first place I see that looks busy, I'm going to get out and I'm going to go.

[278] And I'm fresh from Detroit.

[279] I park my car.

[280] First happen in place is West Hollywood if you leave Santa Monica on Santa Monica Boulevard.

[281] And as I walk by Rage, which I then learn is Rage.

[282] I'm like, oh, yeah, there's tons of dudes dance with each other.

[283] That's a gay bar.

[284] That makes sense.

[285] Then I sit down in the Starbucks and I notice there's like a ton of dudes making out at Starbucks and I say to the guy next to me, I'm like, this is like a gay Starbucks?

[286] I didn't know there was a gay a gay Starbucks.

[287] And he goes, oh yeah, it's a gay Starbucks.

[288] It's a gay town.

[289] And I'm like, it's a gay town.

[290] He's like, yeah, the cops are gay.

[291] I'm like, the fucking cops are gay.

[292] Like it was truly a mind exploding.

[293] If you put enough of us anywhere.

[294] We can turn whatever it is gay.

[295] There are gay cruise ships because they put enough of us on one.

[296] There's a tipping point.

[297] And the cruise ship is a cock sucker.

[298] Yeah, so start talking to this guy.

[299] Gorgeous dude, talking to him for a while.

[300] Super good hang.

[301] He goes, hey, it's Dollar Rolling Rock Night at Mother Load across the street.

[302] Do you want to come?

[303] And I'm like, I'm anywhere that beers are a dollar.

[304] Go to Motherload with him.

[305] He's super hot, so everyone's inviting us.

[306] into the bathroom to do Coke, so it's free Coke and Dollar Rolling Rocks.

[307] I was like, I chose wrong.

[308] This could have been.

[309] So that town, again, this is anecdotal and it's probably quite misleading, but several of our best friends, Monica and I, mutual friends, are gay and in Los Angeles.

[310] And in their 20s, it was a pretty reckless lifestyle by any metric.

[311] Very high rate of drug use, very high rate of everything.

[312] And I would was initially like, are those things correlated?

[313] How are they correlated?

[314] And our good friend said to us, you know, when you are certain that your life is going to end short from HIV or it's going to end because you're going to get beat up in an alley or drug behind a cup, you kind of don't really give a fuck.

[315] There's almost like...

[316] Well, the research shows that gay men, you know, use drugs at higher rates, abused drugs, I would say, it's like used, because I think you can use drugs without abusing them.

[317] Why would you?

[318] But yes, continue.

[319] And a lot of people, you know, It's like using a Ferrari to go the speed limit.

[320] Why'd you even get the fucking thing?

[321] And it's a little hard to separate out because, you know, to be gay is to say sex and desire is not sanctified or ennobled by reproduction.

[322] This is for pleasure and connection.

[323] And I think for a lot of guys, what then happens is, okay, what else is for pleasure and connection?

[324] Yeah.

[325] And it sort of is a natural extension.

[326] And gay guys don't do anything.

[327] sexually with the sexually out of control stuff.

[328] They don't do anything that straight guys wouldn't do if straight guys could, but straight guys can't because women won't.

[329] I always say...

[330] Did you see the SNL with John Mullaney and Pete Davison joking about...

[331] Clint Eastwood made a movie.

[332] He's 90 years old.

[333] He made this movie where his character he wrote and directed.

[334] His character that he wrote for himself has two, three ways in this movie at age 90.

[335] Go get him, Clint.

[336] And Pete Davidson and John Mullaney are looking at the...

[337] this going, Malaney goes, I've never had a three -way.

[338] And Davis is like, I've had one.

[339] And they're both hoping to have one more or one, the first one, before they're 90.

[340] And I'm sitting and they're going, I lost my virginity in a three -way, these poor motherfuckers, these poor straight guys.

[341] And let's pause to, you know, consider for a second why women won't do what gay men do.

[342] Yes, thank you.

[343] I was about to say that.

[344] They got to study a very long time ago where they sent attractive young women out on a college campus just to approach at random college guys and offer to have anonymous sex with them right that minute.

[345] And 98 % of the guys were like, okay.

[346] And then they sent attractive men out to ask women on the college candidate at random.

[347] And they were all like, no. And so what the researcher said was men are more promiscuous, women are more, you know, family and monogamy oriented.

[348] And they did that study again in Germany just a few years ago and controlled for violence, slut shaming, rape, and they did it with computers, and they sat women and men down, and they showed them pictures, and they told them, these are attractive strangers, they're down the hall, they would like to have sex with you right now.

[349] No one will ever know.

[350] You will not be harmed.

[351] There will be no violence, and women were as likely to say yes as men.

[352] Exactly.

[353] Yeah.

[354] So all those straight guys out there, and I've encountered so many in my life who are jealous that it's easier for gay guys to get laid, it is.

[355] And if you want it to be easier for you to get laid, make the world safer for women.

[356] Yeah.

[357] Yep.

[358] And, and, that was, yeah.

[359] One little ass to complicate this.

[360] Slut shaming is a phenomenon that women are at least 50 % responsible for driving.

[361] I was just about to say that.

[362] It's on everybody to change this, not just men.

[363] Not just men.

[364] Women, slut shame, I would say almost more than men in a lot of ways.

[365] So it's on everybody.

[366] We all got to work on it.

[367] well but but also i think it would be um tempting to make it a binary option as well when i don't think any one of these topics is solely a genetic thing solely a cultural socio you know it's impossible to separate those things out there really is because we do you and i have a poison coursing through our veins called testosterone that is also a fact and women have it too and a reasonable dose yeah depending on the woman so there's a lot of things yes because because there is this, you know, I listen to how people talk to their daughters.

[368] And basically, if you have a son, right, it's like, well, Tiger, I hope you get laid, son.

[369] Do you need to borrow your dad's car?

[370] Do you have a suit?

[371] You got 20 bucks?

[372] You know, it doesn't matter who you get laid with.

[373] Just get it in.

[374] And the daughter's like, you better make sure that he loves you.

[375] Like, how the fuck do you know if someone loves you at 15, you know?

[376] They said it?

[377] It's not irrational, though, that that overprotectiveness that parents show for their female children, you have to factor in male violence.

[378] Women and girls are likely to be murdered by intimate partners than anybody else.

[379] And so, you know, I often say to the parents of young gay boys, treat that kid like a daughter, hover and be protective, because in the same way that if your daughter was straight and going to go out into the world and have male sex partners, you would be a little bit more concerned for your daughter than for your son who's going out of the world of female sex partners because your daughter's at greater risk of rape, intimate partner violence, murder, and domestic violence, then your son is.

[380] Your son is likely to perpetrate those things.

[381] Please talk with your son about that.

[382] Uh -huh.

[383] Yeah.

[384] Men are testosterone -soaked dick monsters.

[385] Yeah, yeah.

[386] And so I think it's perfectly rational to be a little bit more overprotective of daughters.

[387] I had these conversations with our neighbors in the predominantly Catholic, predominantly straight neighborhood, where Terry and I lived and raised our son together.

[388] who felt, you know, as good lefty, liberal, progressive Seattleites that they were being hypocritical and that they were more protective of their daughters.

[389] And I was the gay guy going, you should be more protective of your daughters.

[390] They're at greater risk because of male violence.

[391] I'm not saying lock your daughters up.

[392] I'm not saying prevent your daughters from having...

[393] But you do believe in chastity belts.

[394] You're on record.

[395] In chastity devices?

[396] Chastity belts, yeah, yeah.

[397] Yeah, but only for fun and only with consenting adults.

[398] Okay.

[399] Okay.

[400] Okay.

[401] But you can also, you can be protective and not put on the societal limitations, like you've got to be in love and you can still be protected and say there are things to be aware of.

[402] And also, if you are horny and excited and confident, go for it.

[403] Yeah, just the pressure of the experience being one out of a novel Fabio would be on the cover of is a lot to put on a 15 -year -old girl.

[404] Yeah, guys don't have that.

[405] He better bring you flowers.

[406] There better be champagne.

[407] You should, you know, you like, you should be dressed at the night.

[408] Well, the question is, do you want to fuck him?

[409] Is this what you want?

[410] Yes, yes, yes.

[411] And there are options along a continuum that may end if you, you know, I have a hierarchical poach to sex and think fucking is like the ultimate act.

[412] Like, we should be saying to kids, adults do a lot of mutual masturbation, a lot of rolling around, a lot of heavy petting and vortage and oral sex.

[413] There are things, yeah, reindeer games, fantasy play.

[414] There are things you can do that are less risky than penetrative PIV or PIA sex that are pleasurable or you can do these things 1516 Oh my God but it's like he's so knowledgeable on this He's like he's like a military general speaking in acronyms It was kind of like fast math Well even like we learned this recently I'm lost Yeah I do a lot of fast math I live to do fast math Was it PIV?

[415] But even we I guess I'm not even going to take credit for Kristen somehow learned this that even when you explain sex to your kids which you invariably have to do way earlier than you're expecting.

[416] So Kristen will say she learned this is like, the woman takes the man's penis and puts it in her vagina.

[417] Like just something that simple of like you're going to decide if the penis in your vagina.

[418] Oh yeah, that's a good way to say.

[419] It's a weirdly like empowering just explanation of it.

[420] When we talk about educating our kids about sex, having the talk with our kids, I always like to tell everybody out there that you're going to screw it up because you can't not screw it up as the adult.

[421] and just confess that I screwed up that conversation with my own son, me, of all people.

[422] A sex advice guru.

[423] Screwed that up because, you know, we got to the point in his life where he wanted to know, like, where babies come from and, you know, kind of what sex is.

[424] And then one day he came down and jumped up on the counter.

[425] I wrote about this in one of my books, much to his consternation, jumped up on the kitchen counter.

[426] He needs something to talk about in therapy.

[427] And glared at me from across the room.

[428] And I turned around.

[429] I was like, what?

[430] And he went, you and daddy have sex for no reason?

[431] two men can't make a baby.

[432] And I was like, oh, right, I left out 99 .99 % of the sex people have, which is for pleasure.

[433] Yeah, yeah.

[434] Not for babies.

[435] There's a limit to how many kids you can have.

[436] But that pleasure, the intimacy, the connection, all the reasons straight people have sex, those are all the reasons gay people have sex.

[437] And every once in a while you guys crank out a kid.

[438] Yeah.

[439] Well, we reproduce ourselves through your bodies primarily.

[440] Gays and lesbians are the product of heterosexual sex.

[441] So I like to think there's just a lot of like defective models and then like the gays and lesbians.

[442] Okay.

[443] You're like, uh.

[444] You're the cocoons and we're the butterflies.

[445] Stay tuned for more live show after this exciting commercial break.

[446] Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to armchair expert early and ad free right now.

[447] Now, join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[448] Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[449] Have you, I mean, obviously you just said, coming out about who you truly are is such a paramount declaration and requires so much courage that everything else then pales by comparison.

[450] But even with that, there must be something you can point to that has made you just not shy about this topic.

[451] Well, my parents encouraged us.

[452] to speak up.

[453] They were both raised in children are to be seen and not heard homes and didn't like it.

[454] And so they encouraged their four children to argue with adults, which appalled their parents and a lot of my aunts and uncles.

[455] And so we were very sort of argumentative.

[456] And my parents had a sense of humor that was understood that when it was just family, you talked this way.

[457] There were things you didn't say in front of grandparents, things you didn't say in front of the neighbors, but it was just us.

[458] You could be not quite crude, but a little blue.

[459] Like, they had George Carlin's record and they let us listen to it when we were kids.

[460] Right.

[461] With the understanding that we were smart enough to know that you didn't then shout that at the nun who taught you at school.

[462] Yes, yes.

[463] But I think would, like, set me up for it as, you know, sort of semi -professionally were the arguments I had to have with my parents when I came out to them, or with my mom specifically.

[464] At what age?

[465] 18.

[466] I was ready to come out to my mom when I was 16 and had gamed it out with my older brother, Billy, but then my dad, divorced my mother, kind of surprisingly and out of the blue left, got defrocked.

[467] And I knew that if I went in and said, I can take your mind off the divorce for 10 minutes, I bet it would kill her.

[468] And so I waited another like year and a half, although I was ready.

[469] Can I quickly ask?

[470] Were your brothers?

[471] You were close to them?

[472] You had already told your brother?

[473] I was close to my eldest brother and I had told him.

[474] So you had told him the age gap is what?

[475] Two years.

[476] Oh.

