by Dan Savage
Clearly, mere opposition to same-sex marriage isn’t enough to bring my meme-creating wrath down on a politician’s head. So why would a writer like Judge want to mislead his readers on this point? Because he wants his readers to believe that supporters of marriage equality are angry and vindictive shits who will unfairly attack and malign “honest” opponents of marriage equality for sport. My support for Bob Casey in 2006 and Barack Obama in 2008 disproves that charge.
So if it wasn’t Santorum’s opposition to same-sex marriage that led to the creation of the world’s filthiest sexual neologism, what was it?
Andrew Marantz of The New Yorker got it right and offers this succinct recap:
In April of 2003, Santorum, then a senator from Pennsylvania, sat for an interview with the Associated Press. The discussion turned to Lawrence v. Texas, a case before the Supreme Court, in which the plaintiff argued that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional, on the ground that adults have a right to privacy. Santorum disagreed. “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home,” he said, then “you have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does.” A healthy society, Santorum continued, would not condone sodomy or “man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.”
“I’m sorry,” the reporter said. “I didn’t think I was going to talk about ‘man on dog’ with a United States senator. It’s sort of freaking me out.”
Santorum’s comments caused a minor stir. President George W. Bush defended him; Howard Dean attacked him. Then everyone seemed to forget about it.
Dan Savage’s readers did not forget.
They most certainly did not.
Remember that drunken crowd in a bar talking about sex that I mention in the chapter “Mistakes Were Made”? They’re the ones who created Rick Santorum’s Google problem back in 2003. And they didn’t do it because Rick Santorum, like every national politician in the country at the time, opposed marriage rights for same-sex couples. My readers made a vile and disgusting joke at Rick Santorum’s expense to retaliate against the vile and disgusting comments he made about gays and lesbians. Santorum, then the third most powerful person in the United States Senate, equated gay people to child rapists and dog fuckers. That didn’t sit well with my readers—gay and straight.
Oh, sure, I certainly helped to redefine Santorum’s last name.2 But I don’t deserve all of the credit—or all of the blame—for launching “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex” into American public life. (“It’s one guy,” Santorum himself told Roll Call, “you know who it is.”) In May of 2003, just as everyone seemed to be forgetting about Rick Santorum’s man-on-dog comments—just as the minor stir was dying down—this letter arrived at Savage Love world headquarters, aka my laptop:
I’m a 23-year-old gay male who’s been following the Rick Santorum scandal, and I have a proposal. Washington and the press seem content to let Santorum’s comments fade into political oblivion, so I say the gay community should welcome this “inclusive” man with open arms. That’s right; if Rick Santorum wants to invite himself into the bedrooms of gays and lesbians (and their dogs), I say we “include” him in our sex lives—by naming a gay sex act after him. Here’s where you come in, Dan. Ask your readers to write in and vote on which gay sex act is worthy of the Rick Santorum moniker. It could be all forms of gay sex (“I pulled a Rick Santorum with my straight roommate in college”), or orgasm in a gay context (“We fooled around, and then I Rick Santorumed all over his face”), or maybe something weirder (“We’ve bought some broom handles, and we’ll be Rick Santoruming all night”). You pick the best suggestions, and we all get to vote! And then, voilà! This episode will never be forgotten!
I thought that was a great idea. So I ran the letter in my nationally syndicated column, asked my readers to send in proposed new definitions, selected the ten best, and then asked these same readers to vote for the best one. But I didn’t limit the proposed new definitions to gay sex acts. Santorum wasn’t arguing that the government had the right to regulate the private and consensual sexual conduct of gay and lesbian adults alone. He believed—and still believes—that the government should be able to regulate the private and consensual sexual conduct of all Americans, from the gayest gays to the straightest straights. Rick Santorum doesn’t believe a right to privacy—or bodily integrity—exists in the US Constitution. Who you sleep with, whether you can use birth control, whether you can obtain an abortion: Santorum told the Associated Press in 2003 that he wanted the Supreme Court to uphold state sodomy laws, some of which regulated straight sodomy, because he believed the state should be able to regulate all of our sex lives. (Yes, Virginia, straight people can be sodomites too.)3 Because Rick Santorum believes in small government: He believes government should be so small it can fit inside your vagina.
Santorum believed this in 2003, when he was urging the Supreme Court to uphold state sodomy laws, and he believed it in 2012, when he was running for president.
In October of 2011, while campaigning in Iowa, Santorum pledged that he would, if elected president, wage war on contraceptives.
“One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception,” Santorum said in a videotaped interview for the Christian news and commentary blog Caffeinated Thoughts. “Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
Santorum made these comments after telling ABC News that the Supreme Court’s 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision was incorrect. Griswold, Salon’s Irin Carmon points out, “struck down a ban on discussing or providing contraception to married couples, and established a right to privacy that would later be integral to Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas…. [Griswold] would be the case where the majority asked, ‘Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship.’ Rick Santorum disagrees. He thinks, using the currently popular states’ rights parlance, that ‘the state has a right to do that.’”
