Eleven gay bars received letters yesterday from someone claiming to be in the possession of ricin, a deadly poison. "Your establishment has been targeted," the letter begins. "I have in my possession approximately 67 grams of ricin with which I will indiscriminately target at least five of your clients." The Stranger also received a letter, which was addressed to the attention of "Obituaries," according to editorial director Dan Savage. It said that the paper should "be prepared to announce the deaths of approximately 55 individuals all of whom were patrons of the following establishments on a Saturday in January," before listing a handful of gay bars.
"I get it, I get it: you're not all bigots and haters, and people marched against Prop 8 in Salt Lake City this weekend," Savage writes in response to Salt Lake Tribune columnist Sean P. Means' invitation for Savage to visit the state to see the "real" Utah. "But I'm not ready to make nice -- on purpose or by accident -- with the bigots and haters from Magic Underpants Inc. who donated money and time to Prop 8." MORE: Savage has been "a teeny bit over the top with his rhetoric, Salt Lake City Weekly's John Saltas says, before reprising Means' invite and offering to pay Savage's way. "We'll introduce him to local GLBT leaders, many of whom are equally pissed that he walked away from them."
Salt Lake Tribune columnist Sean P. Means says he doesn't "like that Savage and others have singled out Utah for their wrath" with a proposed boycott over the Mormon Church's support of California's ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage. But Means says he'd "rather engage Savage in this discussion," so he has invited him to come to Utah. Means says he'd even buy drinks for Savage and Salt Lake City Weekly founder John Saltas, who publicly dropped the "Savage Love" column last week, "to let the healing begin."
In the wake of the passage of a same-sex marriage ban in California last week, an effort that was heavily funded by the Mormon church, Dan Savage and others have called for boycotting the state. "Trouble is, all Utahns aren't to blame, nor are all Mormons," writes Salt Lake City Weekly founder John Saltas. "A nonspecific call to boycott is never effective and is fraught with misdirected fire." He concludes that "since Savage hates Utah so much, there's no point in us playing in his sandbox by sending him a regular check." MORE:The Village Voice weighs in on the Weekly's decision. STILL EVEN MORE: Savage has been making the media rounds talking about Prop. 8 this week. Check out his New York Times op-ed, his appearance on The Colbert Report and his takedown of Tony Perkins on Anderson Cooper 360.
In the recurring "So What Do You Do?" column on MediaBistro, the editorial director of The Stranger and syndicated sex advice columnist discusses how he got started with "Savage Love," how sex-column writing has changed in the last 15 years, and why he loves his job. "I get emails from people all day long describing their sex lives and sex problems," he says. Savage also talks about the role of the alt-weekly in a deteriorating mainstream media landscape. "I think alt-weeklies have more and more of a role to play -- particularly as dailies continue to try and swim around with an anvil under each arm," he says. "One anvil is objectivity and the other is 'family newspaper.' Alt-weeklies have the luxury of publishing writing by adults, to adults, and for adults. And that's a real advantage. It's a style advantage, it's an attitudinal advantage, and it's also an urban advantage."
The Stranger reports that its party tonight in Seattle hosted by editor Dan Savage will be one of the handful of locations from where ABC News reporters will be filing live dispatches during the election night coverage.
Last week, the New York Press got rid of its newly minted sex columnist after it was revealed that Claudia Lonow took the questions for her first column from old "Savage Love" columns. But Savage tells the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that he feels bad for Lonow, and that he thinks the "borrowing was an accident." In an interview with KING5-TV, the syndicated columnist and editor of The Stranger says that if Lonow would have just sourced the questions properly, there would've been no problem. "She just thought they were good hypotheticals and thought she could use them with impunity, and that's kinda not the way the media business works anymore," he says. Meanwhile, the Press is holding an open competition to become the paper's new sex columnist. Each week, the paper's editors will select one piece for publication, and those winners will become finalists in the quest. The new column will launch in the paper's 20th anniversary issue on April 23.
Yesterday, the Press was proudly announcing its new sex column, "Lip Service" by Claudia Lonow. Today, editor David Blum says her first column will be her last, after it was revealed that some of the questions in the column were taken from Dan Savage's "Savage Love" columns. "It had been our understanding that the questions for her first column came from friends," Blum says. "She has told us she was unaware that using questions from Savage's column was a breach of journalism ethics. She has offered her resignation, and we've accepted it. We apologize to our readers, and to Dan Savage, for this error in judgment."
Ellen Forney has for several years been illustrating and interpreting the most interesting ad in The Stranger's "Lustlab" classified personals each week. Now they are collected in a new book, Lust: Kinky Online Personal Ads from Seattle's The Stranger, released this month by Fantagraphics. In addition to the illustrations, the book has interviews with some of the advertisers conducted by Forney, plus an introduction by syndicated sex columnist and Stranger editor Dan Savage.
The Stranger editor and syndicated columnist's story about how he and his boyfriend became parents will get the Broadway treatment, The Village Voice's Michael Musto reports (see Web Extras at end of column). Musto hears that the adaptation of The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant will be directed by Scott Elliott. "That's one more reason to hope the stagehand strike ends," says Musto.