[477] So you guys are like Irish triplets?

[478] Irish quadruplets.

[479] Whoa, really?

[480] There's four of us each less than a year apart.

[481] Whoa.

[482] Oh, my God.

[483] Oh, and my mother started using birth control because the Catholic priest told her to.

[484] Wow.

[485] That was right when they decided that could be used, right?

[486] Oh, no, the Catholics are still opposed birth control.

[487] I listened to a pot.

[488] Oh, boy, I don't even want to fight about this with you.

[489] But I heard a podcast talking about the fact that the pill, as we, commonly use it.

[490] The two or three days of sugar pill is completely pointless.

[491] There's no reason to have the three days where you get your period.

[492] And in fact, because the whole reason that three day window is in there is because they pitch it to the Catholic Church as not a birth control device, but a device that could align your menstrual cycle to be predictable.

[493] And the Catholic Church had already agreed that you could have sex without, when you were not fertile as a form of birth control.

[494] The rhythm method and withdrawal, the Catholic Church would have prove of.

[495] But yeah, they did try to make the pill something that would appeal to the Catholic Church, and then they would allow for it and allow for the form of birth control.

[496] But the church rejected it, and every sex act has to be open to procreation.

[497] So no butt sex, no face sex.

[498] And the Catholic Church uses the same terms, intrinsically disordered, inherently evil, to describe masturbation, heterosexuals having sex with birth control and homosexuality.

[499] So we're all sodomites, basically.

[500] Right.

[501] I wouldn't normally admit this, but our second child, my wife, became pregnant from face sex.

[502] I just want to put that out there.

[503] It happened once in South Africa.

[504] It did?

[505] There's one documented case where a woman, it's a dark story, performed oral sex and was stabbed multiple times.

[506] The semen made it from her stomach to her uterus, and she got pregnant.

[507] She was a virgin.

[508] She still had her hymn from oral sex and a brutal assault.

[509] I'm a great dinner party guest.

[510] Wow.

[511] Wow, wow, wow.

[512] In fact, can you...

[513] I wanted to finish telling the story about my mother because it captures who she is and what our relationship was like when it was just us.

[514] When I came out to...

[515] This is a long time ago, and my parents were operating with no information and believed that, as many people believed then, that homosexuality was this thing your kids could drift toward and you were supposed to nudge them in the opposite direction.

[516] If my parents had access to Google today, they would not have done and said the things that they had done and said.

[517] My mother, after I came out, she said, okay, I can deal with this.

[518] You may never have a boyfriend.

[519] I never want to meet anybody that you're dating.

[520] They can never come to the house.

[521] And I put up with this for a little while and then, you know, my sister's boyfriend would come to the house.

[522] And eventually I was just like, why can Laura's boyfriend be here and mine can't?

[523] And my mother was just uncomfortable being around someone I was having sex with.

[524] And I said, Laura sucks her boyfriend's cock.

[525] Laura gives her boyfriend blowjobs.

[526] And you pretend that you don't know that and you don't see it.

[527] It doesn't like plague your imagination.

[528] why can't you extend to my boyfriend the same like willful suspension of disbelief right and she looked at me and just like very you know coldly on the L platform at Moore Street L station in Chicago said the blowjobs Laura gives can lead to marriage and family and children and the blow jobs you give go nowhere and I said to her and whose fault is that I didn't make those rules right You motherfuckers made those rules.

[529] And this was the way we could talk to each other privately.

[530] We could be that sort of like stripped down and like we had that kind of relationship.

[531] And then when I started giving sex advice, it was just like kind of channeling me and my mom having an argument.

[532] Right.

[533] And then she came around.

[534] She did.

[535] Because I insisted.

[536] But you did.

[537] Yeah.

[538] I don't think she would have come around if I hadn't insisted, which is what I'm always encouraging young gay kids to do.

[539] Like your only leverage over your parents as an adult is your presence.

[540] that yes yes and if they can't love you and treat you with respect and treat the people you love with respect don't be present for that mistreatment right okay now to walk through your life a little bit you obviously um you leave that preparatory seminary school and you're no longer going to pursue that and then you go to the university illinois can it tell you a funny story absolutely not we hate funny stories here.

[541] We discourage them at all cost.

[542] I would be in jail if I did now or some kid did now what I did then to get out of the seminary because I wanted to leave the seminary three quarters of the way through my sophomore year and my parents wouldn't let me. Okay.

[543] So I took two M80s to school and put them in my locker and blew my locker up.

[544] Uh -huh.

[545] Okay, it was funny then.

[546] It was funny.

[547] Like now I'd be in Guantanamo for high school kids.

[548] And my mother similarly blew up a typewriter to get out.

[549] of typing class.

[550] Oh my God, we're like, soul sisters.

[551] Kindered, yeah.

[552] And I got expelled, and then I got to go to a different school.

[553] But I got expelled from the seminary.

[554] So you leave there, but you make your way to University of Illinois in Champaign, and you major in acting.

[555] I love musical theater, and so I didn't know what else to go to college for.

[556] I was sleeping with somebody who was in the acting program at University of Illinois.

[557] And so I just sort of followed his dick down there.

[558] Sure, sure, sure, uh -huh.

[559] The yellow dick road.

[560] Yeah.

[561] Yeah.

[562] and did that for three years.

[563] Did you have aspirations of being an actor?

[564] Not really.

[565] Just the lifestyle.

[566] To talk about this is so weird.

[567] I went to a university and learned how to fence but didn't learn when people did that.

[568] Do you know what I mean?

[569] Like I graduated knowing how to juggle.

[570] But because I went into the sophomore year of the program and then in my senior year of college, I took all of my basics.

[571] Oh, interesting.

[572] because they put me into the sophomore year of the program because they needed an extra body.

[573] And so I took history.

[574] All your prerequisites.

[575] Major religions.

[576] As a senior.

[577] As a senior.

[578] And I loved it.

[579] And then at that moment, I was like, oh, I should have majored in history because that's what I really have a passion for.

[580] Yeah.

[581] I had a similar thing where I majored in anthropology and then I had finished all my stuff.

[582] I know, I know, I know.

[583] People make fun of me how often I say it.

[584] He can't not say it.

[585] I can't go an hour.

[586] I think it's a drinking game on the podcast.

[587] podcast people.

[588] So I had finished all my core stuff.

[589] And then like the last year, my senior year, I got to kind of just take electives.

[590] And I was always trying to be an actor.

[591] And I was like, I managed to take some film stuff.

[592] And then I took like a film history class and I'm sitting there watching like a nitro print of Casablanca.

[593] And I'm like, these motherfuckers have been doing this for three years?

[594] I should have been doing this.

[595] You can major in watching movies.

[596] What did I?

[597] Like I really was like, I blew it.

[598] Right at the end, I figured that out.

[599] Yeah, I still wanted to do theater, but I wanted to direct by the time I got out of school.

[600] You wanted to direct.

[601] And I had a theater here in Seattle for about almost 10 years called Greek Active.

[602] Yeah, and you did interesting.

[603] You were kind of pre -Hamilton Hamilton in that, right?

[604] You would take classical stuff and...

[605] Right.

[606] I wished I'd done something like Hamilton.

[607] We would take plays like Shaw's St. Joan or Shakespeare's King John and do kind of queer rips on them.

[608] And it was the height of the AIDS epidemic and people were dying.

[609] People in my shows were dying.

[610] Somebody died halfway through the run of a show.

[611] And we did these kind of queer, you know, my approach to theater, and this is, I'm really going to bore people now, is, you know, every, there's no such thing as a tragedy.

[612] There's only comedies that end sad suddenly.

[613] Like, Hamlet's a really funny play.

[614] People who, like, perform Hamlet and, like, take it and are so self -serious, and the production takes itself really serious, it's unwatchable, it's tedious.

[615] But if you treat it like a comedy and, like, find the humor in it and find the life in it, then you're sad when these people that you like spending time with at the end.

[616] are all dead.

[617] Yeah, that's a good point.

[618] You perform Hamlet as a tragedy.

[619] By the time they're dead, you're like, good.

[620] Yeah, yeah.

[621] Die.

[622] They could have died an hour earlier.

[623] It would have been fine.

[624] Thank fucking God.

[625] Yeah.

[626] So you graduated.

[627] You weren't like, I'm moving to New York and I'm going to go to Broadway and I'm going to be in place.

[628] Nothing like that.

[629] No. I always wanted to live in New York, but I never did.

[630] I moved to West Berlin in 1988.

[631] It was there for a year and a half there when the wall came down.

[632] What took you there?

[633] Why did you go there?

[634] Dick.

[635] Okay.

[636] The yellow dick road led you...

[637] The yellow dick road led there too.

[638] A different dick.

[639] Okay.

[640] On the same yellow dick road.

[641] Okay.

[642] I broke up with the guy, went to college to be with, and then met a different guy, and he got a fellowship with the West German government.

[643] And they were so much more advanced than we were on gay rights then, that the fact that they'd given a fellowship to this gay dude who had a boyfriend, I got a residency permit.

[644] Oh, no shit.

[645] It's a funny story.

[646] I applied for a job with the U .S. Army working in a school.

[647] Uh -huh.

[648] Because there's a huge base in Zeelandorf outside Berlin.

[649] And they hired me to teach German, which is a language I didn't speak.

[650] Right.

[651] Because they assumed I spoke it because I had this residency permit and lived in Berlin.

[652] And when they found out I didn't speak German, they wouldn't fire me. They made me teach German.

[653] Oh, that's so military of them.

[654] So I would prepare a lesson plan each day with my German -speaking boyfriend that then I would teach to these second to sixth graders, but also teach to myself.

[655] So I spent like a year in Berlin.

[656] And did you learn it?

[657] Yeah, well, we called it sex and supermarket German because we could get groceries and get laid, but that's all we could get.

[658] Okay.

[659] Those are the essentials.

[660] Right.

[661] Yeah.

[662] We will Kaustadne Puli?

[663] Sheise in Nix often voting?

[664] Oh, go.

[665] You're flirting.

[666] Von Haaserdin's Gebordstock.

[667] Do you speak German?

[668] No, I remember like nine things from my German class in high school.

[669] and like when you answered, I don't know.

[670] I asked how much your shirt was, but I don't know if you said a million dollars or $70 or...

[671] I didn't understand what you said, so I said...

[672] Yeah, that's what I figured happened.

[673] Shisenzi -Nicht off in Bowden, which means don't shit on the floor, and you'll be surprised how often that comes in handy in a German gay bar.

[674] Well, Germany in particular.

[675] I don't know if you read there's a very fascinating Vanity Fair article about the German character, and they're very obsessed with shit.

[676] They have like 120 words for shitting.

[677] Like Eskimos have for snow.

[678] Much more open gay scene there in the 80s, I would imagine.

[679] Yeah, people were dying everywhere, but it was a desperate time.

[680] How about drugs?

[681] Drugs were very out and open there?

[682] Drugs were expensive, and we were all poor, um, expats.

[683] So there wasn't a lot, there's drinking.

[684] There wasn't a lot of, uh, drugs that I saw.

[685] Okay.

[686] I've always been sort of like around drugs, but never kind of succumb to them.

[687] They didn't interest you.

[688] It's weird.

[689] I have a very, except for Dick, I guess, a non -addictive personality.

[690] And that, like, I did ecstasy, and I did cocaine in college a couple times.

[691] Okay.

[692] I did acid once in college.

[693] And, like, I did those things.

[694] I was like, well, that was really fun.

[695] And that's that.

[696] That's that.

[697] I don't need to do that again.

[698] Or I'm going to do that again someday.

[699] And it always seemed to me that, like, you took ecstasy, and it was an amazing, euphoric experience.

[700] So you want to, like, put that up on a shelf until you need that experience again.

[701] Because if you take ecstasy every weekend, it's not going to feel that you feel.

[702] diminished returns, for sure.

[703] So you should want to jealously guard the power of that by not abusing it.

[704] Yes.

[705] We're not using it all the time.

[706] Yes.

[707] And that was always my approach to drugs.

[708] It's like, oh, that was amazing.

[709] I'll do that again in 15 years.

[710] Like Christmas.

[711] Let's do it once.

[712] I did acid in college.

[713] This is a horrible story.

[714] I did acid in college once.

[715] And it was like the acid that kids in downstate Illinois could get.

[716] So real pure.

[717] Right.

[718] You're like...

[719] Real high grade.

