This year's Science Teller keynote speaker Dan Savage writes about sex. He talked to Tom McKinlay.
As well as writing about sex, United States columnist and author Dan Savage saves lives.
Or perhaps that should be, because Dan Savage writes about sex, he saves lives.
Anyway, in 2010 he was instrumental in setting up the It Gets Better Project website, its mission ''to communicate to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth around the world that it gets better, and
to create and inspire the changes needed to make it better for them''.
The project hopes that will prevent them killing themselves.
And Mr Savage, who visits Dunedin next week as part of the Science Teller festival, organised by the University of Otago Centre for Science Communication, knows it works because people who have benefited from the shared stories posted on the website tell him so.
''When we started the It Gets Better Project five years ago, in 2010, we were aiming it at 15-16-year-old kids, 17-year-old, 14-year-old kids, and now I go to colleges and meet people who are 22 and were 16 or 17 when the project went online and they sat and watched all those videos and they tell me, sometimes through tears, about the difference those videos made for them.
''It is gratifying for me personally when I run into people, as I often do, who credit the project for literally saving their lives.''
The website now has more than 50,000 videos that have been viewed more than 50million times. There are politicians there, Barack Obama among them, entertainment industry luminaries and sports people, but it's not those videos that Mr Savage values most.
''My favourite videos are the ones created by everyday ordinary LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] people talking about what they did to make it better, to get to a place where they could say it got better, in the past tense.
One such involves a high-school-age boy talking about his brutal experience of school and sharing what he did to get out.
''He looked in the camera and said, `I was hating high school, I was getting beaten up, people were horrible to me and I went and got my GED', which is a general equivalency degree you can get here, basically your high school diploma, he just went and got it, took his test and skipped his last year of high school and went right on to community college and then on to college.
"He kind of felt bad, because in a way, the bullies were winning, they were driving him out of the school. But in another way he saved his own life, he rescued himself, he removed himself from this horror show and got out of this horrible place and was sharing this information with other queer kids who might be in a similar circumstance and have a similar option.''
Mr Savage was named 2013 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association for his work for LGBT youth.
In Dunedin, he will give the keynote opening talk of this year's Science Teller festival, which is on the theme Sex and Science.
Beyond his activism on behalf of the young LGBT community, Mr Savage is also the widely syndicated author of the advice column Savage Love, about sex, which appears in newspapers and magazines in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia. Among his books is the explicitly political Skipping Towards Gomorrah, in which he sets out to commit each of the seven deadly sins. He also dabbles in a little political punditry, which he says is unavoidable in the US, where politicians ''will not leave sex alone''.
As he notes, Canadians got the French, Australia the convicts, and the US the Puritans.
''The right wing in our country would rather talk about sex and contraception and abortion and gay marriage than talk about economic inequality, or being the only industrialised Western nation in the world that doesn't guarantee health care to all its citizens. They want to talk about sex and sexuality to distract people from, frankly, what even I as someone who focuses a lot on sex, think are more important issues than where the next orgasm is coming from.''
This is not to overlook the importance of the political gains the queer community in the US has made. Mr Savage celebrates the fact the US is catching up with New Zealand on gay marriage and says that such hard-won rights are never forever in the US, where the forces of reaction have recently been rolling back women's rights, with respect to contraception and abortion, and the voting rights of minorities.
Some on the right may beat the Puritan drum quite cynically, Mr Savage says, to distract, but he also acknowledges sex's age-old grip.
''Sex is half a billion years old and, what's our species, 200,000 years old? Sex made us and it will unmake us. It is the central driver for many people's lives.
''If you think of one topic that unifies all humanity, something that is a shared and common experience, that transcends all their differences, it really is sex, and then how we frame it, how we understand it, how we discuss it, how we act on it. All of that is shaped by culture, religious belief, all these other variables, but sex is fundamental and transcendent across the human experience and across the generations.''
Central it may be, but that does not mean we live comfortably with its siren call.
''Sometimes I think that the sex negativity in a culture is hardwired into the human experience,'' he says.
When children first become curious about where they came from, and find out, it matters little how comfortable the parents are talking about sex, the child is always appalled.
''The kid cannot understand why anyone would do this thing ... Then we hit puberty,'' he says.
''In some way I think adult life is about dealing with and even enjoying that conflict, that override, that sex is powerful enough to enact over our inherent childish sex negativity, feelings of conflict and cognitive dissonance. That can be good, it can be bad, it can be fun, it can make sex more textured. We are complex social animals and it is odd that sometimes people seem to think that sex should be simple and straightforward.''
Why would it be simple and straightforward when so much else is not, he asks. Take food for example.
''The ways in which we eat and what we will eat are just so complicated. We don't just eat for nourishment, we eat for pleasure and sensuality and community and intimacy. [For] all these other reasons we eat.''
Indeed, we eat all sorts of rubbish that has little to do with sustenance.
''But a lot of people have this attitude that when it comes to sex that if you are not just doing it for sexual sustenance, for release, to drain yourself, that you are some sort of libertine or, I don't know, some sort of debauched individual. But we don't look at somebody with a fancy kitchen and who is very informed about food and very creative about food and think, 'debauched', we think, 'gourmand'.''
AT THE FESTIVAL
• Dan Savage will give the keynote opening address at Science Teller festival, Sex and Science.
University of Otago College of Education Auditorium, Friday, October 30, 6pm.
• He'll do a book-signing on Saturday 31 October at 3.30pm at the samve venue.
For more, go to www.scienceteller.com
