E-Mail This Article to a Friend SAVAGE MARRIAGE Dan Savage on tying the gay knot BY DEIRDRE FULTON

In Dan Savage’s new book you will not find men having sex with men pretending to be women, or women wondering why they can get off only through anal sex. In The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family (Dutton), the typically blunt sex columnist (whose "Savage Love" appears every week in the Phoenix) reveals another side of himself, as he reflects on the personal and political factors that led him and his boyfriend Terry to a makeshift Canadian altar (while their six-year-old son DJ listened from behind a couch). On the phone from New York City, where he was kicking off a national book tour this week, Savage talked with the Phoenix about his marriage, and gay marriage in general.

First of all, congratulations. Does married life feel any different?

Not really. It’s a cliché — all clichés apply about marriage, and parenting: it didn’t change anything, but it changed everything. We don’t interact any differently. It’s kind of funny, my boyfriend and I still call each other boyfriends, and when DJ hears us use the word boyfriend, he jumps in and corrects us: "You’re not boyfriends, you’re husbands." So I’d say the person who it changed the most for is DJ.

Do you feel as though, by marrying, you’re part of a larger movement?

I don’t think this is something Terry and I expected to do two years ago, one year ago, much less 10 years ago. When I was coming out, when I was 15, 25 years ago, being gay — deciding you would rather be gay and out than closeted and miserable — meant giving up a lot of things. It meant looking at your parents and saying, "I’m never going to get married, I’m never going to have kids...because I can’t do it. I can’t pretend to be interested in girls and I don’t want to be a priest (in the case of my Catholic family)." So it’s really disorienting, many years later, to have everything that made you make these sort of profoundly consequential choices — I’d rather kiss boys than have kids of my own [and] now here we are, we can have kids, we can get married, our lives are not circumscribed. And I do think in that sense we’re participating in this larger movement towards normalcy.

In some parts of the country, like Massachusetts or California, it seems gay marriage is taking hold. But in other states, things seem to be going backward.

It’s part of what makes it so disorienting and bruising, actually. It would almost be easier if bad things were happening everywhere. Then it wouldn’t be so rip-shod.... The country is shaking out into slave states and free states for gays and lesbians. There are good places to be gay and lesbian, places where you are going to have full civil equality, like Massachusetts, and there are places where you cannot live, like Virginia. It’s strange to feel like refugees in your own country. For gays and lesbians, there seems to be a Hurricane Katrina once a month in some goddamn state somewhere.

Is there anything in the book that will make gays and lesbians bristle?

Absolutely. The big one is the monogamy chapter [about gay men]. We do seem to have these twin double standards: the right wing saying we’re not monogamous enough for marriage, the gay-marriage crowd says we are monogamous enough for marriage. That’s not a standard that anyone applies to heterosexuals. I do think heterosexuals are more monogamous than gay men; I think lesbians are more monogamous than heterosexuals. If we start applying that standard, then only lesbians should get married. And I’m absolutely positive that that’s the stuff that’s going to end up on the Concerned Women for America Web site: here are these two gay guys with a kid and they’re not monogamous! They’ll make it sound like we have sex parties at our house, with DJ serving cocktails. (Pause) Which isn’t true. We only serve soft drinks.... A certain chunk says, "Oh my God, we have to be on our best behavior or we won’t win our rights." And I’m of the opinion that you don’t need to be well-behaved to have rights.

Dan Savage will read from The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family on October 1, at 5 pm, at the Brattle Theatre, in Cambridge. Tickets are $5. Call 617.661.1515.