[720] Then I was in a gay bar in Seattle in the 90s and somebody offered me acid.

[721] And I was like, oh, I remember acid from college.

[722] It wasn't like too bad.

[723] Right.

[724] Right, right.

[725] So I did a hit of acid, and then a little while later, somebody said, do you feeling anything?

[726] And I was like, no, not really.

[727] And they said, do you want another one?

[728] I was like, okay, sure.

[729] And the first one hadn't hit yet, and nobody told me that the intervening nearly two decades, the power of acid, particularly here on the West Coast, as opposed to downstate Illinois, had increased like a thousandfold.

[730] Sure, sure.

[731] I was destroyed.

[732] I was in a gay bar, in drag on Halloween, sitting on the bar, holding the sides, losing my mind for six hours.

[733] and I was the host of the costume contest.

[734] Oh, boy.

[735] I fulfilled none of the duties.

[736] You totally shirked all your responsibilities.

[737] And then it went around the bar that I was fucked up out of my mind on acid, so everybody had to come fuck with me. And I was just like, oh.

[738] And I've never done acid again.

[739] I'm not surprising.

[740] Did they tell you not to shit on the floor?

[741] No. Although, yeah, I had to go to the bathroom at one point, and it's really hard when you're so fucked up on acid to make your bladder release because you feel like, you're going to dissolve.

[742] I never want to do that.

[743] This sounds awful.

[744] I'm not recommending acid for you.

[745] I never have.

[746] I just want to be on record.

[747] So when you got back from Berlin, did you guys break up?

[748] Is that what happened?

[749] I followed him to Berlin.

[750] We came back to Madison, Wisconsin.

[751] We had an apartment in Berlin.

[752] He was going to get this arts degree, and then we were going to go back to Berlin.

[753] And then, because George H .W. Bush was president.

[754] We couldn't imagine a worst Republican president after Reagan.

[755] So we just couldn't deal.

[756] And then he got a job on the road for a year with an opera company in the States.

[757] And that's right after I met Tim, who was coming here to start The Stranger.

[758] And I said, I'm going to go write this advice column.

[759] And after this year is up, we'll go back to Berlin.

[760] I moved here.

[761] We broke up and I got stranded in Seattle.

[762] Okay.

[763] So what's really interesting is when you move back to Madison, you happened to, through working at a video store, you befriend Tim, who was the co -founder of The Onion.

[764] Right.

[765] And did you know immediately he was one of the co -founders of The Onion?

[766] Yeah.

[767] Yeah, well, when I met him, I was introduced to him as the co -founder of The Onion.

[768] He just sold The Onion, and he was moving away to start this paper.

[769] And we met at a social event, and I was just like, oh, you're going to have a newspaper.

[770] And this sounds so disingenuous 30 years worth of columns later.

[771] He's telling me about his paper.

[772] And I said, I grew up reading Ann Landers, Xavier Hollander in Pennhouse Magazine, who wrote Ask the Madam, which is a terrific sex advice column.

[773] And listening to my mother give advice to the neighbor ladies, because I was a little like cissy gay boy under the dining room table listening all the time.

[774] And so I just looked at Tim and I was like, oh, you should have an advice column because everybody reads those.

[775] You see that QA format.

[776] You can't not read it.

[777] And he looked at me and went, excellent advice, write the advice column.

[778] And I wasn't angling for the gig.

[779] And did you have any aspirations of being a writer at that point?

[780] No, I wanted to do plays.

[781] Where did you do make any decisions career oriented or was all just?

[782] Just sort of like fellow dick road kept taking me places.

[783] Yeah, yeah.

[784] Which, by the way, is not a bad way to end up somewhere.

[785] you know.

[786] No, it's not, not at all.

[787] A lot of orgasms along the way.

[788] And then it was 1991, or 90, and Tim and I just started talking like, okay, this is going to be a straight paper, but you're a gay dude, you're going to give sex advice, you can't just write about gay sex.

[789] And it's like, I don't want to write about gay sex at all.

[790] It would be really funny if I, as a gay dude, was giving sex advice to straight people, and I treated straight people with the same contempt that heterosexual advice columnists had always treated gay people with.

[791] I would, like, treat straight people like that.

[792] Like, ew, yuck, I can't believe you would do something.

[793] So disgusting.

[794] Your poor mother must be heartbroken.

[795] Here's some advice.

[796] And I started writing this column as a joke thinking I do it for six months.

[797] Uh -huh.

[798] And straight people who'd never been treated like this in print before by a fagg.

[799] Uh -huh.

[800] Who was telling them they could call him a faggot.

[801] Because the salutation on the column for the first eight years was a faggot.

[802] Loved it.

[803] Yeah.

[804] And then it turned into a real advice column by accident.

[805] Like, I started getting real questions.

[806] And I didn't know anything.

[807] Yeah, that's what I'm very curious about.

[808] Pure omniscient when you write an advice column because you only print the questions you have answers for.

[809] Yes, yes.

[810] And, you know, 1991, there's no Google.

[811] There are libraries with books in them.

[812] If you don't know something, you've got to look it up in a book, the humiliation of that.

[813] And so I put the clitoris in the wrong place the first time I talked about it in my sex advice column.

[814] Because I was 26 -year -old with a gay dude who came out as a teenager and high school.

[815] Like, why?

[816] I wouldn't know.

[817] Well, let me tell you, even as a straight dude, it's a huge mystery for a long time.

[818] I know where it is now.

[819] In fact, I remember my first experience going down to Gail's pants.

[820] Amy, I'll leave her last name out behind Deanne's garage.

[821] She said, have you ever fingered anyone?

[822] I said, absolutely.

[823] Tons of times.

[824] She said, great, I love that.

[825] Let's do that.

[826] And I was going down, down, down, down.

[827] And I was like, I'm pretty soon I'm going to strike her butt's got to be coming up here pretty soon.

[828] I was panicked like I'm going to hit her butt.

[829] It was much, because I'm going, I'm based off my anatomy.

[830] My penis is kind of up top on my pubis mound.

[831] My mound's pubis.

[832] I thought her hole would be at the apex of the mound's pubis.

[833] Gang, it was at the nadir.

[834] This is the plot point in Booksmart.

[835] You should go see Booksmart.

[836] Oh, it is?

[837] Down, down, down.

[838] Oh, it's terrifying.

[839] You're like, oh, I'm going to be in the butt crack here pretty soon.

[840] It is terrifying.

[841] And as I'm taking longer and longer and longer, she goes, you've done this before?

[842] And I'll go, that kind of was my last push.

[843] I was like, fuck it.

[844] Hell or high water.

[845] And I found it.

[846] Oh, boy.

[847] Hi, Mom.

[848] And Breeze parents.

[849] Yeah, poor Breeze parents.

[850] Everyone's taking on the chin tonight.

[851] So you had to find out where the clitoris was.

[852] And you found out it turns out it's not on the soft palate.

[853] That's just where mine is.

[854] And if it was now, I could have just Googled it, but then I just assumed.

[855] I ended up getting a lot of angry letters from people with clitoris instructing me. I learned a lot from my readers.

[856] I mean, writing advice commas changed a lot in the last 30 fucking years because there's the internet now and there's Google.

[857] And writing a device column is more difficult now because everything is situational ethics.

[858] Yeah.

[859] You used to get questions, like some straight person in a bar with friends, somebody would say butt plug and they wouldn't know what that was and then they'd write me a letter on paper and put in an envelope, put a stamp on it, mail it to me and I would write a column about what a butt plug is.

[860] But plugs have a wiki page now.

[861] And if you're going to email me, you can like Google it.

[862] This fucking has a wiki page.

[863] I used to get to write these instructional columns about how to do a thing.

[864] And you don't need those columns anymore and I don't get those questions anymore.

[865] It's always, I did this, they did that.

[866] If I tell them, this will happen and this bad consequence will happen for me, but also bad consequences for them.

[867] What do I do?

[868] Who's it the fault here, and it's, you know, half the mail is like, there's nothing that you can do.

[869] You've shot the bed and it can't be unshot.

[870] You screwed the pooch.

[871] It can't be unscrewed.

[872] Right.

[873] You need a fireman, a cop, and a priest.

[874] And not me. Yeah.

[875] And I miss writing those what's -a -but -plug columns because they were easy.

[876] Well, objectively, there was an answer, and now you're asked more or less to levy a verdict on whether the thing was moral or amoral or a -moral.

[877] Levy a verdict.

[878] I'm going to remember that and use that.

[879] That's what I do all day long, is who's right, who's wrong as opposed to just the moral absolute goodness of a butt plug.

[880] Yeah.

[881] Any trepidation about levying these verdicts?

[882] If somebody writes to an advice column, they're asking to be told.

[883] They are.

[884] Not what to do, because it's not binding arbitration.

[885] The concede is, you tell me what to do, and then I get to make up my own mind.

[886] I get to seek out other input.

[887] Often people write me in anger because they thought what I told this person to do was the wrong thing to do.

[888] And those letters, those angry letters, always assume that that person did exactly what I told them to do.

[889] Yes.

[890] And that's almost never the case.

[891] Because the mail I get 10 years later from people is, I didn't do what you told me to do and I wish I had.

[892] Right.

[893] Right.

[894] The measure of success from an advice column is, uh, do people read it?

[895] Do people read it?

[896] And do people send you questions?

[897] That's the gong.

[898] I was just talking to Monica about this.

[899] Um, when I was younger and I was, um, in my 20s and a comedian, I was just starting to get in a position where I would get interviewed and do the stuff.

[900] I went and did Love Line.

[901] And I had Dr. Drew on the podcast, and we were, woo, La Blonde!

[902] And we were talking about that episode.

[903] And then someone tweeted a link to me of it, and I got through about five seconds of it.

[904] And I almost threw up.

[905] I'm like, oh, my God, I used to be such a negative, like, my just impulse was to make fun of everything and everybody.

[906] That's so much of the sex advice out there that's so terrible.

[907] It's putting people down for being sexual in the first place and sneering at their sexual interests.

[908] And it's really what sets Savage Love apart at first is I think whatever you want to do is great, as long as you're doing it with somebody who wants to do it and so much of comedy around sexes look at that disgusting pervert we're all disgusting pervents and we're all in this together and you may have a thing that you're talking about or that you've been outed for being interested in and people are snickering or mocking you and everybody snickering and mocking you is it's a fear response because they know that their shit got dragged out in public they would be mocked and maybe we could all just stop mocking each other in this way and there is a humor in it Like, I think sex is funny.

[909] I don't like boring, dry, unfunny advice columns.

[910] Like, it's inherently ridiculous.

[911] Whatever you're interested in.

[912] And then the way, it's the human brain, our capacity for abstract thought, our capacity for language is a lot of researchers believe also what makes our erotics so complicated and, like, drives us to fetishes and sort of this, like, these random associations.

[913] Yeah.

[914] And the same language can, and it can be a random association.

[915] And, you know, it's so interesting.

[916] And we're all in it together.

[917] Yes.

[918] I love this study, done in the UK, huge sample size, and they literally wanted to measure the prevalence of what's called a parapheria, which is a non -normative sexual desire, a kink.

[919] The fancy medical researcher's sciencey name is parapheria.

[920] And they brought these thousands of people together to try to figure out what percentage of humans have a parapheria.

[921] Sure.

[922] The majority, the vast and overwhelming majority have a non -normative sexual interest, which makes it normative to be a kinky weirdo.

[923] Not non -normative.

[924] Yeah, what is normative.

[925] Right.

[926] Everyone should read Perv, the sexual deviant in all of us by Jesse Bering.

[927] I'm pro -Perve.

[928] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[929] I'm not pro -making anyone feel threatened or scared.

[930] But if everyone's up for it, I'm going to talk about fat natchies till the cows come home.

[931] I'm going to talk about pussy pacidermis.

[932] These are all topics that Monica and I are going to talk about.

[933] Do you know that an icy mic is?

[934] No, what's an icy mic?

[935] I can't tell you.

[936] It's too gross.

[937] No, tell us.

[938] You take a big turd and you put it in the freezer and then you use it as a dildo.

[939] Okay.

[940] Oh, wow, wow, wow, wow.

[941] You're welcome.

[942] And it never happens.

[943] It's like Dirty Sanchez, donkey punching.

[944] Nobody does this shit.

[945] Yes, we were just talking about it at lunch.

[946] What's it called the thing?

[947] What's it called when you jack off into a biscuit?

