How To Start A Sex Advice Column

 

Great things can come from someone saying “NO.” My column is a testament to that. Years ago Dan Savage’s syndicator told the publisher of a gay entertainment magazine that he would not sell the gay author’s column to gay newspapers. How’s that for irony?

The editor was Chris Crain, the visionary editorial director of the now-defunct Window Media, once the largest chain of gay newspapers. Chris called me up one day and said, “I want you to write about sex.”

“Sure,” I responded. “Send me your cutest employees and I’ll get started.”

So the first lesson in starting a sex advice column is to turn somebody else’s NO into your own private YES. The second is to have a champion. For example, mine showed great courage in standing up to enormous pressure from easily offended gay schoolmarms to pull the column on a count that it made so much fun of easily offended schoolmarms.

Third, is to have a distinguished and often sober panel of experts.  For example, I had Richard Banconi, MSW. His warped get flawless logic (“beauty is only a light switch away)” significantly affected the way I wrote the column.

I also had Brad Thomason, Ph.D, who was literally my psychologist in residence. We lived together as boyfriends for the first two years that I wrote the column. I depended on him to give me the clinical view of my psycho readers and for that I thank him. And also because he let me steal his best lines. Like the title of my first book–Men Are Pigs But We Love Bacon. It was his response to a friend wondering how he could have dated me.

I also had three board-certified Family Practice Physicians who made themselves available for my impertinent questions:  The funny, fresh-faced scion of the busiest gay practice in the southeast, and my own personal physician. If I had his bedside manner, I would have been too busy f****** to write this book. The lesson:  You’ve got to have experts around you that make you sound like you know what you’re talking about.