Dan Savage has been advising readers of alternative newspapers across the country, helping them with questions about fetishes, orgasms and all their sexual worries, for more than 13 years. Starting with Seattle’s The Stranger, where he remains the editor, his “Savage Love” column has spread to about 70 alternative and community papers. Almost all of these papers, although outside the mainstream press, are primarily directed at straight audiences. In fact, until a recent foray into gay-oriented outlets with “Savage Love 2.0”, Savage has declined requests from gay and lesbian publications to run “Savage Love”. This is because he feels that the column thrives on the interplay between a gay sex columnist and non-gay readers.

“It works because it’s about the energy between straights and gays,” he said in a recent phone interview with the Gay & Lesbian Times.

And Savage believes it’s by nature of his being a gay man writing for a straight audience that his column works as a kind of activism, alongside more blatant forms of activism like protesting.

“I’ve reached more straight people through my column, than I ever did marching with a sign,” he says.

Case in point: Savage made national headlines recently after applying for — and being granted — a marriage license to a woman news editor, but only after explaining to the clerk that he was gay and she was a lesbian and each was in a long-term relationship with a partner with whom they lived. Most importantly, Savage wrote about this in the Stranger in order to highlight the hypocrisy of marriage laws that allow two opposite-sex people to marry without any personal connection whatsoever.

“There’s a weird false division between journalism and activism,” Savage says. “Writing is involvement and journalists’ involvement is critique. I go do something and then write about it; that is de facto activism.”

There is even a degree of activism in his sex column. When the column first began in 1991, the column ran letters addressed to him as “Hey Faggot”. This was a response to the then-current debate fostered partly by Queer Nation and Act Up about reclaiming hate words.

“Not until straight people could use ‘faggot’ would that make it not a hate word.” Savage ultimately changed the format but only after papers such as the San Francisco Chronicle had gone to the mat to be able to run a column with “hate language” in it, at which time, he says, “the reclamation debate and the context disappeared.”

“A lot of straight people are willing to read my column because it is about them,” Savage says. “So I fool straight people into reading about gay politics that they wouldn’t normally read, through entertaining them. … And a lot of my readers are younger and don’t know any out gay people. My column lets them get to know a gay person.”

Even though Savage recognizes a “huge sea change from when I was 20,” he says, “It’s not quite to the point it got to in the ’70s with race, though. We haven’t reached that turning point when certain positions were treated as beneath contempt.”

For instance, he points out, there came a time in the civil rights movement when media outlets stopped balancing civil rights coverage with segregationists’ views considered worthy of reporting. With issues relevant to the GLBT community, we are still at the point where major media outlets feel the need to bring out opposing viewpoints from the American Family Association and other so-called traditional values defenders.

“Every time we talk about same-sex marriage, we always have to trot out Lou Sheldon [of the Traditional Values Coalition],” Savage says. As he sees it, although the majority of Americans do oppose same-sex marriage, it’s time for the media to stop respecting this viewpoint.

At the same time, Savage sees a weakness in some activists’ desire for acceptance of lesbians and gays by the majority of the population. “We need to give people the right not to like us,” he says. But at the same time, he says, we need to fight for our rights –marriage, in particular. “I agree with Andrew Sullivan,” Savage says of the conservative gay commentator with whom he shares little in common, “marriage is the only issue right now.”