Sedaris, in his essay in the It Gets Better book, writes that when he was growing up nobody called him gay because you might as well have called him a warlock. Nobody knew what gay was.

I feel like I'm a compassionate guy, but I also feel if somebody's grip on life or sanity is so tenuous that a joke in an advice column that usually is nothing but jokes pushes them over the edge, then if not me, it would have been a leaf blowing past them that did it, or something else. You almost have to feel that way, doing this.

One person simply can’t be all things to another person – sexually or otherwise—and unmet needs, unfulfilled desire, and unexplored possibilities are prices we pay to be in LTRs (long –term relationships). Monogamous, polyamorous, Femdom, or whatever: All couples people walk around feeling a little unfulfilled. (Single people, too). Because no one gets everything they want.

Parenting is about being competent and responsible. It's not about gender, necessarily.

I started doing drag in Seattle because I started doing my column before I moved here, and then moved here and wanted to be able to go out and do things as Dan Savage without being recognized the next day, because the column was just in Seattle and it was kind of a sensation and I was beating people up. I was really worried and I didn't want to beat somebody up in a column and have that person know what I look like when I didn't know what they looked like.

Sometimes I talk to religious people about my column or what I do, and I ask them to, you know, read 20 or 30 of them and then come tell me that the message at the heart of every column isn't, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' In every possible sense.

The cultural expectation should be if there's infidelity, the marriage is more important than fidelity.