[TW: Homophobia, Assholery] Dan Savage Fails Again, Still Gets Fellated By Fans
So let me get this right.
Dan Savage:
- tells this girl a flat out gender essentialist lie about women’s sexuality being more fluid than men’s.
- says that he knows this lie to be true from his experience, which translates to “I know some women who said they were lesbians but they married men.” Never mind that this isn’t his experience, never mind that identifying as a lesbian has nothing to do with who you marry. (I know three lesbians who are/have been married to cis men. It doesn’t change the fact that they are lesbians.)
- tells this girl who is already in a Catholic convent school being taught by nuns to just tough it out if her parents force her into reparative therapy, as if it’s nothing more than a challenging chemistry course or an exercise boot camp and not an emotionally and spiritually abusive and debilitating horror which has driven who knows how many kids (and adults) to self-doubt, self-harm and even suicide, which he should know as the alleged font of all (cis white male) gay knowledge.
- fails, even after learning this girl’s location, to even try to suggest even one actual resource for her, anywhere that she could turn to find help to avoid being forced into abusive “counseling” or even just someone she could talk to. Apparently his Google was broken.
- publishes all of this massive failure.
- lets commenters do the work and come through with queer support resources in the girl’s location, rather than leaving her with the glib suggestion to tough it out and hang on because… Oh, right, because “it gets better.”
- and the pig still get lauded and praised and tweeted about as a hero. As if he did something. As if he helped. As if he didn’t lie to the girl. As if he didn’t give her potentially fatal advice to just grin and bear her homophobic parents’ abuse.
A hero.
What the hell does this man have to do for people to recognize him for the dangerous asshole that he is? Burn someone’s house down? Send a hurting, scared kid a weapon? Just go ahead and counsel self harm because the endorphin rush provides “relief?” What?
I really need to know.
See, the harm here is that queer “activism,” and I put that in quotation marks because the IGB campaign is not activism, is suddenly very popular, which could be a good thing, but this kind of popularity is not. It overgeneralizes, and suddenly people are thought to be “experts” on a subject just because they happen to belong to some sort of minority. People like Dan Savage and Lady Gaga profit on this. It’s kind of sick.