[948] Hold on, Robbie, Wobbywob, what's it called?

[949] Soggy biscuit.

[950] Soggy biscuit.

[951] And again, this is really.

[952] regional.

[953] Rob's also from Chicago, so you might be familiar with the Huggy Biscuit.

[954] But again, you are, right?

[955] It's never happened on planet Earth.

[956] No, it's never happened, but you guys can fill in the blank.

[957] Seven billion humans is currently alive.

[958] You're right.

[959] Every single thing has happened.

[960] Somebody probably did an icy mic once.

[961] Yeah.

[962] You're right.

[963] You're right.

[964] You're right.

[965] And now he's vice president.

[966] Oh, yeah.

[967] Stay tuned for more live show after this exciting commercial break.

[968] We've all been there.

[969] Turning to the internet to self -diagnose our inexplicable pains, debilitating body aches, sudden fevers, and strange rashes.

[970] Though our minds tend to spiral to worst -case scenarios, it's usually nothing, but for an unlucky few, these unsuspecting symptoms can start the clock ticking on a terrifying medical mystery.

[971] Like the unexplainable death of a retired firefighter, whose body was found at home by his son, except it looked like he had been cremated, or the time when an entire town started jumping from buildings and seeing tigers on their ceilings.

[972] Hey listeners, it's Mr. Ballin here, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast.

[973] It's called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries.

[974] Each terrifying true story will be sure to keep you up at night.

[975] Follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts.

[976] Prime members can listen early and add free on Amazon Music.

[977] What's up guys?

[978] This is your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new and let me tell you, it's too good.

[979] And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay?

[980] Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation.

[981] And I don't mean just friends.

[982] I mean the likes of Amy Polar, Kell Mitchell, Vivica Fox.

[983] The list goes on.

[984] So follow, watch, and listen to Baby.

[985] This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.

[986] You have the great pride of having, you've invented several words that are now in the lexicon.

[987] Pegging.

[988] Pegging.

[989] Guys, Dan Savage invented pegging.

[990] You didn't invent the act, but you named it.

[991] Yeah.

[992] Well, I named it in a self -serving way because in the early 90s of my concert, it was when stores like Babe Land and Come As You Are and Good Vibrations started to open.

[993] And they were selling strap on dildos primarily to lesbian clientele and women who had sucked with other women.

[994] They would sell strap on dildos.

[995] And then straight couples started drifting in because straight guys wanted to get fucked in the ass by their wives or girlfriends wearing strap on dildos.

[996] And I started getting all these questions at my column.

[997] And someone would say, you know, I'm a guy, a straight guy, and I want to get fucked in the ass with a strap on dildo by a woman.

[998] And then we would talk about it.

[999] And that would take so much of my word count every time I had to say fucked in the ass with a trap.

[1000] Oh, yeah.

[1001] Sure, sure.

[1002] It's a cumbersome description.

[1003] Right.

[1004] And like when you've got a column and you've got to cut it down to word count, you start taking out like single words here and there.

[1005] And here was this phrase that was like 42 words long to describe an act.

[1006] Right.

[1007] And so I put it out to my readers.

[1008] I didn't invent the term.

[1009] I put it out to my readers and like, let's think of a name for this, a woman fucking a man in the ass of the strap on dildo needs a name.

[1010] Lovingly and consenting.

[1011] And we took nominees and there were multiple, and then my readers voted.

[1012] It's the same thing that happened with Santorum actually.

[1013] Readers nominated and then there was a vote.

[1014] Don't spoil the.

[1015] And much to my aunt Peg's consternation, Pegg one.

[1016] So pegging and then also Santorum, right?

[1017] Does everyone know what Samtorum?

[1018] I don't even know that I want you to describe it, but...

[1019] We already described them I see Mike.

[1020] Santorum is the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.

[1021] Yes, and it was a response to your dislike of Rick Santorum, who had some very anti -gay...

[1022] Yeah, some people have said that we ruined his name because he opposed gay marriage.

[1023] Barack Obama opposed gay marriage, and I wrote him a $5 ,000 check and voted for him in 2008, right?

[1024] It wasn't about opposition to marriage equality.

[1025] Rick Santorum gave an interview to AP in 2003 in which he said that gay couples that wished to marry were basically the moral equivalent of people who rape children and men who want to fuck dogs.

[1026] And it was a reader who wrote in because the scandal sort of blew up and then it was blowing over.

[1027] And a reader wrote in and said, he should never be able to live this down.

[1028] We should redefine his name to mean something disgusting.

[1029] And I put that out there and readers sent it a whole bunch of different definitions and the readers voted and picked that one.

[1030] There's a whole chapter in my book American Savage about how Santorum happened.

[1031] And what was great about this is the reader who wrote in the original letter saying you should do this contest said he should never be able to live this down when he said to the AP when Rick Santorum ran for president in 2008 and 2012 the very first stories written about him in all the major political papers and all the big paper the Wall Street Journal was about the 2003 interview in Rick Santorum's Google problem if he was what now that he's running the president because when you Google his name Rick Santorum the first thing that came up was the frothy mix of Lubin Fecl Matter.

[1032] And that's not me being a genius.

[1033] That's my readers were the genius.

[1034] You're like that first review that comes in on a product on Amazon.

[1035] It's just stuck there.

[1036] You're always going to read that first one.

[1037] Poor Rick Santorum.

[1038] Don't fuck with the queers, motherfucker.

[1039] Fuck, I wrote down the third.

[1040] You had a third really good word.

[1041] Do you know what I'm talking about?

[1042] Monogamish.

[1043] Monogamish yours?

[1044] Yeah.

[1045] It is, right?

[1046] Yeah.

[1047] I love that term, monogamish.

[1048] It appears from the outside that how much easier it is for men.

[1049] I mean, our friend who's on Grindr, we're perpetually fascinated by, and I'm just going to walk, because if you're not privy to this stuff, I find it to be the most interesting thing in the world.

[1050] I said, how do the hookups happen?

[1051] He goes, well, okay, guy comes over to the house, it's customary to offer them a water?

[1052] In the foyer.

[1053] In the foyer.

[1054] just walk in the door.

[1055] Hey, you want a water?

[1056] I'm good.

[1057] I brought one.

[1058] It's also polite to have brought one, which I love this etiquette.

[1059] I said, what happens next?

[1060] He goes, well, kiss for a minute.

[1061] I unbutton his pants.

[1062] I take a look.

[1063] If it looks good, we go upstairs.

[1064] If not, I just stand up and I go, we're not a match.

[1065] And then the dude goes, okay, cool.

[1066] And then he bounces.

[1067] And I'm like, if I were to have ever, pulled down a woman's pants, stared at it, man came up as I'm not a match.

[1068] And I would be the most evil man to live amongst her friendship.

[1069] Not all gay guys do that.

[1070] Right.

[1071] Again, I don't want to paint with two brought over brunch.

[1072] I'm only telling you about my one friend.

[1073] I want to be very clear about that.

[1074] It can be dehumanizing, obviously.

[1075] That's very dehumanizing.

[1076] But if you're in the right frame of mind, if you're not fucked up on drugs, you know, you can do anything for the wrong reasons.

[1077] Drink too much, eat too much.

[1078] But there are people with high libidos who have thick skins who handle rejection very well and can give rejection in a way that doesn't make somebody else feel destroyed or devastated.

[1079] Right.

[1080] And there's a lot of people like that who do that kind of grinder, hookup roulette.

[1081] But I guess this is where my Catholic thing comes in.

[1082] My friends, when I first came out, you know, 17, 18 years old, my first boyfriend's 28.

[1083] And in Chicago, it's pre -AIDS epidemic.

[1084] And he thought it was his responsibility to teach me how to have sex in a bathhouse, to, like, have sex with 10 guys in a bathhouse one night.

[1085] I'm 17, 18 years old.

[1086] And I was just like, I can't share a can of Coke with my sister.

[1087] because the cooties thing.

[1088] I'm not going to suck a dick that's been in 30 other mouths or butts in the last half hour for all I know.

[1089] And so I've never done that like grinder instant hookup thing.

[1090] It is like eating a piece of gum off the subway.

[1091] It is.

[1092] It's not to say like I haven't had one night stands and I don't want to slut shame people who can do that and are down.

[1093] I have hangups around that.

[1094] But with that said, I do think there are different pressures on a male -male relationship that is striving to be monogamous.

[1095] I think you would be denying reality.

[1096] to pretend that there aren't different temptations and pressures.

[1097] It's a minority pursuit for a male -male relationship to be monogamous.

[1098] Most gay male couples, whether they tell their straight friends or not, are not monogamous.

[1099] When you look at the research and the studies into even gay male couples that identify as monogamous, they're monogamous and they have three ways, but only together, so that counts as monogamy.

[1100] They're monogamous, but they go to the bathhouse together occasionally.

[1101] They have a grinder hookup sometimes together, and that's monogamous.

[1102] Yeah, there's nothing on the side.

[1103] share.

[1104] And Justin Lay Miller is a terrific sex researcher who did this study that showed that people in monogamous, all people, gay, straight, in monogamous relationships were as likely to get sexually transmitted infections as people in non -monogamous relationships.

[1105] Because people fucking cheat.

[1106] Well, we just had Esther Perel on.

[1107] She was fantastic.

[1108] I love her.

[1109] Yeah.

[1110] And she said that cheating is something that's been...

[1111] Universally forbidden universally practiced.

[1112] Yes, which is such a profound truth.

[1113] And we tell people that monogamy comes naturally to us as a species, that we're a monogamous species.

[1114] And then we have to threaten people with death if they commit adultery in the Old Testament.

[1115] And as Chris Ryan, who wrote Sex at Dawn, another terrific book, said, you don't have to threaten a species to do what comes naturally to it.

[1116] We don't have to go up to a porpoise and go, fucking swimmer, I'll kill you.

[1117] And yet we tell people, I sometimes get painted as an enemy of monogamy or I'm trying to, like, proselytize for non -monogamy.

[1118] Everything I say about monogamy is to help monogamous people have.

[1119] more successful monogamous relationships.

[1120] It's about being realistic about what monogamy is and means.

[1121] Literally the only thing that humans attempt where perfection is the only standard for success.

[1122] If you are with somebody 50 years, they cheat on you once or twice, they were good at monogamy, not bad at it.

[1123] And if we tell people that if somebody cheats on you just once in a multi -decade relationship, that they never love, this is what we tell people, they never loved you.

[1124] Your relationship was a lie.

[1125] Oh, yeah.

[1126] Your marriage was.

[1127] was a lie.

[1128] Otherwise, they couldn't have done that.

[1129] It is such destructive bullshit.

[1130] And that destructive bullshit does not destroy the relationships of non -monogamous people.

[1131] It destroys the relationships of people who are trying to be monogamous.

[1132] Well, yes, I applaud that.

[1133] And I would just want to say, I don't have a position on whether anyone should or shouldn't be monogamous.

[1134] But what I have a very deep conviction on is you shouldn't feel like you're going to hell or a complete failure as a human being.

[1135] I think shame is the cancer that we all spread to one another, and that should be attacked and fought, you know.

[1136] And the lies we're told about monogamy instill and create a lot of shame, because we tell people that if you're in love, you won't want to have sex with anybody else, and then you do want to have sex with other people.

[1137] You are attracted to other people.

[1138] And that is a problem, you know, people have it in their heads, because we pound it into their heads, that you're going to grow up, get married, fall in love, and never want to have sex with anybody else ever again, except that one special person.

[1139] And then they meet somebody else they're attracted to, and the story they tell themselves is, I guess I'm not in love with my spouse anymore.

[1140] Otherwise, this feeling would not be possible.

[1141] And so I'm going to end this marriage because I'm not in love with my spouse anymore.

[1142] And the proof is I'm attracted, perhaps in a very fleeting way.

[1143] Perhaps I just have a crush on this person.

[1144] Well, yeah.

[1145] Another important thing Esther says is the victim of the affair is not always the victim of the marriage.

[1146] If I say to somebody, here's a married couple, that one there cheated, everyone's like, that's a bastard, that's a monster.

[1147] They're the jerk.

[1148] And sometimes what happens is this person was emotionally or physically abusive.

[1149] This person was neglectful or contemptuous.

[1150] This couple hasn't had sex for 15 years.

[1151] Yeah.

[1152] And this person had sex with somebody else after those 15 years of neglect and emotional abuse.

[1153] And they're the monster?

[1154] No, no, no. It's too simple.

