It's a sentiment not expected from a sex columnist — especially one who once tried to pass the flu to GOP presidential candidate Gary Bauer — but Dan Savage is hesitant about the whole marriage thing.

Before you send any e-mails filled with moral outrage, let's get the obvious out of the way: Savage supports same-sex marriage. His new book "The Commitment" makes that crystal clear.

Yet neither men are willing participants, arguing with enduring love about their wedding day outfits and choice of poem that will close the ceremony.

"While we would like to have the legal benefits of marriage, we weren't planning on flouncing down the aisle matching with tuxes anytime soon," Savage writes. "The Commitment" does cover how they, with their families, have stepped into a brave new world no one really predicated or imagined. Strangely when Savage, editor of the alt-weekly "The Stranger" in Seattle, started working on the book, it was to be a memoir that chronicled the home he grew up in Chicago. But a certain election changed the book's focus.

"I started writing about this house and all the generations living in this house and after the elections of last year, the book sort of morphed into this book about marriage because people tried to pin Kerry's loss on us," Savage tells the Blade. "I sort of refocused the book and squarely met and dealt with what [Terry and I] are going to do."

Marriage wasn't something Savage considered as an option when he came out, he says. The world was a different place and there were certain assumptions he made about what would be available to him as a gay man.

"You were leaving a lot at the side of the road so you could kiss boys," he says. "Suddenly all of those things in the last ten years have become open to us and available to us."

Savage sees the new book and his "The Kid," about his and Terry's adoption of a child, as a chronicle of the possibilities that now are part of the gay world.

"I wanted to document what it felt like to be part of that generation where everything we thought we sacrificed to be gay was suddenly available to us," he says. "We hadn't left it at the side of the road."

"It's like an ill-fitting garment," Savage says. "You don't know how to totter around in it. We haven't had this option in front of us in long enough and heterosexual wedding traditions feel awkward because we are not heterosexuals."

Just like every cultural group who has its own ceremonies surrounding marriage, Savage believes it will take time for gays and lesbians to have rituals that feel right.

"The Commitment" illustrates that Savage's son eventually made the case for marriage. At first D.J. is opposed to the idea, but Savage recounts a conversation where he explains to his son that marriage is a promise to stay in love and together.

"A big part of it was our son," he says. "Suddenly it meant something to him for his family to reaffirm and strengthen the bond that is holding it together."

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