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Dan Savage’s new video threatens to redefine ‘Rick’ if Santorum makes anti-gay remarks, but is such guerrilla blackmail justified? Back in the heady, Bush-dominated days of 2003, prickly sex advice columnist and guerrilla gay rightser Dan Savage waged a culturally successful war with then Senator Rick Santorum (Republican, Pennsylvania), after Santorum made public statements comparing homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia. Savage, himself a content and settled gay man now with a husband and child, launched an internet campaign to create a neologism that described “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes a byproduct of anal sex” . The new word? Santorum. The newly coined term quickly rose to the top of Google rankings, thus forever associating Senator Santorum’s last name, were one to do an internet search, with one of the more unseemly, albeit common, aspects of gay sex. A mean, irreverent and not undeserved cultural victory! Now, eight strange and changing years later, Santorum is running for president of the United States under the banner of his tried-and-true ultraconservative Christian ideology. In response to this new campaign, and Santorum’s unwavering commitment to associating homosexuality with the darker and most abhorrent reaches of sexual subculture, Savage has created a new video, hosted on the Funny or Die comedy website , threatening to go after Santorum’s first name. In the video – which is mostly “bleeped out”, to create the sense of a truly disgusting and monstrous sexual act that is also likely a string of nonsense dirty words – Savage says that he will not redefine the name “Rick” if Santorum agrees to stop going after the gays in such determined fashion. Another mean, irreverent, funny, preemptive cultural victory for Savage? Not necessarily. The left’s response to the vitriol of the Fox News-stoked American political right surrounding President Obama’s election victory has been, in typical Democratic Pollyanna fashion, a call to cease the angry rhetoric, to make politics about polite discourse again, rather than the snarling bed of conspiracy theorising, wild accusations (“Obama is a Kenyan Muslim!”), and Hitler comparisons it became in 2008 and, with the ascendancy of the Tea Party movement, beyond. “There is too much meanness!” political spokespersons of the left cried, frustrated with being deemed anti-American pro-Communist nü-Fascists. Now that we are nominally in power, finally, we want to stop the madness. But of course, in actual practice, the left can still, in the bloggier corners of society, dish it out just as nastily as the right – Sarah Palin is a vituperative viper with “a secret non-baby”, Michele Bachmann is an addled Christian space alien. A formal call for reason and bipartisanship looks pretty hypocritical when you scan the scattershot, informal pages of, for instance, Daily Kos comments. The right has, of course, pointed out this double standard, and it does seem that a campaign like Savage’s new one offers more fuel for criticism. Last year, Savage became something of a beatified folk hero for creating the feel-good, gently revolutionary “It Gets Better” campaign , a series of YouTube videos made in reaction to a rash of tragic gay suicides (committed by young people feeling alone and desperate), which softened his go-for-broke offender reputation. Dan Savage was someone we could all love, all of a sudden, because he said nice things about family and hope! But now, the Savage of old comes rearing back with an admittedly slightly tongue-in-cheek Funny or Die video going after his defeated foe Rick Santorum. It’s probably too much. While we on the queer left (and our queer-friendly allies) might get a chuckle out of the latest anti-Santorum campaign – Santorum being a perfectly frustrating avatar of nasty bigotry couched in piousness – Savage’s latest effort gives the bigots too much power by deigning even to address them. Santorum and his fervid supporters won’t pay much attention to the nuances of the joke; they’ll merely see it as yet another personal attack lobbied by a sexual radical obsessed with scary dirty talk. And in a time when, for better or worse, LGBT activists are struggling and succeeding to push their just causes into the mainstream (this year’s New York City pride parade was as tame and square, yet celebratory, as any Fourth of July parade), Savage’s endeavour to turn our side of the argument, well, savage again is probably losing us ground in the political cachet game in the pursuit of a few mild laughs. I don’t know how seriously anyone really takes Dan Savage. But he has proven, as evidenced by a tear-inducing Google ad that highlighted the success of the “It Gets Better” initiative, a fairly resonant cultural figure. And though Rick Santorum’s beliefs and policies are vile and regressive, I think we’re at a juncture where we need to kill the opposition with, if not kindness, a certain high-minded betterness. If Santorum wants to blabber on about animal- and kid-screwing, he’s free to do so. But we here in the bourgeois queer movement should, I think, try to keep the rhetoric as elevated as possible. Savage has become a mainstream cultural hero, and whether it’s merely comedy or not, a new call to sully an individual’s name with a particularly blue schoolyard joke seems only petty and time-wasting. The likable Savage already, ahem, creamed Santorum. There’s no honour in kicking a frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter when he’s already down. Gay rights Republicans Sex US politics Tea Party movement United States Richard Lawson guardian.co.uk