[1155] It's too black and white to say, you know, when a couple is in crisis because there's been an affair or an infidelity, well, who cheated?

[1156] They're the bad guy.

[1157] Not always the case.

[1158] As Esther proves in her work.

[1159] This is why I came up with the expression monogamish was I coined it because at a very perilous moment, Terry and I came out as non -monogamous at the height of the marriage equality debate and we're parents, and we talked about being non -monogamous in one of my books.

[1160] And they were saying that gay people shouldn't be allowed to be married because all the studies show that gay male couples are the least likely of all to be monogamous.

[1161] Lesbian couples are the most likely to be monogamous.

[1162] So if successful monogamy is the standard, that only lesbian should be allowed to get married.

[1163] That said, there are studies that show that the couple's most likely to divorce lesbian couples less likely straight couples least likely gay couples relationship instability correlates with monogamy huh but you're not pro or anti monogamy no I'm letting this out in front of people who want to be monogamous should know what they're signing up for and monogamous helps people do that because some people use that to say we're monogamous but we both acknowledge that we're sometimes attracted to other people and that's not proof that we don't love each other and if people can just accept that that you're married to me. We have a monogamous commitment.

[1164] We don't have sex with other people.

[1165] We're both honoring that commitment.

[1166] You are sometimes attracted to other people.

[1167] People create so much grief in their relationships by policing each other for evidence of what they know to be true and should just accept.

[1168] Think of the...

[1169] You were looking at porn.

[1170] You looked at the barista.

[1171] You looked at the waiter.

[1172] You're attracted to your personal trainer.

[1173] Of course she's attracted to her personal trainer.

[1174] No one in the whole sordid history of personal trainers has ever employed a personal trainer.

[1175] They did not want to fuck.

[1176] Your wife wants to fuck her personal trainer.

[1177] don't give her grief for wanting to the question is did she and if she didn't stop bitching about the fact that she's attracted to her personal trainer he probably cranks her up and makes her feel good and then she comes home and fucks you yeah I gotta get my wife a personal trainer some people that's what monogamish means it's just like let's see when I get home we're still sexual beings we're still attracted to other people but we're gonna like soak up that energy sometimes from others without acting on it and then plow it into each other right people get bored and it particularly particularly women get bored.

[1178] Wednesday Martin is a terrific sex researcher who's written a giant book about this.

[1179] We have it in our heads that women are the more naturally monogamous ones, women are more invested in a long -term relationship.

[1180] Actually, female desire in a committed relationship for a male partner falls off faster than male desire in that relationship does.

[1181] Women get bored faster.

[1182] There's all these programs, like how do we create a viagra for women, all of these clinical programs where they're addressing low libido and low desire in women.

[1183] And the problem is boredom.

[1184] The problem isn't that they don't.

[1185] have a libido.

[1186] All these sex researchers, Laurie Brodo, Merida Chivers, Amy Muses, terrific sex research.

[1187] Most of them work in Canada because you can actually get a grant in Canada to study sex realistically as opposed to hear.

[1188] They also do fecal transplants there.

[1189] Yeah.

[1190] That's a place to be.

[1191] They often find, they have these case studies and they talk about, you know, the woman's in this marriage, she has no libido, no desire, they're not fucking, she feels terrible about it, wants to know if there's a pill she can take.

[1192] They're in therapy, they're in sex counseling.

[1193] nothing works the marriage is on the line the guy's going to leave her the couple ends up getting divorce suddenly her libido comes roaring back why is that because now she gets to fuck someone else what do we do with that now that we know that that's how female desire works in a long -term relationship how do we control for that if monogamy is the only standard of success our relationships are set up for failure particularly opposite sex relationships at the outset at their creation.

[1194] That's why we need so much, well, we don't need it.

[1195] That's why I think the culture commits so much violence against women and sex shaming is because women are less naturally monogamous than men, likelier to wander off than men if left to their own devices, which is why women's bodies have been policed in a way that men's have not in a patriarchal culture.

[1196] It does seem like the underpinning of many of our big systemic issues is just the patriarch's insecurities.

[1197] Which is now fetishized.

[1198] When you think about people's sexual kinks, they're sort of fantasy scenarios, they're almost always eroticized fears.

[1199] It's really common for women to have ravishment, which fantasies, people prefer that term to rape fantasies, because a ravishment fantasy is someone overpowers you that you want to be overpowered by, so it's not rape.

[1200] So many gay, you think about like gay male erotic archetypes, like the kinds of men that gay men fetishize, Marines, truckers, cops, firemen, not notoriously pro -homo type.

[1201] Right?

[1202] Likelier to be the guy who beat the shit out of you and you want to sleep with that guy.

[1203] You know, this fear of like somebody else sleeping with your partner, your partner cheating, that some people are now successfully eroticizing that fear and can like live it out in this contained way that actually makes their relationship more exciting and fun and mutually pleasurable.

[1204] It allows for this variety.

[1205] Yeah.

[1206] That's awesome.

[1207] And we can say, okay, the power, the fear, the cultural shit that informed that kink, that created that sexual desire, that's really fucked up.

[1208] Let's address that.

[1209] In the meantime, you got this kink.

[1210] Enjoy.

[1211] Enjoy it consensually.

[1212] We should acknowledge that women's ravishments fantasies don't come from nowhere.

[1213] They come from a culture where women are not safe.

[1214] That, for some women, not all women, that fear becomes eroticized.

[1215] Because in an erotic play sense, you can take control of that experience and live out your worst fears.

[1216] And we have no problem when people want to live out their worst fears.

[1217] in film and television and watch disaster movies and slasher movies and horror movies add a boner in an orgasm and people are like well that's wrong but if you want to watch hostile jack nicholson quote was if you put a breast in your mouth it's nc17 if you cut the breast off with a knife it's pg 13 he's like there's an issue here there is an issue yeah yeah very true can i say one more thing about monogamy and desire in a long -term relationship i would love it.

[1218] I'm not saying everyone has to be non -monogamous, but if you're bored in your long -term relationship, there are ways that you can address that don't involve cuckolding fantasy scenarios and third parties.

[1219] When you think about what was exciting about the relationship at the start, you were practically strangers to each other.

[1220] It felt risky and dangerous to get undressed in front of each other.

[1221] She could have been crazy.

[1222] He could have been a psycho.

[1223] Like the adrenaline's pumping because you're coming together.

[1224] And it's scary.

[1225] And you usually have to clear hurdles and you don't understand or know each other well and it's nerve -wracking.

[1226] You can manipulate nerve -wracking.

[1227] You can create new hurdles for yourself.

[1228] Go have sex on the roof of a building somewhere.

[1229] People come to me, you know, we've married 10 years, we're hardly having sex.

[1230] What do we do?

[1231] And I'm like, don't have sex in that bed in that room at that same time on that same day.

[1232] What you should do is say to each other, we're going to have sex three times this week, not in our house, not in our bed, and you are going to surprise me. And then we're going to do this again next month and I'm going to surprise you.

[1233] And then basically you're going to go through the day nervous because, you know, if your wife comes around the corner in a leather out there with a whip.

[1234] In your office where she usually doesn't drop by.

[1235] Well, that means you're going to get fucked at work and might get fired and your adrenaline's going to start by then.

[1236] You're going to have to find a stairwell or a bathroom, single seat, or fuck quietly in the stall at the end.

[1237] But you have to do it.

[1238] And if you can, like, bring back that adrenaline with that same person that was inherent in the interaction with those persons at the start when they were stranger to you, you can revive your committed monogamous long -term relationship sex.

[1239] Awesome.

[1240] That's great advice.

[1241] You have to have sexual adventures together.

[1242] You've got to be horrors for each other.

[1243] You'll be one of the only guests I could ask this to in hopes that you actually have some kind of statistical information.

[1244] Again, anecdotally, why in my observation is the amount of bottom so disembarker?

[1245] disproportionate to the amount of tops.

[1246] If you're a top, you've got the pick of the litter in L .A. You could be like fucking I -patch, hook, you're getting some ass tonight.

[1247] Why do you suppose that it's so disproportionate?

[1248] I don't know.

[1249] There's no kind of like study about that?

[1250] No. Okay.

[1251] I'd love to enroll in that study, though.

[1252] I'll try to get some grant money short up and you'll be the first person I come to you.

[1253] Now, before I, I'd love to.

[1254] you go.

[1255] You've been the most excellent guest.

[1256] Now, you've done something that is so profound.

[1257] You started something called The It Gets Better Project.

[1258] And if you guys aren't familiar with the It Gets Better Project, 50 ,000 users submitted testimonials about it getting better.

[1259] In the first year, it's many, many more now.

[1260] It is.

[1261] I believe that.

[1262] Fifty million views of kids watching this.

[1263] I think it's the most beautiful thing that you could put out into the world of just hang in there and things change and how did you get that?

[1264] I think the most valuable thing about the videos is so many of them it's not just like you wait there it'll get better around you.

[1265] So many of the videos are people describing exactly what they did.

[1266] Like me, the arguments I use with my mother to bring her around there's one video that really was one of my favorites in the first few weeks of the project where this kid who was still 18, 17 years old was looking in the camera saying I was brutally bullied in high school.

[1267] I hated it.

[1268] I took my G -R -E or G -D -E, whatever that is, and I skipped senior year and went to community college.

[1269] I'm in college.

[1270] You don't have to show up for senior year.

[1271] You can graduate early like I did, do it like this.

[1272] And so much of the advice was practical in that way.

[1273] So much self -helpy stuff is a little bit vague and opaque.

[1274] It's like, find your purpose.

[1275] Oh, right.

[1276] Yeah.

[1277] He's a good idea.

[1278] Why do I think of that?

[1279] Call my mom.

[1280] Where's doing the project was really rewarding and Terry and I made one video and tens of hundreds of thousands of other people participated in making other videos and it's almost 10 years later 10 years this September I can't walk through an airport without some 25 26 year old queer person approaching me to say that the project saved their life literally just happened in LA last week this Mormon kid that the project saved their life not me not Terry like all of these voices together and when you think about it the project the religious right freaked the fuck out because they knew that it was their kids specifically that we were trying to talk to because these videos are for kids who go to a school without a gay straight student alliance his parents would never allow them to go to a gay youth or queer youth support group and it was bringing the queer youth support group to these kids in their parents homes we got a letter a few months after the project launch and breaks my heart this letter still from a girl who'd come out to her parents in Texas, told them she was a lesbian, and they forced her to take it back, to change, pushed her into reparative therapy at her church.

[1281] And so she did what so many queer kids have done, myself included, she told her parents under duress what she thought they needed to hear, which was that she wasn't a lesbian, she was just confused, she took it back, right?

[1282] And she wrote us to say, I'm watching the videos in my bedroom, in my parents' house under the covers in the middle of the night and they're helping me and they were helping her because she was seeing adult queer people whose parents had the exact same reaction her parents did when she told them whose parents are in their videos with them whose parents are apologizing to them in the videos that they made and she sees a future now and this is where it's really fucking heartbreaking and I'm crying in advance of sharing this she said at the end of her letter every day I get up and I go downstairs and I look at my mother and I look at my father and I love them for who they might be in 10 years and they are being awful to her at this moment and she because of these videos has this capacity not just to imagine a future for herself where she gets to escape her parents but a future for herself where her parents come around like so many other people's parents have because she saw it with her own eyes she didn't hear about it right and that was the power of the it gets better project not because Terry and I made 100 ,000 videos ourselves but because so many other people participated and made videos.

[1283] Well, it's the most beautiful.

[1284] You won't give yourself this compliment, but I will give it to you.

[1285] It's not too much to say that you've actually saved a ton of people's lives, and I doubt many of us in this room can say that.

[1286] So I just want to applaud you.

[1287] Well, thank you.

[1288] Thank you so much for coming.

[1289] You're a beautiful, beautiful person.

[1290] Thank you for having you.

[1291] And I'm so proud to have got to sit and talk with you.

[1292] You're wonderful.

[1293] You guys, Dan Savage.

[1294] Hey, everybody, I just want to say that our live Seattle experience featured music from a very beautiful band, The Head and the Heart.

[1295] We got a little misty -eyed when we watch them.

[1296] Now, you can catch the Head in the Heart on their Living Mirage tour this September through October.

[1297] And also, before the fact check, we're going to include their song, missed connections off their new album, Living Mirage.

[1298] It's so beautiful, so enjoy the head and the heart.