So I opened the contest up to gay and straight sex acts because, legally speaking, Rick Santorum doesn’t distinguish between them: He would like the government to regulate all sex. And there really is no such thing as a gay or a straight sex act; straight people can do pretty much everything gay people can do and vice versa. And the winning entry wound up not being a sex act at all, as you already know, but a sexual by-product. Here’s the letter that created Santorum’s Google problem:
While I agree with the spirit of naming something objectionable (to him) after Rick Santorum, I think it should be a substance, not an act. I would never want to “santorum” anyone I liked. What a turnoff. Instead, I think it would be better to name some kind of sexual byproduct after him. After all, ending up with idiots like Santorum in elected office is a byproduct of the otherwise desirable practice of letting any old yokel vote. Specifically, I nominate the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. As in, “We had a great time, but we got santorum all over the sheets.” Or better yet, “Before I sodomize my gay, unmarried dog, I like to give him an enema so there won’t be any santorum.”
The “frothy mixture” definition won by a landslide, beating the nearest runner up—“farting in the face of someone who’s rimming you”—by a three-to-one margin.
I’ve kept in touch with the person who came up with the winning definition for santorum over the last decade. He’s debated coming forward and claiming his share of the credit—and he deserves the lion’s share—but he fears potential personal and professional repercussions. Since I can’t use his name, let’s call him Frothy Mix.
“The entire definition, including froth
y, came to me at once,” Frothy Mix said. “I also kind of knew that it would win and become a big enough deal that Rick Santorum himself would hear about it.”
It might surprise some people to know that Frothy Mix is straight—and that he grew up in a deep red state. “Otherwise I am probably basically who people think I am,” says Frothy Mix. “An atheist progressive in a big liberal city who went to impressive-sounding schools and has held some of the kinds of jobs right-wingers might associate with a vast liberal conspiracy. In terms of my personal life, though, I’m not a swinger or particularly kinky.”
But unlike far too many of his fellow straights, Frothy Mix recognizes that politicians like Rick Santorum threaten his freedom too.
“Santorum didn’t just say that gay people don’t have a right to have sex, though that’s bad enough,” Frothy Mix told me. “He’s on record basically saying that no one has a right to sexual privacy. We should keep in mind that it hasn’t been that long since we’ve had the right to have a sexual relationship outside of marriage or with a person of another race.”
And Frothy Mix didn’t decide to “punk Rick Santorum” simply for laughs. He was genuinely outraged by Santorum’s remarks. “What really got me was the way he used such dehumanizing language so casually,” Frothy Mix said. “I wanted to make it harder for a sitting US senator to feel like he could say something like that in the future.”
Why was he so sure his definition would win?
“First of all, I knew most people were going with a verb,” said Frothy Mix, “and I’d have the noun category basically to myself. It is about the worst thing you could call Mr. Santorum, but there’s nothing inherently gay about it. I knew ‘frothy’ would work sort of like the hook in a pop song. It would make people think of lattes and beer, which just makes it that much more gross. Still, I’ve been continually surprised that it took off the way it did, then has stuck around for so long.”
I want to break in here for a moment to unpack the genius of Frothy Mix’s definition for santorum, and why I think it’s stuck around for so long. While Frothy Mix viewed the word frothy as crucial, for my money—and in my particular area of expertise—the word sometimes is crucial. Lowercase santorum is only the by-product of anal sex sometimes. If you’re doing anal sex right, if you’re assfucking correctly, there will be no santorum. If there is santorum—if fecal matter intrudes on your assfucking—the anal sex is ruined. The same can be said of Rick Santorum. He would like to intrude on your sex life and would ruin it if he could. Santorum, like so many religious conservatives, is obsessed with anal intercourse, and Frothy Mix’s definition offered sweet poetic justice, forever linking Santorum to anal sex and its unpleasant potential by-product.
And you could say that the winning definition—once again: “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex”—managed to do something that Rick Santorum hasn’t managed to pull off and hopefully never will: It won a free and fair national election.
“You can say I’m a hater,” Rick Santorum said during a 2004 Senate debate—at the height of the Iraq War—about putting an amendment into the United States Constitution that would ban same-sex marriage. “I would argue I’m a lover. I’m a lover of traditional families and of the right of children to have a mother and father. I would argue that the future of America hangs in the balance, because the future of the family hangs in the balance. Isn’t that the ultimate homeland security? Standing up and defending marriage?”
Santorum was responding to California senator Barbara Boxer, who earlier in the debate had asked, “What is more of a threat? Al-Qaida or gay marriage?”
You might think that a man who described banning same-sex marriage as the “ultimate homeland security” measure—because the threat gay families pose is on par with the threat that Al-Qaida posed—doesn’t have many gay friends or supporters. But Elizabeth Santorum, Rick Santorum’s adult daughter and his chief campaign staffer during his 2012 campaign, would have you believe that he does.
