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Recent Savage Love Letters of the Day: A kinky mom loves her kinky/queer son and wants to help him find kinky/queer love. A reader's boyfriend's hipster beard prevents him from going down on her. Do kinky queers belong at Pride and are straight kinksters queer? Also, her shitty boyfriend met up with her shitty ex-husband for drinks—what should she do? And, as always, last week's column and Savage Lovecast.

Regarding DRINKS, the woman whose controlling boyfriend thought it was a good idea to meet up with her shitty ex-husband:

The only thing you need to say here is this: TRUST IS THE BASIS FOR AND THE ONLY THING THAT TRULY MATTERS IN ANY KIND OF RELATIONSHIP WITH ANYONE ANYWHERE! If you don't have trust as a foundation, what do you have? You have to build it. You have to work at keeping it. And when you don't have it or you lose it lots of negative things happen. If DRINKS needs permission to leave this loser, who was pining for her since he met her (!), she might think about how trusted she feels and how much she actually trusts a guy who basically stalked her from day one. Ok, that's it. Rant over. That stuff pisses me off.

I told DRINKS to dump her shitty boyfriend—so I'm not leaping to his defense here. But I don't think he "stalked her from day one" is fair. They met when she was newly single and she wasn't looking for anything serious or, it's true, for anything from him initially. He didn't hide his interest from DRINKS—he didn't lie to her, he didn't enter into a friendship under false pretenses, he didn't hang out with an ulterior motive—and she eventually decided she was willing to date him. That happens a lot and I don't think that's stalking. His behavior after the relationship got started—the controlling behavior—was a whole lot more concerning (and disqualifying) than his behavior when they first met.

Another thought for DRINKS:

Recon is the right word. He wasn't getting to know you better, DRINKS, he's gather ammo to use against you later. GTFO and know you're better off for it.

I agree! DRINKS should definitely DTMFA!

Regarding KINKY's question about who does and doesn't belong at Pride...

Dan, as a parent yourself, I would love for you to talk about Queer families. Does your son feel like a part of the queer community? My mom came out when I was four. This was back in the 80s when Heather and I were the only people on Earth who had two mommies. (Or so it seemed.) I've been to more pride parades, women's festivals, gay chorus rehearsals, and Take Back the Night marches than I can remember. I marched in Washington DC in 1994, before a lot of the people at the Pride marches this weekend were born. My moms coined the term "Culturally Queer" for me when I was a teen realizing I was straight and worried about being told exactly what I saw on the FB comments for your last column about kinksters at pride: "Cishets don't belong at pride, period."

I hate the term cishet, especially when people slap it on others. It doesn't at all express my lived experience. You want to know about discrimination and bullying, and coming out, and educating ignorant people again and again, talk to me about being a kid with a queer family in the 80s and early 90s! I might have been one of the first, but more and more queers are having kids and statistically speaking a lot of us will be straight. Are we all kicked out of the community as soon as we turn 18?

I hate the term "cishet." I much prefer "breeder." (Kidding, kidding.) You're definitely a member of the queer community—and you absolutely, positively belong at Pride. Hell, even if you weren't a member of the queer community—and you are and you paid your fucking dues—you still belong at Pride. The whole point of Pride is visibility. Pride is about being publicly out and unashamed and taking up space and being seen. The rallying cry after Stonewall was "Out of the Closet, Into the Street!" Into the street where our straight parents, straight employers, straight neighbors, and straight landlord could see us. The rallying cry wasn't and isn't, "We're Having a Pride March—Straight People, Please Avert Your Eyes!"

For centuries shitty and bigoted straight people—not you, letter writer, and not all straight people (but most pretty recently!)—wanted to live in a world where they could pretend queer people didn't exist. And they used violence and terror to ensure they lived in that world. Pride was about facing down the violence and terror and ending demanding to be seen by straight people so they would—what was that other slogan again? Oh, right: so they would know we're here, we're queer, and they were just gonna have to get used to it.

So anyone who says "cishets" don't belong at Pride—marching with us as allies or watching us march past—doesn't know what they're talking about. Queer people who only wanna be seen by other queer people have the option of slinking into bars and bathhouses or staying home.


More for KINKY...

I enjoyed your recent response about the place of kinksters at Pride. I think that anybody who shows compassionate support for various lifestyles belongs at Pride. I also agree with your statement that we shouldn’t add another letter to what is already a mouthful and I wonder if we could even come up with a term to replace all the letters? I personally don’t identify as any of the letters (maybe I do but I just don’t know that letter) and so I feel like a bit of a jerk when I inevitably get the letters wrong. But I guess I’m also a bit torn about labels in general. If we can’t label it, then maybe we can’t work toward normalizing it, is that the problem? As a woman I understand that you sometimes need to raise awareness of your existence to get respect so maybe reducing it to one term just dilutes the discussion too much? Personally, I can’t wait until we get to the point that nobody gives a fuck about how you identify and who you fuck, but I think that’s a long ways off. In the meantime, how does a sympathetic hetero juggle all those letters without coming off as a flippant asshole?