[1299] if I never come through.

[1300] Don't tell me I lost a step.

[1301] Criss -crossed in the wrong direction.

[1302] I found myself in a conversation from a misconnection.

[1303] Standing there in a purple dress.

[1304] I put my eyes in the right direction.

[1305] I find myself in a conversation from a misconnection.

[1306] La -da -da -da -da.

[1307] From a misconnection.

[1308] Oh, ooh, oh, oh.

[1309] Lost myself in this maze.

[1310] Yeah, it haunts me. I felt it slip in sad ways.

[1311] Yeah, it haunts me. But I see it and I feel it and my souls are something I'm missing.

[1312] Should I follow this wherever it goes.

[1313] Now I will always come through.

[1314] I will always come through.

[1315] Crisscrossed in the wrong direction.

[1316] I found myself in a conversation from a misconnection.

[1317] standing there in a purple dress I put my eyes in the right direction I find myself in a conversation from a misconnection the fallen fruit of a family tree a crystal ball in the odyssey I get the feeling you've been here before from a misconnection don't tell me I lost a step crisscrossed in the wrong direction I found myself in a conversation From a misconnection Standing there in a proper dress I put my eyes in the right direction I found myself in a conversation From a misconnection La da -da -da la la And now my favorite part of the show The Fact Check with my soulmate Monica Padman Welcome to the fact check I'm very excited about this one I love Dan Savage.

[1318] I know.

[1319] Do you think Dan would be upset if I told the, and just tell it?

[1320] So we were backstage and we didn't know Dan.

[1321] We were just getting to know Dan.

[1322] And somehow the topic came up that he spends a few months a year in Austria.

[1323] He's got a really good friend there.

[1324] And when the Austrian guy comes to the U .S., he's always taken aback by how overly nice people are to folks in the service industry.

[1325] Oh, yeah.

[1326] Almost seems pandering to him.

[1327] Right.

[1328] It's like so many civilities.

[1329] And so niceties, pleasantries.

[1330] And so what Dan was suggesting, in Austria, they actually pay people.

[1331] They pay people a real wage.

[1332] And they have real health care and they have nice housing.

[1333] And the waiter, he's doing fine.

[1334] He might live next door to an architect.

[1335] The observation was that people are walking around with so much guilt because people are getting paid $8 an hour when other people are getting paid $150 an hour.

[1336] And you just naturally feel guilty about that.

[1337] So you're, oh, oh, how long have you worked here?

[1338] You're almost like talking to a baby.

[1339] Yeah, you're like, you're really pandering.

[1340] And ever since he pointed that out as I've been moving through life, I've heard people pandering so much.

[1341] Yeah.

[1342] It's just been very obvious.

[1343] It's the Bader Mindhoff.

[1344] I've been like, oh, my gosh, he's right.

[1345] Did you notice when we were in Chicago, we were driving to Chicago and there's a toll booth operator.

[1346] I feel fucking terrible that someone has to stand in that booth all day long.

[1347] Also, we should be over that.

[1348] Toll booze?

[1349] Yes.

[1350] Well, I'm just fucking pissed.

[1351] We don't like toll roads.

[1352] But in general, though, this should be automated.

[1353] I don't know why there has to be a person in there.

[1354] But okay.

[1355] Shouldn't even exist.

[1356] And if it exists, it should be automated.

[1357] You shouldn't have to pay to drive on a fucking, no, no, no. Because people are going to be mad that I want to take away somebody's job.

[1358] Oh, that's legit.

[1359] And that's fair.

[1360] But, okay, there's a lot of things that unpack here.

[1361] One of them is we've got an interstate system that I, Eisenhower fucking green lit back in the day.

[1362] That toll road thing is a bunch of hooey, in my opinion, all through fucking, I'm willing to take on this battle.

[1363] Okay.

[1364] I don't like it.

[1365] Okay.

[1366] This is going to be your cause?

[1367] It is.

[1368] Fuck that.

[1369] Take it out of the gas tax.

[1370] I don't want to have to stop.

[1371] We had to stop like five times.

[1372] I have to wait in line.

[1373] There's a traffic jam.

[1374] Remember the thing we saw where someone was accidentally in the fast pass lane and they clearly didn't have a fast pass and there were people behind and it was.

[1375] They were trying to back up.

[1376] Oh, my God.

[1377] It was like people, trying to watch people move a bed through a doorway sideways.

[1378] It was just, it was agonizing to witness this whole thing.

[1379] And it was a huge cluster fuck behind.

[1380] And I was like, what is going on?

[1381] We are paying taxes.

[1382] You need to hop on the interstate and just get to where you're going.

[1383] Yeah.

[1384] Oh, I agree.

[1385] Okay, anyways, when we would talk to those toll booth plaza employees, I was like.

[1386] Oh, my God.

[1387] Are they called plazas?

[1388] Like the fancy place, like the New York Hotel.

[1389] A plaza is like a fancy place.

[1390] They've decided to call the toll booth station a plaza.

[1391] No, I think a plaza might have more specific definition than that.

[1392] But when I pull up, I feel terrible.

[1393] I would have a hard time standing in that booth all day.

[1394] My feet would hurt.

[1395] Yeah.

[1396] Your gas fumes, the whole thing.

[1397] Exactly.

[1398] So I'm like, hi, how you doing?

[1399] Are you going to get to go somewhere for Fourth of July?

[1400] It's so patronizing, patronizing.

[1401] I give up on talking.

[1402] I'm done with this podcast.

[1403] I can't say any fucking words correctly.

[1404] I know them, but I can't say them.

[1405] So I understand this theory, and I believe it, and I think that's probably all true.

[1406] And some people just are friendly and do want to talk or do want to at least make someone smile once during the day.

[1407] And I don't think that's bad.

[1408] I'll tell, well, is it pity or is it kindness?

[1409] Because if it's pity, I don't think people should be pity.

[1410] Well, I don't think.

[1411] And the reason they're easy to pity is because they're completely underpaid and it's not fair.

[1412] Uh -huh.

[1413] So if you fix that problem, now you're just being friendly as opposed to there's pity underneath of it.

[1414] I don't know.

[1415] I'm on the fence about that.

[1416] Yes.

[1417] And some people are in horrible situations.

[1418] But you know, here's the thing.

[1419] If you feel shitty, instead of fucking forcing them to have this super over -the -top conversation of kindness, give them more money.

[1420] Don't pander to them.

[1421] Just fucking tip them way more.

[1422] Sure.

[1423] Slide a 20 at them.

[1424] I personally am not nice to people like that.

[1425] In general.

[1426] I'm not a nice person at the grocery store.

[1427] I'm not trying to make small talk or do any of this.

[1428] No one would think you were from the South when they meet you out.

[1429] Never.

[1430] No. No. I'm very cold.

[1431] Mm -hmm.

[1432] You got walls.

[1433] up.

[1434] No, I just, I'm like, we don't need to do this.

[1435] Like, we do not need to do this.

[1436] I'm never going to see you.

[1437] I mean, I might see you next week at this time.

[1438] But actually, if that's the case, if it's like someone I'm going to be seeing, then I will be like, how are you?

[1439] Or, you know.

[1440] Right.

[1441] I noticed your pimble went away.

[1442] No. Oh.

[1443] You look less heavy this week.

[1444] Have you changed something?

[1445] Are you on a diet?

[1446] Oh, I see your diet team.

[1447] No, I'm not.

[1448] What?

[1449] I guess that'd be nicer than like, oh, you went off your diet?

[1450] Oh.

[1451] That'd be bad.

[1452] What if you went?

[1453] Uh -oh.

[1454] Oopsies.

[1455] You went off your diet?

[1456] What?

[1457] Do you want to hear the definition of plaza?

[1458] Palazzo or plaza?

[1459] Plaza.

[1460] No, plaza.

[1461] Oh, my God.

[1462] You heard plaza?

[1463] No, I heard.

[1464] You heard plaza?

[1465] Hold on.

[1466] Plaza.

[1467] Okay.

[1468] Paza.

[1469] No. Plaza.

[1470] A public square.

[1471] marketplace or similar open space in a built -up area.

[1472] The plaza is lively in the evenings when the pavement cafes are full.

[1473] Yeah, this is a European thing.

[1474] They bought fancy bridalware at the plaza.

[1475] See, fancy.

[1476] Uh -huh.

[1477] In that case, yeah.

[1478] There's a connotation that plazas are fancy.

[1479] Right.

[1480] We had a strip mall next to our house that was called Huntington Plaza.

[1481] Okay, well, that's a situation like the toll booth, where people are trying to make it fancy and it's not, and that's a bummer.

[1482] That makes sense.

[1483] Why is a funeral parlor called a parlor?

[1484] I don't know.

[1485] That makes me uncomfortable.

[1486] It sounds like a saloon.

[1487] Look up parlor.

[1488] I am doing it now.

[1489] And let's listen to how it's you pronounce.

[1490] Oh, I spelt it paler, which is skin, not parlor.

[1491] Do you want to hear it?

[1492] Mm -hmm.

[1493] Okay.

[1494] Our show has unraveled.

[1495] Parlor.

[1496] Parlor, okay.

[1497] A sitting room.

[1498] Are we doing this?

[1499] I don't, and it can't entrust anybody.

[1500] A sitting room in a private house.

[1501] I don't think of a funeral parlor as a private house.

[1502] Well, maybe just the parlor is the place you gather to look at the corpse.

[1503] Yeah, the parlor is the room where the corpse is.

[1504] But what's just the big building, a funeral home?

[1505] Yeah.

[1506] Okay, that makes sense.

[1507] Oh, a parlor in the home.

[1508] All right, now I'm back in.

[1509] Someone's probably on their way to a funeral parlor.

[1510] Oh, I'm sorry.

[1511] Or they went to a funeral.

[1512] home and sat in a parlor last week and they had just stopped thinking about it and now they're looking at uncle teddy at least now they know how to pronounce it that's true and why it's called that yeah we were talking about kindness and that type of thing and you were saying you should just pay them more money that is definitely my M. Because you know what I don't think people that are equally low income do this whole patronizing thing to them Like where I grew up working class area of Michigan, people didn't talk to the servers like that.

[1513] Oh, hey.

[1514] Yeah.

[1515] Oh, you know what we're going to go with?

[1516] I'll have, you know.

[1517] I know, but it's also, it's nice to be polite.

[1518] Like, you should be polite.

[1519] You don't have to ask them about their children and stuff.

[1520] No, but there's just, there is a certain gear that is, I think, pity.

[1521] And I think if I were a server, I would recognize, oh, person pities me that's why they're acting like i'm a long lost cousin that just returned safely from war okay but that would also be your own thing yes you have an insecurity i do i don't think i would ever i never felt like that when i worked at soul cycle you're also from the south i was about to say yes i grew up in a completely different environment everyone was doing that you go into the gas station and the woman's like hey sweetie yeah they come right at you with sweetie which i love because calling a woman sweetie can be very dismissive And I acknowledge that.

[1522] It is a tool that has been used with misogynistic men.

[1523] Yeah.

[1524] And also, Sweetie is just a great thing to be called.

[1525] Yeah, I agree.

[1526] I don't mind that at all.

[1527] But Southern hospitality in general, I have kind of a beef with.

[1528] Sure.

[1529] Because I do feel like, okay, you're being super nice to people's faces and then you're not being nice behind their back.

[1530] The same woman at the convenience store that called you, Sweetie comes home.

[1531] And she's like, I saw that brown girl.

[1532] I hate that brown.

[1533] or something, monsterca, padmonster.

[1534] And she smelled like curry.

[1535] She stunk to high heaven like curry.

[1536] She tracked Dairy Queen all over the store.

[1537] It was sticky when she left.

[1538] Yeah, see, so he said that Catholics don't necessarily believe that the Bible is the word of God.

[1539] I mean, he said that sort of in passing, so maybe he meant like some people or whatever.

[1540] Well, I think he means some people think it's metaphorical.

[1541] Right.

[1542] And some people think it's literal.

[1543] I know, but they do.

[1544] I did check in with a Catholic, I know.

[1545] Okay.

[1546] And they do think the Bible is a direct will of God delivered through a select group of men.

[1547] So they do know that like humans.

[1548] God didn't take pen to paper and write the Bible.

[1549] Right.

[1550] That it is what God wants.

[1551] Most people following that religion, I would say probably, yeah, take a lot of it as metaphor.

[1552] Again, I'm not going to bash anyone that likes it.