“It is tough, after all, being a young surrogate for a candidate and father clinging to an older worldview,” Elise Foley wrote in a fawning profile of Elizabeth Santorum that appeared on the The Huffington Post just before the 2012 Iowa caucuses. “Her father’s stance on same-sex marriage and gay rights, in particular, has caused some friction…. Opposed to same-sex marriage herself, Elizabeth said she has gay friends who support her father’s candidacy based on his economic and family platforms.”
So…
Elizabeth Santorum, who doesn’t support marriage rights for gay people, has gay friends. And Elizabeth’s gay friends support her father’s candidacy “based on his…family platforms.”
Right.
To Ms. Foley and all the other political reporters out there who will write puff pieces about Rick and Elizabeth Santorum in 2016: When Elizabeth Santorum tells you that she has gay friends and that her gay friends support her dad…how can I put this? Your interview subject has made an astonishing claim, a claim that must be verified before you publish it. Your response should be a demand for the names and phone numbers of these “gay friends.” You can offer to quote them anonymously to protect their privacy and to shield them from the social consequences of their stupidity. (No gay person who goes on the record supporting Rick Santorum will get laid ever again.) But you need to verify the existence of these gay friends because you’re a journalist, not a stenographer.
In fairness to Elizabeth Santorum, she’s not the only anti-gay bigot who has been allowed to make the “I have gay friends!” claim unchallenged. Rick Warren, Sarah Palin, Joel Osteen, Donny Osmond, Pat Boone—all the biggest homophobes tell reporters that they can’t be bigots because they have gay friends. (My personal favorite: the Reverend Peter Mullen, an Anglican priest in London, who got in trouble for writing this on his personal blog: “Let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan SODOMY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH.” After he got in trouble, he defended himself by saying he had “nothing against homosexuals,” and he couldn’t be a bigot because, “many of my dear friends have been and are of that persuasion.”)
If I told a reporter from The New York Times or The Huffington Post that I had the Hope Diamond in my pocket—if I told a reporter from the Thrifty Nickel that I had the Hope Diamond in my front pocket—the reporter would ask me to present the diamond before publishing my claim. It’s not impossible for me to have the Hope Diamond in my pocket, of course, but it is extraordinarily unlikely. A good reporter would check my Hope Diamond claim out before publishing it.
But never once, in the short and sordid history of anti-gay bigots claiming to have gay friends, has a political reporter asked the obvious follow-up question: “Can I have your gay friends’ phone numbers, please?” I can’t understand why. Political reporters: If Elizabeth or Rick or Joel or Sarah or Rev. Peter can’t produce their gay friends, you will have caught a public figure telling a very revealing lie. Isn’t that what you live for? And if Elizabeth or Rick or Joel or Sarah or Rev. Peter can produce a gay friend, you’ll be able to treat your readers to an entertaining interview with a deranged homo.
Elizabeth Santorum is about as likely to have gay friends who support her father as I am to have the Hope Diamond in my pocket.
So, political reporters, when the time comes to write puff pieces about Elizabeth Santorum in 2016, ask her for proof about her gay friends, the same way you would ask for proof from any other nut making an extraordinary claim.
I’d ask her myself but she blocked me on Twitter.
“Sen. Rick Santorum may have lost the presidential primaries in Arizona and Michigan, but there’s at least one thing he can celebrate: His Google problem appears to be subsiding,” The Wall Street Journal reported on February 29, 2012. “Following a surge of interest in Santorum’s presidential campaign, as of late Tuesday Savage’s webpage had fallen down the list.”
A triumphant Santorum staffer claimed that h
is Google problem wasn’t just subsiding: “Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign says his ‘Google problem’ has been solved. Until recently, the top result for users who typed Santorum’s name in the search engine was a crude sexual term devised by gay columnist Dan Savage to attack Santorum,” Alex Pappas wrote on Tucker Carlson’s conservative news/alternative universe site The Daily Caller. “Peter Pasi, a digital consultant to the Santorum campaign, said that they were finally able to overcome this problem as Santorum has risen in the presidential race. Santorum’s campaign website now ranks higher in Google.”
It’s true that the link to SpreadingSantorum.com, which included the definition (you didn’t have to click through to read it), did drop down to eighth place in February of 2012, before creeping slowly back up to third place on most searches. “The most horrific filth that you ever want to see,” as Santorum himself described Spreading Santorum.com, was no longer the first search result. (Rick apparently hasn’t seen the viral video Two Girls, One Cup, which is much more horrifying than SpreadingSantorum.com, which is just a blog.) But the site was still among the top returns—and it remained among the top returns—for the remaining four weeks of Santorum’s campaign for the GOP nomination. Anyone who googled Santorum would still see the “frothy mixture” definition for santorum created and promoted by my readers.
