From humble beginnings growing up in a strict Roman Catholic Chicago household, to coming out as a gay teen and becoming a popular sex columnist, Dan Savage has made a name for himself.

For those who don’t know, Savage Love is a weekly sex advice column that is often serious and dry, yet sarcastic, sometimes funny and almost always full of sexual terminology. And the author often lives up to his name, as he is never shy to voice his opinion — just like the readers who seek his advice, for they, too, are blunt, pushing the boundaries when asking their sometimes outlandish yet sincere personal questions about their sexual preferences and tendencies.

Savage also has his own sex-advice vocabulary; try Googling the letters “DTMFA” and you’ll find the term — penned by Savage as “Dump The Mother Fucker Already” — with a lip-smacking smorgasbord of other Savage-made words, including leotard and saddlebacking and pegging. Most of them are as dirty as they sound.

As of late, Savage and his partner Terry Miller, with whom he has an adopted son, have turned their passions into a crusade to help LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered) teenagers with the increasingly meaningful It Gets Better campaign.

The self-described “pushy busybody” is taking a break from advising North Americans about how and how often they should be fucking; he is in Calgary to promote the campaign during the 13th annual Fairy Tales Film Festival.

Festival director Jessica Dollard contacted the anti-bullying crusader last year, and he was so impressed with Calgary’s version of the educational initiative he said he would speak during the week-long film festival.

“It’s a great group,” Savage says. “They asked and I was happy to come.”

EARLY LIFE

Savage wasn’t always Savage Love. Born in 1964 as Daniel Keenan Savage to parents William and Judy, he grew up as the third of four children and attended a school he describes as “a Catholic school for boys thinking of becoming priests.”

In “1981ishwhateversomething” he came out to his parents, but it was in 1991 while he was the night manager of an independent video store in Madison, Wis. that a co-worker offered Savage a life-altering proposal.

The co-worker started the alternative Seattle newspaper The Stranger, in which Daniel Keenan Savage morphed into Savage Love, a snarky and explicitly charged Dear Abby for the sexually active, promiscuous, straight, gay and experimenting population.

With a bachelor’s degree in theatre and history, Savage never considered himself a writer before he started doling out sage advice.

“When I started writing my column I wasn’t sure people would be asking me questions even a week later,” Savage says.

“I answered questions sent in by friends and waited to see if the mail, snail, would bring any questions. Within a week the first few arrived. The mail, now email, hasn’t stopped since.”

For the first eight years Savage requested that readers address him as “Hey, faggot” in salutations of their letters in an attempt to make the discriminatory word less discriminatory and more acceptable, but he changed the protocol in 1999 because he felt his mission was accomplished: The word “faggot” was commonly replaced by queer, gay, bisexual and homo.

“At this point I think I’ve read — if not seen — everything,” says Savage, “Which is not to say that the mail doesn’t shock me sometimes — it does. But those letters, the ones that shock me, I don’t see coming, you know?”

Even after 20 years of reading thousands of salacious letters, he knows there are still burning sex questions out there. But he expects one day he’ll have just about heard them all.

“Personally, I’d like to be asked to top Jake Gyllenhaal, but I don’t think that question is ever going to be put to me,” he says.“I’d settle for being asked to watch — even videotape — Johnny Weir topping Jake Gyllenhaal.”

While Savage encourages sexual experimentation, he’s also an advocate of safe sex and almost all consensual adult sex acts.

“I was writing the column before abstinence education took off... and I watched the average-sexual intelligence plummet. People got real stupid, real fast,” he says.“But I think people are coming around now — abstinence education has been exposed as a fraud and a failure, as has many of our assumptions about sex.”

Savage believes his column has contributed to that change.

“People are finally coming around and learning to be more accepting of sexual diversity and difference, including their own. People are less terrorized by what’s ‘normal’ and what isn’t.”

That said, he has firmly set his targets on the political right wing and fights not only for gay rights but also for straight rights, such as the HPV vaccine and the morning-after pill. Even though he grew up in a religious family, he considers himself atheist and liberal.

WHAT HE’S DOING NOW

Savage has been known to take on American politicians, particularly Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who compares homosexuality to bestiality. To mock the senator’s ignorance, Savage often uses the politician’s last name — Santorum — to define and label “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes a byproduct of anal sex.” He continued the tradition, penning “saddlebacking” (the “phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities”) after Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Church, who vocally supported banning gay marriage. Savage often invites readers to lend a word to his unique sex dictionary, and through a contest came up with the definition for Santorum.

Savage’s latest passion, the It Gets Better campaign, is spreading like wildfire as he continues to push his anti-bullying message. The campaign was started in response to a rash of teenage suicides in the U.S. that were attributed to children and teenagers being bullied for being gay or just suspected of being gay.

“We just brought out a book because not all kids have access to the Internet, and the book allows schools to demonstrate their support for LGBT kids.”

Since the campaign started last year, U.S. President Barack Obama, TV host Ellen DeGeneres and singer Janet Jackson have participated in making personal videos to inspire and help bullied kids by letting them know it will get better.

Savage was especially touched by a video created by Bronx poet Gabrielle Rivera.

“She said ‘It doesn’t get better — what happens is, you get stronger.’ Her video really moved me.”

Society, he says, has a long way to go, but he believes the discrimination has toned down a notch.

“We’re winning the movement for full acceptance and equality for sexual minorities,” he says.

“There are holdouts and there are bigots; there will always be holdouts and bigots. But we’re winning the argument one family member, co-worker, friend and fellow-student at a time.”

Facts, science and simple human decency, he believes, have had a strong influence in educating the ignorant.

“It really does get better — and you can make it better. You can make your own life better, and you can make the lives of people around you — gay or straight — better.”

Savage has taken his campaign on the road, and when he’s not advising people how to strap it on and fuck, he can be found at universities and colleges through the Savage U initiative.

“I go to a college and do a speaking gig and answer their sex questions,” he says. “It’s something I’ve been doing for years and MTV Live is opening it up a bit, adding some more elements, but it’s very true to who I am and what I do.”

And even though Canadians recently handed Prime Minister Stephen Harper a majority government, despite Savage’s urging through his column in Fast Forward Weekly not to vote Conservative, Savage believes Canada is a fine place to live.

“(Canada’s) LGBT citizens have a lot more rights at the federal level than we do,” he says, adding, “Maybe there are some missing pieces here and there.”