[1553] I think it's great.

[1554] The one funny analogy I really do like, though I want to say, as Sam Harris pointed out, it seems so normal that God wrote this book to everyone.

[1555] But when you position it as, what if God had directed a movie?

[1556] Yeah.

[1557] And that was the movie of God.

[1558] All of a sudden it seems completely preposterous.

[1559] Right.

[1560] Although a movie and a book are the same thing.

[1561] They're a story.

[1562] Yeah.

[1563] One's written down and one's filmed.

[1564] I guess.

[1565] They're just media.

[1566] They're both media.

[1567] Yeah, of course.

[1568] Yeah.

[1569] In one media seems totally reasonable that God wrote.

[1570] And then another media seems absolutely preposterous.

[1571] Maybe because in that media form, you could do that solo.

[1572] You could not direct a movie.

[1573] Well, God could.

[1574] Well, but you need actors.

[1575] He could make them.

[1576] Oh, well, yeah.

[1577] But if you do the logic of it, they wrote it down.

[1578] because they wanted the most amount of people to be able to consume it.

[1579] Yeah.

[1580] And so if there was a God currently who wanted to get his message straight once and for all, a smart God would go, well, in this world, way more people see movies.

[1581] Way, way more people are seeing Avengers than have read any book that's in the marketplace.

[1582] So if I want the most amount of people to hear the direct message from my lips, I'm direct in a movie.

[1583] So stupid.

[1584] You just imagine people 200 years from now debating whether or not that movie was really directed by God or not.

[1585] It's impossible to even imagine.

[1586] Okay.

[1587] God wanted to make a movie.

[1588] Would he pick from the current cast, like, would he like cast from like Julia Roberts and stuff as Eve?

[1589] Like who?

[1590] It'd be Leonardo DiCaprio.

[1591] Oh.

[1592] For sure.

[1593] For Adam or who?

[1594] Brad Pitt.

[1595] Yeah.

[1596] A listers.

[1597] It would be straight.

[1598] Maybe you might audition for.

[1599] No, no, no. I would not make that cut.

[1600] Yes, you would.

[1601] There's a lot of characters in that movie.

[1602] Basically, Tarantino is God.

[1603] He's the closest thing that actors have to God.

[1604] Whoever he wants in his movies is going to be in his movie.

[1605] Oh, that's true.

[1606] Yeah.

[1607] In the fact that I have not been asked to be in his movie, we can settle on what God would do as well.

[1608] Well, he's not the only one, Scorsese.

[1609] Scorsese is a god.

[1610] No question.

[1611] But he's had a couple.

[1612] He's shit the bed a few times.

[1613] Okay.

[1614] You know what I'm saying?

[1615] You can't really point to Tarantino's shitting the bed.

[1616] I don't know that he can get anyone, if I'm being honest, especially now.

[1617] Because there's like a lot of stuff with him.

[1618] A lot of bad stuff with him.

[1619] And all the N -word.

[1620] Like there's like a lot with him that.

[1621] Provocative filmmaker.

[1622] As most of the greats have been.

[1623] Mm -hmm.

[1624] But I just mean not everyone is willing to be a part of that.

[1625] I just feel like this is infallible conversation where we're like saying nobody.

[1626] And we can't say nobody.

[1627] No, you're right.

[1628] We cannot say nobody, and we can also say both Brad Pitt and Leor in his current movie.

[1629] Of course.

[1630] So that's the pick of the letter right there.

[1631] God would probably put the rock in his movie.

[1632] Again, if we're going to be, like, technical about it, all those people, Jesus and all.

[1633] The gang.

[1634] Yeah, they're Jewish and they're Mediterranean.

[1635] Like, they have dark skin.

[1636] That's right.

[1637] So I should audition for God's movie.

[1638] You would make a great Jesus.

[1639] I have the hair for it.

[1640] I think your average height back then 2 ,000 years ago was about 5 -1 for a man. That's what will be next.

[1641] Some day, some audacious filmmaker, playwright is going to cast you as Jesus.

[1642] And we're going to be like, what the fuck?

[1643] Jesus got fatchies?

[1644] And then nine minutes later, after you've climaxed, you settle yourself down.

[1645] What?

[1646] Who climaxed?

[1647] When they see your fatchies, they'll have to deal with that situation.

[1648] Oh, geez.

[1649] Okay.

[1650] Well, I don't think.

[1651] They'll hand out blankets.

[1652] No. Oh, my God.

[1653] This isn't a porn version of Jesus.

[1654] It's not.

[1655] It's just the robes and everything.

[1656] Look, let me tell you.

[1657] When I'm walking down the street, people aren't like ducking into the bushes to jack off.

[1658] To release.

[1659] Well, let's be fair about it.

[1660] To release.

[1661] Okay.

[1662] Sorry.

[1663] It's not like they're perverted.

[1664] You unleashed this new thing.

[1665] You're the new variable.

[1666] It's your fault.

[1667] It's all women's fault for being attractive.

[1668] You know that.

[1669] God.

[1670] At times I have to re -educate you on this and mansplained this to you.

[1671] I hope whoever wanted to puke at the smelling conversation will want to puke at this.

[1672] This is worse than whatever stinky smell we were describing.

[1673] Was that in last episode or this one?

[1674] That was in the last.

[1675] Damn it.

[1676] Anyways, after people finish releasing, the tidal wave of emotions is over.

[1677] And then they just settle into your performance.

[1678] People leave the theater going, well, that's the best rendition of Jesus Christ I've ever seen.

[1679] Thank you.

[1680] I'm going to start now.

[1681] You totally forgot it was a woman with faturals.

[1682] Yeah.

[1683] In fact, you would be limiting the pool because even though they might go as far as to cast a woman as Jesus, they're going to be specific not to cast a woman with augmented breasts because they didn't have augmented breasts 2 ,000 years ago.

[1684] You're right.

[1685] Stern was just the topic came up about James Bond being a feat.

[1686] female now.

[1687] You know, this is what's happening.

[1688] Oh, right.

[1689] Who is it?

[1690] Is it Zendaya?

[1691] I don't know, but our friend Phoebe's writing it.

[1692] Phoebe Wallerbridge?

[1693] Yes, she's writing double out seven.

[1694] Oh my.

[1695] And it's going to be a female 007.

[1696] Stern brought up, which I agree with is it's fine if you hand over 007 to a female because 007 is just his identifier with the Scotland yard or whatever organization he works for right but her name's gonna be james bond is she's gonna say bond james bond and we're gonna be staring at a woman they might have messed it up no my favorite name dibs for a girl is james oh would you call her jimbo no okay well a lot of james go by jim and then then that evolves into jimbo well i'm not gonna allow that if your daughter is being called jimbo that's a rough.

[1697] I bet she's going to be spunky and I bet she'll be able to take on a name like that.

[1698] Like Jimbo?

[1699] Here comes Jimbo.

[1700] Barreling in.

[1701] Yeah, you're right.

[1702] Yeah, so I love that name for a girl.

[1703] So you'd be fine with a female also being named James Bond.

[1704] Yeah.

[1705] Not Jenny Bond.

[1706] No, no. See, I think that's almost worse.

[1707] Jumping James.

[1708] The name should either be like It needs like a separate thing.

[1709] Right, like Elizabeth Paddywack.

[1710] Yes.

[1711] Or James Bond.

[1712] It can't be.

[1713] Jennifer Bond.

[1714] That's so silly.

[1715] You're right.

[1716] You got to go all in or all out.

[1717] Yeah.

[1718] All or nothing.

[1719] They give her a whole new name and then she goes, Tita Barrow.

[1720] Elizabeth.

[1721] Tita Barrow.

[1722] Okay.

[1723] Then, exactly.

[1724] Shaken, not Stewart.

[1725] You'd be like, what?

[1726] Then I wanted to be James Bond.

[1727] I'm glad.

[1728] Is it going to be?

[1729] I don't think they had all the details.

[1730] Oh, they were.

[1731] Yeah, they were like.

[1732] Pontificating.

[1733] Yes.

[1734] Better get used to the name James for a girl.

[1735] I'm telling you.

[1736] I will.

[1737] If you make a little Little James Padman in a stupid white dress.

[1738] I will be its bigots fan.

[1739] Well, you don't be its bigots fan.

[1740] Okay, that same topic, birth control, you think that they've become for birth control.

[1741] Yeah, I think you're allowed to be on birth control.

[1742] Yeah, but you're not.

[1743] But a lot of people are.

[1744] Okay.

[1745] So a lot of people have just decided.

[1746] That was a metaphorical of tithes.

[1747] Yeah.

[1748] Oh, this was crazy.

[1749] So he told us that there was one case where a girl in South Africa got pregnant from oral sex.

[1750] And then I looked this up and that's true.

[1751] That happened.

[1752] So in 1988, a 15 -year -old living in a small Southern African nation came to local doctors with, she was in labor.

[1753] And they were confused because she didn't have a vagina.

[1754] No, no, no, no, no, no. It's true.

[1755] How can you be?

[1756] I promise.

[1757] I promise.

[1758] It is true?

[1759] Oh, my goodness.

[1760] She didn't have a vagina.

[1761] She had a condition.

[1762] This is a news site I got this on.

[1763] And it was not a dot org.

[1764] I think it was ABC News.

[1765] Okay.

[1766] And it was a specific condition and they talk about the condition and it's real, very rare, obviously.

[1767] Sons vaginitis?

[1768] She did not have pussy pacidermis.

[1769] No, she had pusses apseidermis.

[1770] Yeah, that's right.

[1771] Not to be crude about this.

[1772] nice girl.

[1773] Anyway, so inspection of the vulva showed no vagina, only a shallow skin dimple.

[1774] So they delivered this baby through a C -section.

[1775] Okay.

[1776] And everyone was very confused.

[1777] She was confused.

[1778] She didn't understand how this could have happened.

[1779] And then they looked and she had been in the hospital 278 days earlier with a knife wound to her stomach.

[1780] Oh, my goodness.

[1781] The average pregnancy lasts 280 days.

[1782] and just before she was stabbed in the abdomen, she had practiced fellatio with her new boyfriend and was caught in the act by her former lover and the fight with knives ensued.

[1783] Oh, wow.

[1784] The girl arrived at the hospital with an empty stomach and therefore with little stomach acid around and the doctors found two holes from a stabbing that opened her stomach up to her abdominal cavity.

[1785] The case reports has doctors washed her stomach out with salt solution and stitched her up.

[1786] A plausible explanation for this pregnancy is that the sperm gained access to the reproductive organs via the injured gastrointestinal tract.

[1787] Wow.

[1788] Isn't that crazy?

[1789] That is really crazy.

[1790] No vagina.

[1791] And still pregnant.

[1792] And even if you have a vagina, to get pregnant from oral sex.

[1793] There's really three amazing stories here in one.

[1794] One is she doesn't have a vagina.

[1795] Two, she didn't know she was pregnant until she was in labor.

[1796] Three, she was blowing a dude and gotten a knife fight that resulted in her being stabbed.

[1797] These are all once in a 10 ,000 lifetime stories.

[1798] That's right.

[1799] Although the second one said she was pregnant and didn't know it.

[1800] But that's not crazy.

[1801] If you didn't have a vagina.

[1802] Nine months pregnant.

[1803] She was in labor.

[1804] But if you didn't have a vagina, you'd just be like, something, I am sick.

[1805] You know, your belly would be distended.

[1806] You'd feel kicking.

[1807] Breast would be tender.

[1808] If you did not have a vagina, it's not even in your realm.

[1809] So you would be like, oh, I have a tumor.

[1810] Like, it would be something else.

[1811] Would you think, like, when it was kicking, you're like, oh, my God, I have such bad indigestion that my stomach's popping out.

[1812] I think you would.

[1813] I think you would.

[1814] You're right.

[1815] It's not an option.

[1816] It's not an option.

[1817] No. But it was.

[1818] But I have to imagine, I'd be more quick to believe that swallowing semen got me pregnant versus my spicy burrito is now pushing out of my stomach in a hand shape.

[1819] Like, given those two options.

[1820] I think I would go with, oh, I guess you can get pregnant swallowing sperm.

[1821] They should have taught us that.

[1822] Anyway, the baby was healthy.

[1823] That's all that matters.

[1824] Another miracle.

[1825] Okay.

[1826] So you, I don't know why you keep saying this.

[1827] You have said this a few times, that Germans have 120 words for shitting.