It's always the sympathetic heteros who wanna do away with labels. No offense, of course, and I know you mean well. But when you're a member of the group that comprises roughly 90% (or more) of everybody, you're rarely at risk of being incorrectly labeled. The default and even reasonable assumption—that you're heterosexual—is, in your case, the right assumption. So your label is going to fit you so seamlessly that you may not even know you're wearing it. You didn't even have to apply it! Those of us who aren't straight have to speak up—we need those labels so that we can find and date and fuck and support and marry and love each other. Or tie each other up.

Readers call bullshit on the man whose beard prevents him from going down on his girlfriend:

I've got a few comments on your letter from SHAVE. I've worn a bushy beard for years, and my partner absolutely loves it. My beard in no way prevents kissing or head-giving—it's clear that SHAVE's (hopefully ex-) boyfriend simply isn't interested in these things. Yes, beards attract all sorts of bodily fluids, food, and other things. Which brings me to an important point: beard-wearers who perform cunnilingus/analingus should make sure to shampoo daily. You do not want some old catsup to give your partner a yeast infection.

And...

I'm calling bullshit. I've rocked a big beard and long mustache several times over the past six years and it has NEVER not once interfered with my ability to devour pussy. It's a lame excuse for a lame dude.

And...

I just wanted to contribute to todays discussion of the hipster bearded boyfriend by saying that a long and wild looking beard is not objectively an obstacle to oral sex. I regularly receive oral sex from a man who resembles the members of ZZ Top. Does this woman's BF seriously believe that all other hipsters, the cast of Duck Dynasty, and every other prodigiously bearded person he has seen or heard, of never give oral? Lame excuse.

Perhaps I should've called bullshit on SHAVE's boyfriend... but it didn't occur to me that SHAVE's boyfriend could've gone down on or kissed her with that beard because I wouldn't want a man with a beard like that kissing me or eating my pussy.

We did a whole episode of the Savage Lovecast with nothing but questions from queers after a gay listener complained about having to listen to so many calls from straight people...

I'm listening to your most recent podcast and addressing the "too straight" criticism. By giving the gay listener who complained an "all gay" podcast seemed like pandering—or worse, pattern behavior training. What's to stop BDSM fans from sending emails saying you've never devoted an entire episode to their particular sexual reason for listening?

I understand this gay listener's complaint. As a straight male, I sometimes think some of the episodes don't apply to me. BVut I then remind myself that something most likely does. Can I somehow incorporate what a queer or kinky couple is doing in my straight "boring vanilla monogamous" relationship? I then intently listen for advice, lessons, etc., that I can learn and if there's nothing of value, hey, that's ok. One of the reasons why I enjoy your podcast is because you have a good delivery, you keep it fun, and you have generally sound advice. (I've never written a podcaster before, but I respect what you do and would prefer you keep the format as varied as possible. I always look forward to Tuesday mornings!)

Thanks for listening and I'm glad you enjoy the show—and I agree with you: we can all learn from each other! I've certainly learned a lot from my straight callers over the years. (And we recently did a show dedicated to calls about BDSM!)

Regarding my response to You Won't Answer, the anti-gay troll who successfully trolled me at the end of this week's column...

You’ve got the right idea in your answer to YWA, but you kinda missed the obvious reason why straight women don't hookup like gay men do: straight women also need to think about the possibility of getting pregnant! That’s a biggie! There’s also, of course, the evolutionary angle. Although a really horny straight woman could conceivably (pun intended!) have a few more children, horny straight men could have a LOT more children, who then carry his genes to the next generation and so on. So evolution favors really horny men more than really horny women.

Jesus Fucking Christ got name-checked on a recent podcast...




Oh, I'm fully aware of what Jesus didn't say about owning people...

And finally...

Can u set me up with ALONE, the introverted gay guy into bondage?

I'm not allowed to put my readers in touch with letter writers, sadly, as I have no way of knowing who is and isn't an axe murderer. But I can't stop readers from reaching out to letter writers in the comment thread at the bottom of my column. I can't promise you ALONE will see your note, of course, but it's your best/only option.

Okay, we're going to leave it there. Have a great weekend, everybody, and a great Pride. See you on Monday.


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Listen to my podcast, the Savage Lovecast, at www.savagelovecast.com.

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