David Badash notes on the The New Civil Rights site That Dan Savage is more than a little hypocritical:

Dan Savage is using anti-gay slurs to insult the same people who are targeting the LGBTQ community. And that is unacceptable.

He's talking about Dan Savage, the queer sex positive journalist at Seattle's The Stranger, using pejorative names for QLTBG folk as insulting labels for non-queers. More specifically, these are the titles of two Dan Savage blog posts this week:

"Ken Cuccinelli Is a Fag."

"Transgendered Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna Betrays His Community."

Note, first of all, that Savage is using both fag, and transgendered (n.b. technically, the usage is transgender, a noun rather than an adjective) as pejoratives, as insults. Savage is using them as negative terms, rather than the any of the neutral acceptable uses within queer subcultures. I note, by the way, that Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna isn't a transgender person. Granted, McKenna is an an ignorant self-absorbed ass, since he's trying to sue because President Obama signed the health reform bill, but McKenna is a basic run-of-the-mill heteronormative WASP politician, and is, at worst, shockingly predictable.

The problem is the way Savage refers to both Ken Cuccinelli and McKenna. It's very clear from the context that Savage is using transgendered and fag as negatives, as terms of approbation. This suggests not only that Savage has issues with self-loathing and hypocrisy, but that his vocabulary is sadly lacking. And no, it doesn't matter that Savage self-identifies as a fag; what matters is that the worst insult he can muster for Ken Cuccinelli is "fag." And, no, Mr. Savage, you don't get to do that. You really don't. You've pretty much managed to walk back the progress self-identified out fags and transgendered folk have made in helping to reclaim, or at least remove some of the negative associations of the words, by heaping negative connotations back on the words.

This is not appropriate behavior for anyone, but especially not for someone who identifies as a writer; English is the most copious language to ever exist on Earth. A writer should do better than fall back on conventional hate speech. A queer writer must do better than use heteronormative assumptions to attack opponents. Dan Savage is damaging his credibility, and that of the community he claims to represent.