A few days ago, Amazon offered the audio version of Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America by Dan Savage for a few dollars.
I have mixed feelings about Dan Savage. The It Gets Better Project was great. He knows how to make fun of homophobes. He usually makes a strong case for equality in the mainstream media. He can be funny, too. But he can also be harsh, sarcastic, condescending, rude, insensitive, arrogant, self-satisfied and rather unpleasant. He isn’t someone I’d want to be friends with.
His posts at The Stranger sometimes generate lively discussions in the comments section, and I used to follow those now and then. Savage sometimes participates in those discussions. One day, his readers were talking about how some LGBTs experience family rejection, and a gay father said that he loved his seven-year-old son unconditionally. He thought unconditional love should be the model for parents. Savage popped up and asked the man if he’d still love his son if he turned out to be a psychopath. He was talking about this man’s seven-year-old boy. I found the question to be so repugnant, I rarely read his posts at The Stranger anymore.
But I did get the audiobook because it was super cheap—probably because it’s dated. I’ve been listening to it for the past few days. Savage is the one who reads it. The book is supposed to champion liberty and individual pursuits of happiness, and it’s supposed to counter the holier-than-thou types who want to tell everyone else how to live and use the law to limit their freedom. Savage decided to indulge in the seven deadly sins as a way of demonstrating that one person’s sin is another’s happiness, and his publisher paid for everything.
The trouble is, Savage isn’t always that sympathetic toward other peoples’ pursuits of happiness, and if he’s not already into someone else’s “sin,” he doesn’t demonstrate much intellectual curiosity or compassion.
There are a couple of things that he defends with passion. He is all for the legalization of pot which he categorizes as a kind of slothful pastime as a way of fitting the subject into the structure of his book. Savage makes it clear that he thinks pot is safer than just about any recreational drug, and he believes the benefits far outweigh the risks. He claims he doesn’t think kids should smoke it, but he says he would rather they smoke pot than drink or do other drugs. Savage is also a great defender of heterosexual swingers, and he devoted most of his lust chapter to hetero swingers clubs and practices. It was obvious that he admires and is impressed by straight couples who get together in large groups to screw around, but he thinks gay bathhouses are kind of gross.
Savage went to Las Vegas and to a riverboat casino to explore greed. His descriptions of the people and venues were often tedious and unflattering. Savage admitted gambling simply isn’t his thing, and the conclusions he drew weren’t terribly insightful.
For some strange reason, Savage decided to pursue envy by staying at an expensive spa, but the spa wasn’t luxurious, and the regiment was rather grueling. Savage and his fellow guests had to walk in the hot desert sun for several hours a day, and they were given very little to eat. Savage made a lot of snotty comments about the décor, and his observations of the wealthy spa-goers were mostly banal. His most keen insight was that the rich were so well off, they had to pay for the experience of a little deprivation.
The chapter on gluttony was mind blowing in its stupidity and thinly veiled hostility. Savage begins the chapter by claiming he is tempted to overeat even though he’s thin. He claims he was overweight as a teenager, and he claims that he sometimes indulges in dessert at fancy restaurants. He went to a fat acceptance convention claiming he thought he’d meet a lot of happy eaters, but then he skipped the first night’s dance because he feared the floor would collapse. He spoke of how he was afraid the cables holding up the elevator would snap when several large women got in with him. He talked about how all of the overweight people seemed reluctant to eat much in public. He was critical of the way the event organizers claimed being overweight was healthy and that some are simply prone to gain weight. He made a point of describing how unhealthy some of the participants looked. He told us about how some had to use canes, wheelchairs and scooters. I didn’t detect one note of empathy when he spoke of these things. Savage learned that some of the participants had weight loss surgery to restrict the amount they could eat, but others were highly put off by these surgeries because it violated the spirit of fat acceptance. Savage briefly admits that these people are subjected to a great deal of hate, but he doesn’t spend much time trying to understand the impact this has had on their lives. He doesn’t spend much time exploring why these people are overweight. He fails to make the connection between the contradictory messages he encountered at the convention and the bitchy way the participants sometimes treated one another to the defensiveness of gay men and the bitchy way they sometimes treated one another pre-Stonewall. It goes right over his head. And he doesn’t understand why they won’t admit that overeating is bad for your health, take some responsibility, overindulge now and then, but eat more salads and baked chicken like he does…because their problem couldn’t possibly be more complicated and harder to solve than his, right?
For his chapter on Pride, Savage went to an LGBT Pride event. If you think he’d show some sympathy in this chapter, you’d be mistaken. He was harshly critical. Savage claimed that in years past, LGBTs might have needed their egos boosted, but these days it’s a lot easier to be queer. (Keep in mind this book was written in 2002, before marriage equality, before DADT repeal, before Lawrence v. Texas.) He spends some time talking about how predatory some gay men are. He talks about the “freaks” and he uses the word “faggot” repeatedly. He goes into detail about Pride-themed butt plugs, and he’s rather sarcastic about how one attractive, well-off gay couple can’t explain to him to his satisfaction why they need and still participate in Pride.
It’s true Dan Savage isn’t guided by the same dogma and mindset of the Religious Right, but I think he has more in common with them than he’d care to admit. He is often smug and even self-righteous. When he doesn’t understand something, he becomes argumentative and judgmental. He seems to be blissfully unaware of how caustic his remarks can be. I don’t sense a lot of warmth or affection for others. I simply don’t find him very likable. I wouldn’t want to share an elevator with him. Not because I’d be afraid the cables would snap. I wouldn’t want to feel the negative energy radiating off of him. I’ve been around people like him before. They look at you with cold eyes and judge the fuck out of you. They think they have a perfect right to do that. You don’t have to be a Bible-thumper to be a prick.
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