You're listening to A Stranger Podcast, www.com.

Hey, this is Dan Savage, and you have downloaded successfully the Savage Love podcast,

the once-a-week audio version of Savage Love, my syndicated sex advice column.

We're going to get right to the calls, but if you want to give us a buzz sometime and record

your sex question, the number here at Savage Love podcast is 206, 201, 2720.

Call, record a question, and the tech savvy at risk youth will forward it to me.

So here we go.

Let's get to the first question.

Hi, Dan.

I am a straight male in San Francisco, California.

I come from a big Irish Catholic family.

Several of my cousins at this point have come out of the closet, and I'm very supportive

of them with a lot of their parents and grandparents and relatives aren't.

You know, and I've always considered myself, you know, very, you know, very liberal, very kind of open-minded.

But I feel vaguely uncomfortable when I'm around them, and it's not their sexuality, it's not their, you know, their life choices.

It's that I feel like I should be representative

of something or, you know, accepting everyone with open arms. And, you know, I just, I feel that

that's created a distance between us. So help me out. Thank you. All right. So you've got some

faggot cousins and you want to know how you can get them to understand that you're totally down with the whole pole smoking sodomite thing.

The last thing you want to do is come across, like, the guy who meets a black guy and goes out of his way to demonstrate that he's, you know, not a racist,

and in so doing comes across as totally racist

because you're kind of objectifying this person is not an individual and a human being,

...