[1828] But you're making that up.

[1829] It's so big that I'm hoping you know that it's, I don't know.

[1830] Oh, okay.

[1831] Yeah, I'm being facetious intentionally.

[1832] You're being feces.

[1833] You're being feces, sheisha.

[1834] I can't find how many words they have, but in that article they talk about shysa, Drek, mist, arsh, but that's manure, ass, dirt, and shit.

[1835] So they have, like, some words for those things, but they don't have, like, an absurd amount.

[1836] Okay, it's as good as I want it to be.

[1837] It's not like the Inuit's in the snow.

[1838] It's not.

[1839] All right.

[1840] But they still love shit.

[1841] I'm still going to say it.

[1842] So this is like orangutan.

[1843] Oh boy.

[1844] I know, but you just can't spread false information like that.

[1845] I love Germans and I feel like I can.

[1846] It's like when I'm critical of the left.

[1847] Like they're my people and I'm allowed to say that they have too many words for shit.

[1848] Even though they're not your people.

[1849] Nor do they have too many.

[1850] Yeah.

[1851] And you can just say that they have an affinity for that.

[1852] For shy shit.

[1853] Yeah.

[1854] But they don't have to say they have 120 words because they don't.

[1855] I'm never going to stop correcting you about that.

[1856] I'll stop saying it.

[1857] I bet we have 120 words.

[1858] It's excrement, duty, crap, shit, poop, do -do.

[1859] We probably have more.

[1860] Well, I'm just saying that they must have.

[1861] I'm back.

[1862] I'm back.

[1863] I'm going to say it more.

[1864] No. Okay.

[1865] So he talks a little about parapherias.

[1866] Oh, these are people who like to have sex with people without legs?

[1867] No. Well, paraplegic means like limbs are...

[1868] That's true.

[1869] A paraphylic sexual interests are defined as unusual or anomalous.

[1870] Oh, like paranormal.

[1871] Yeah.

[1872] And he was saying, but actually, most people have them.

[1873] So then I looked this up.

[1874] Their actual occurrence in non -clinical samples is still unknown.

[1875] One study looked at desire for an experience of paraphylic behaviors and a sample of adult men and women in the general population.

[1876] A total of 140 persons, this was Canada, I think, classified according to age, gender, education, ethnic background, religious beliefs, area of residency, and corresponding to the norm.

[1877] for the province of Quebec were interviewed.

[1878] Nearly half of the sample expressed interest in at least one paraphylic category, and approximately one -third had an experience with such practice at least once.

[1879] Voyeurism, fetishism, frauderism, and masochism interested both male and female respondents at levels above what is usually considered to be statistical, unusual 15 .9%.

[1880] Fraud?

[1881] I know.

[1882] I don't know what frauderism is.

[1883] That's F -R -O -T -E -U -R -I -S -M.

[1884] Fraudorism.

[1885] Yes.

[1886] Fraudorism.

[1887] Frotterism is a parapheolic interest in rubbing, usually one's pelvic area or erect penis against a non -consenting person for sexual pleasure.

[1888] Well, this is sexual assault.

[1889] Yeah.

[1890] Well, so most of these, like, these are paraphylic sexual interests, but normally when you hear about paraphernal, it's paraphyphilic disorders.

[1891] And that's always when it's affecting someone else negatively.

[1892] Right.

[1893] So, interestingly, levels of interest in fetishism and masochism were not significantly different for men and women.

[1894] Mastikism was significantly linked with higher satisfaction with one's own sexual life.

[1895] These results call into question the current definition of normal versus anomalous sexual behaviors.

[1896] Uh -huh.

[1897] So, that's interesting.

[1898] I think I could check off two of those boxes.

[1899] voyeurism.

[1900] Voireism, absolutely.

[1901] What's the other one?

[1902] I guess fetishism, what was that?

[1903] It's just liking something of fetish.

[1904] I don't know.

[1905] I don't think so.

[1906] I don't know.

[1907] Do you have any fetishes?

[1908] I'm trying to think.

[1909] And like body parts you like obsess about or?

[1910] I mean, I like certain body parts over other body parts, but that doesn't seem like a fetish.

[1911] That just seems like, oh, I'm attracted to arms or something like that.

[1912] But yeah, if you like, if you searched in your porn.

[1913] sight like broad shoulders you're going to watch two people have sex purely for the aesthetic of it and the visual so you're going to refine what exactly the visual you want to see yeah and that to me would then be kind of fetishizing I guess maybe it generally is a little more extreme like you like to like suck the toe cheese out of people's toes well right so toe fetish is a faint Well, okay, but they do get like that.

[1914] They do, they do.

[1915] They do.

[1916] Yeah, yeah.

[1917] And toe fetishes seems to be a popular one, yeah.

[1918] I wonder if they like the cheese.

[1919] Oh, boy, probably, probably.

[1920] Yeah.

[1921] I think there's people that, like, buy people's use socks off the internet.

[1922] I just think that's, I think it's a spectrum maybe.

[1923] Yeah, sure.

[1924] And then I've also heard it being kind of co -opted by different social justice movements where it's like, if you like, let's say, Southeast Asian.

[1925] you're fetish -sizing them that you specifically like them right and so they've kind of made it they've really definitely helped make it a pejorative and that is right well I think what they're saying is like you don't really care about the human you the agenda we're trying to push right now basically I think or at least I am I don't know if you are is that people shouldn't feel weird that they have things that they fantasize about right that's where we're generally going unless it's violent or yeah Anytime it's taking away someone else's rights, no, not an option.

[1926] But if you have certain proclivities, great.

[1927] Yeah, agree.

[1928] And probably we all do.

[1929] So it's not atypical behavior.

[1930] And on that point, I actually think the people that were offended by what I said, they're using the worst possible definition of fetish.

[1931] So that fetish is kinky and dirty and naughty, like that that's naughty.

[1932] So in that respect, I see what they're saying.

[1933] Right.

[1934] But we're both operating now from two different definitions of fetish.

[1935] Totally.

[1936] But I think fetish is put in this parapheria box.

[1937] So it is, if you're putting a whole group of people as a fetish, it shouldn't be a fetish.

[1938] It's just like, I like Indian people.

[1939] So it's not, I see what they're saying about like, why does that have to be something extra?

[1940] It's just like, why can't you just like them?

[1941] It doesn't have to be a fetish.

[1942] It's like saying my gay neighbor.

[1943] Just say your neighbor.

[1944] Right.

[1945] Yeah, I got you.

[1946] Speaking of gay men.

[1947] Oh, yeah.

[1948] So why are there so many disproportionate bottoms?

[1949] Okay, so there's an article advice.

[1950] Why are gay guys convinced the world is full of bottoms?

[1951] So I'm going to read a lot of it.

[1952] Ask any gay man and he'll tell you the world is full of bottoms.

[1953] Really quick, before you continue.

[1954] Okay.

[1955] I know this seems absolutely absurd to have to explain because we live in L .A., but in case you're in the middle of nowhere and have no gay friends, a bottom is someone who generally during anal sex is the one receiving the penis.

[1956] And the top is the one administering the penis or the dong.

[1957] Exactly.

[1958] Okay, continue.

[1959] Grindr added the option to list one's preferred position in their profile for the first time this September.

[1960] This is years ago.

[1961] Since then, 6 % of daily users have identified themselves as tops and only 4 % as bottoms, according to a representative.

[1962] 28 % of remaining men identify as versatile.

[1963] Similarly, on Scruff, a dating app, more users identify as versatile than anything else.

[1964] According to Chief Product Officer Jason Merchant, 35 % of U .S. users identify as versatile.

[1965] versatile while 21 % identify as bottoms and 19 % as tops.

[1966] But that's flawed.

[1967] Are they going to say it?

[1968] It would seem then that more guys want to present themselves as liking it both ways and exclusively preferring one position over another.

[1969] But only 40 % of Grindr users and 44 % of Scruff users list any preference at all.

[1970] Many prefer not to broadcast their bedroom preferences in the first place.

[1971] These statistics are skewed by a more obvious factor.

[1972] This is what guys say they're preferred.

[1973] position is when they're putting that information out in the world.

[1974] That means a whole host of human behavior and social stigma comes into play.

[1975] Guys will fib in order to get late or because of what others might assume about them based on their preferences, and they might be driving the anecdotal perception that the queer world is ripe with bottoms.

[1976] In a 2011 paper published in the archives of sexual behavior, researchers Trevor Hart and David Moskowitz surveyed over 400 men recruited via Craigslist personal ad section to uncover factors that lead one to think of themselves as the top, bottom, or versatile.

[1977] They found a similar breakdown as Grindr and Scruff about half of those surveyed identified as versatile and a quarter each as tops or bottoms.

[1978] However, they also followed up to see what kinds of behavior guys reported engaging in during sex and discovered that while those who self -reported as tops or bottoms actually consistently topped and bottomed in bed, only about half of versatile guys actually switched things up.

[1979] That means that when it gets down to getting down, the versatile guys surveyed weren't nearly as open -minded as their claim preference would lead you to believe.

[1980] 48 % of self -reported Versal and men were in fact bottoms, well, 52 % were tops.

[1981] So all things being equal, which these statistics would seem to bear out, gay guys all told fall pretty evenly on the divide between top and bottom.

[1982] Oh, and then the other myth, or maybe it's factual, is that as men are in a relationship longer, those roles tend to blur more.

[1983] Oh, they start testing.

[1984] That married men that have been together a while or, you know, they haven't been married for a while, but they've been together a long time, apparently are more versatile.

[1985] Yeah.

[1986] Like, just when you're on an app, you're having to suss out if the person's act, like, when they're, like.

[1987] If they're telling the truth.

[1988] He'll say versatile's just bottom.

[1989] Like, all the guys saying, if you're a top, you just say you're a top because you have your pick of the litter.

[1990] Right.

[1991] There's no incentive to say you're versatile if you're actually a top.

[1992] Well, kind of if you're like.

[1993] You want to hook up with another top, maybe.

[1994] Yeah, or just like, I'm down for anything.

[1995] You're like, maybe you're a top, but then you're, meet some guy that's so hot that you're like fuck it i'll be a bottom just to be with that guy yeah that's like me i could you know i might have a favorite sexual position but i'm open to any sexual positions that would get me in the rack with the person i want to be with yeah the whole top bottom thing is very interesting to me like the fact that it's so rigid like that like because everyone has all the parts you know anal play is very polarizing topic a lot of people do not enjoy it at all.

[1996] But I guess my point is, like, why wouldn't, if you're in a relationship or you're seeing someone, why wouldn't, like, you'd try one thing and then reciprocate?

[1997] Unless, unless.

[1998] Well, my guess is they tried it and they don't like that.

[1999] Yeah.

[2000] I mean, everything is all psychological.

[2001] Our sexuality is so psychological.

[2002] You're right.

[2003] If they don't like it, then no. But I just feel like they're in these, like, rigid concepts of themselves.

[2004] Like, it's like an identity thing as opposed to if they really like it.

[2005] or they don't.

[2006] Yeah.

[2007] I don't know.

[2008] I don't know enough.

[2009] We'll have to ask more tops if they've tried getting fucked in the ass and if they hated it or liked it.

[2010] Right.

[2011] Or it was more of an identity thing.

[2012] But how would they even know?

[2013] They won't know.

[2014] No one knows.

[2015] There's no such thing.

[2016] I know.

[2017] Anyway, that's all.

[2018] Can we just say for the record?

[2019] Dan was one of my favorite guests.

[2020] Oh, he was so, so interesting.

[2021] He was so interesting.

[2022] He's so smart.

[2023] And then so beautiful in an articulate way about.

[2024] so many things, like a really beautiful person.

[2025] Yeah, I agree.

[2026] I enjoyed it.

[2027] But what was funny is my ex -father -in -law was in the audience.

[2028] Yeah.

[2029] Yeah, Greg, who I love so much.

[2030] Yeah.

[2031] Bree's dad, mom and dad came, and it was really fun.

[2032] He is in no way a homophober or anything.

[2033] He's just also a vet who hangs out at the VFW Hall.

[2034] Yeah, and an older man. And it was a real crash course in what my podcast is like.

[2035] Oh, yeah.

[2036] Yeah.

[2037] Of all the ones.

[2038] Yeah.

[2039] It was a trial by fire.

[2040] All right.

[2041] Well, I love you.

[2042] Love you.

[2043] Fun chat.

[2044] Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[2045] You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

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