I've been a fan for a long time. I saw you live in Dallas this summer. Just reading the Playboy interview with you, and one piece has me laughing out loud literally (not LOLing): I, too, grew up in Chicago, and my first Broadway play was the national tour of A Chorus Line! I’m two years older than you, but we were two of the (many, many) gay boys in the audience at the Schubert! When I told my mother I was gay a few years later, she took to bed for three days with a migraine. Thank god I didn’t inherit her drama queen gene! Baking cookies (oatmeal, mixed fruit and chocolate chip) as I type this!

Jon

P.S. We could turn the “six degrees of separation” thing on its head if we extrapolated every gay man’s intersection with A Chorus Line!

I should probably do a real SLLOTD today—I should do a real SLLOTD every day, as it's technically/actually/really in my job description—but I'm running Jon's letter because it allows me to link to my interview in Playboy. If you had told me back when I was a little gay boy reading my older brother's copies of Playboy for the articles that I would one day be in the Playboy interview, well, I wouldn't have believed you. But here we are! One sample exchange after the jump...

PLAYBOY: How often do people—we imagine it would mostly be men—complain about the infrequency of sex in their relationships?

SAVAGE: Actually, I get letters from women who are distraught because they had fun, inventive, active sex lives with their husbands until they had children, and then their husbands saw them as just moms and couldn’t see them as sex objects anymore. But that doesn’t mean the men don’t want to have sex. Straight men would do everything gay men do if straight men could, but straight men can’t, because women won’t. If I told straight men there was a park with all these women from the ages of 18 to 60, some of them insanely hot, some of them average, all of whom want to fuck you and don’t want to know your name or your phone number and never want to see you again, that park would be full of straight men tomorrow. Not all gay men go to those parks. Not all straight men would go either, but many, many would.

PLAYBOY: Have you?

SAVAGE: I’ve never been to a bathhouse. I’ve never had sex in a bush. That doesn’t interest me, but gay guys do do that. Female sexuality is different, whether you believe sexual reserve and caution are biological or cultural or some combo of the two, which is what I believe. The risks of being sexually active fall disproportionately on women’s shoulders. Sexually transmitted infections are easier to pass from male to female. If she gets pregnant, that’s all on her, particularly if it’s an anonymous encounter. She’s vulnerable to intimate-partner violence, to rape. When straight men complain that women aren’t up for anything, I always write back and say, “Well, tackle the rape problem and maybe more women will be. Tackle the intimate-partner violence thing.” Female sexual reserve acts as a check on straight men’s ability to spin out of control sexually. The challenge gay men have—and I wish there was more HIV-AIDS education about this—is to find inside ourselves that check that straight men have imposed on them externally, or we can spin out of control sexually and destroy ourselves, which is what we did [during the AIDS crisis]. You can fuck yourself to death, and we shouldn’t do that again. My point of view has always been that straight people need to have more sex and more sex partners than they do, and gay people need to have fewer sex partners than they can. It’s just hard for straight guys to get laid. Pussy is hard to get, and it’s hard to get because of disease, pregnancy and violence. I don’t think women are naturally any less horny.

Read the whole thing here.