Tell me a little about your career path.
Well, I write what has to be the smuttiest advice column in the world, in which I take the risk of telling the truth about sex -- particularly from the male perspective -- which is why so many straight people respond to the column. I'm not telling women what they want to hear about men, and I'm not letting men off the hook for what they owe women, and I think both of those things are kind of rare in sex-advice-land.

But somehow I managed to orchestrate a coup-d'etat and take over The Stranger, and get published in lots of different places, and write books that aren't about sex, and it's all been very, very glamorous (laughs). I mean, I just think I'm a jackass, and I can't believe that people pay me to write.

Did you start off wanting to be a writer?
God no. When I met the people who were starting The Stranger, I told them they should have an advice column -- not because I wanted to get the gig, but because I'd read advice columns all my life and I knew that they were just very popular. They thought it was a good idea and asked me to write it.

Have you noticed any trends over the past couple of decades as you've been a sex columnist? Certainly there are a lot more people with sex columns now -- both online and off -- than when you started.
Well, sure. Now every college newspaper has a sex columnist -- who all want my job and want my help getting it. Every day I get a letter from someone who says "This is my college sex column, help me get syndicated." I look at these letters and think "Fuck you -- why would I do that? What are you talking about? We're a dying industry; leave me alone."

When I started writing the column, I just wrote about sex using the language people actually use when they talk about sex with their friends, instead of this sanskrit that people use when they write about sex in newspapers. I applied to sex the attitude that my friends and I had always had towards it; that it was user-friendly, and that it was a fun and interesting part of your life, and it shouldn't be so fraught. To say that as a gay guy in 1991, whose friends were all dropping dead, was kind of revolutionary.

When I first started, I would write about water sports and people's heads would explode -- same with when I started writing about straight guys getting done in the butt by their girlfriends with strap-on dildos. And then there I was seven or eight years later, watching a Sex and the City episode about water sports.

Has the competition caused you to change your focus at all, or niche yourself a little more?
Not really, I've just kept doing what I've been doing. I think the salvation of my column has been this guy I met 14 years ago. When we first started dating, I still wrote a bit about my own sex life, and he said "You can date me, but you can't write about me, or us, or what we do in bed." And so I stopped. Most other sex columns that come and go and rise and fall are sex columnists writing about their own sex lives extensively, and what happens with those is that you reach a saturation point as a reader where you just don't buy it anymore. You just don't believe that this is a person honestly exploring their sexual interests or dating; you believe that this is a person out there trying to shock you by trying to find weird things to do, and you doubt its authenticity.

"Savage Love" just isn't about my sex life; it's about my readers. I go where they go, and I myself remain sort of a mystery. I'm the Greta Garbo of sex columnists. I write dumb books about my private life, but not in the column. I'll occasionally write something about myself in a column, but it's always a lie -- I'm actually not into Ashton Kutcher or tighty-whities. Or I'll write about assistants I've had who are completely fictitious.

Have you ever given advice that you really regretted afterwards?
Once, back when I first started accepting email, I answered a question, and then, for whatever reason, didn't delete it from the tracking system -- a couple of months later I found it in there and answered the same question, giving the exact opposite advice. That tells you everything you need to know about relying on a newspaper columnist for your marching orders.

So, yeah, I've definitely given shitty advice, and admitted it. And people have beat me up over it, and have given me feedback. I get thousands of emails every week, and half of it is people yelling at me, and picking apart the advice I gave, and telling me what I should have said. Anybody who follows -- to the letter -- the advice they're given back there with the escort ads in a free weekly newspaper is an idiot. So if they followed just my advice -- and didn't think about it for five seconds or get a second and third opinion from someone who's not a substance-abusing jackass with an advice column at his disposal -- I don't feel the least bit guilty if they destroy their lives, because it's just a matter of time before something did.

What's your favorite part of the job?
Honestly, I love this job, and I've always taken it as seriously as I think one should, which is "not very." I've always described "Savage Love" as "a conversation I would have with my friends in a bar about sex." And it's a total blast. I get emails from people all day long describing their sex lives and sex problems. They trust my judgment and they want to hear my take. And all the young straight girls who send me pictures of their boyfriends along with their emails are a delight. I get letters from all over -- from Australia, and England, and China. It's a little overwhelming, sometimes, because I can't respond to them all. But I don't get a lot of angry hate mail pounding on me from religious people, because I think they realize that they're not going to make me cry if they tell me that Jesus hates me -- or that it'll give me a life crisis. It's not going to work.

You've been with alt-weeklies all the way through, even as they've gone through lots of upheaval and have gotten more corporate. Why have you stuck with The Stranger and your other syndicated outlets for so long?
Well, I absolutely worship The Stranger, and I think we've still got it -- and that many alt-weeklies have still got it. At The Stranger, we've always viewed the paper as a sort of performance, and we do the kind of advocacy and participatory journalism that we need in our culture. I mean, we don't just sit back and suck our thumbs.

What's the most important role -- or purpose -- of an alt-weekly these days?
I think alt-weeklies have more and more of a role to play -- particularly as dailies continue to try and swim around with an anvil under each arm. One anvil is objectivity and the other is "family newspaper." Alt-weeklies have the luxury of publishing writing by adults, to adults, and for adults. And that's a real advantage. It's a style advantage, it's an attitudinal advantage, and it's also an urban advantage.

The dailies here in Seattle we call the "donuts" because they write to the suburbs and they don't write for the city, or advocate for the city. Their worldview and their attitudes are suburban, because that's who they think their subscribers are. People pile up in cities not because they don't like yards, but because they want to get laid. People want to be where other people are, and we've always advocated for good urban values.

Alt-weeklies are really just about advocacy journalism and truth-telling, and they engage in arguments and throw bombs in the way that daily papers can't allow themselves to. I mean, daily newspapers all need to put "fuck" in a headline above the fold one day -- it'll solve all their problems. That's my prescription. And then in one fell swoop they'll get rid of all those 80-year-old subscribers who won't let them drop "Blondie." Catering to the 80-year-olds? Where's that getting newspapers? Making sure there's nothing in your paper that's inappropriate for an eighty-year-old to read?

David Hirschman is editor of mediabistro.com's Daily Media Newsfeed.

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]