In eleventh grade, I got pancakes with Dan Savage at a Perkins in Berea, Ohio. He was in town to give a talk at Baldwin Wallace College about sex education, and to answer undergraduates’ questions in his patented wry, sardonic way.

This was before the days of the Savage Love Podcast, before his MTV show, before the It Gets Better Project, before the Russian Vodka ban, before his marriage book, but after he re-defined Santorum. He was known in certain circles of alternate mag readers and precocious teenagers, but the average person did not recognize his now-infamous acronyms. GGG. DTMFA. His speaker fees must have been an order of magnitude less than they are now.

During the talk Savage absolutely killed, but after the show he crumpled into an exhausted, jet-lagged heap. A few of us approached him. My friend made a joke about how she’d lost her Monroe labret on the way to his talk, but that it had been worth it. He laughed. Up close, his eyes were slightly bloodshot, and away from the podium he had lost all will to perform.

Four of us were slated to accompany Mr. Savage to a post-talk dinner. Two college students, and two high school students. We waited in an awkward huddle near the Baldwin Wallace auditorium doors while Dan pried himself away from a few more fans.

“Is my escort in the hotel room?” he joked as he approached us. He’d just gotten off the plane right before the talk, he added, and was ready to crash, but he humored us.

We asked if he wanted something to eat, and he said that yes, he was fucking starving. We rattled off the available options. Denny’s. Friendly’s. Max and Erma’s. Perkins. Pizza Hut.

“Let’s go to fucking Perkins, I guess,” he said, laughing, a little pleased at just how pathetic our Cleveland suburb was. “Let’s get some fucking pancakes.”

He might not have even been serious. If we’d given him the option of going back to the room, he would have probably jumped at it. I was too naive to get the joke; I thought he actually had an escort waiting for him in the hotel room, as part of his compensation.

We shuffled into the restaurant and gathered around a table with a worn nylon tablecloth and cracked plastic chairs. It was just Dan, two students from the college’s Gay-Straight Alliance, and the two of us from the local high school, a boy named Erik and me.

Erik and I were the President and Vice President, respectively, of our school’s Student Equal Rights Coalition, which had been an easy feat since we were the founders of the group and the only two regular members. Our reward for fighting against the school’s nonsensical abstinence-only sex-ed policy was that we’d been invited to eat with Dan Savage. I was floored when I heard. It didn’t turn out how I’d expected.

At that age, Dan Savage was my hero, and I fantasized that we’d hit it off. I thought I would say exactly the right cunty-snarky thing and he’d take me under his surprisingly muscular wing, bring me up and teach me to be a bitchy, ironical writer and sexual-ethics pedant.

I thought, too, that I could make Savage into the kind of writer I wanted him to be in return. I imagined I would take him to task for saying asexuality didn’t really exist (a belief he held at the time but has since renounced) and tell him to stop using the word “pussy” as an insult. In return, he’d bequeath me all the secrets of performing a proper blowjob, or something.

In reality, I sat beside Erik and dumbly chewed my pancakes, watching Dan while the college students chatted with him. Dan leaned over his plate and ate and said relatively little. Now, I recognize the weary, effortful quality of his conversation, and I know it’s exactly the kind of thing I would do if I were dying of sleep deprivation, hunger, and boredom. He was tired, he’d done his work, and he was being grilled by dumb nineteen-year-olds who barely read his column, but he was still trying to he nice to them.

The college students asked some straightforward questions about kink and non-monogamy, the likes of which even a cursory read of Savage’s column would have answered. Erik did not know Dan’s writing at all, and said even less than I did.

Of the four of us, I was most familiar with Dan’s work. My friends and I read his column every week, huddled together over a copy of Cleveland Scene magazine, flipping past the escort ads for the telltale Savage Love header and byline. We read him devotedly for years. Having no formal sex education, he was the best we had access to.

In health class, we were forced to watch a local Christian organization perform skits and pressure us into signing virginity pledges. The Christian actors were early twenty-somethings with desperate grins and little plastic treasure chests with their organization’s name printed on the front: Operation Keepsake.

We each received a treasure chest, and were asked to imagine it represented our virginity. The members of Operation Keepsake used a series of red solo cups filled with water and a few drops of red food dye to demonstrate how rapidly STIs spread through sexual contact. We were shown grotesque photos of advanced stages of syphilis and chlamydia and not told such conditions were curable.

The girls were separated from the boys and we were told about how our purity was a special, easily tarnished gift, and that if we had sex with even one boy, it was actually the equivalent of having sex with dozens of people, through some weird transitive property involving a complex bracketed chart. A few girls asked about STI transmission during lesbian intercourse and were maligned openly for it. At the end of the two-week-long session, we were all lined up and presented with a virginity pledge to sign. I refused, along with quite a few others, including a pregnant girl who was carrying an animatronic fetus around in a plastic carrier, as homework for her Life and Family class.

Erik and I tried to arrange for Planned Parenthood to visit our school and dispense actual information about safe sex and contraception, but this was unequivocably blocked by the school’s administration. This same administration once sent us home for wearing shirts printed with slogans like “I Identify as Gay,” “I Identify as Bisexual,” and “I Identify as Asexual” on National Coming Out Day. The principal said the shirts would incite violence.

So my friends and I turned to Savage Love. From Dan, we learned which STIs were communicable by skin contact and which ones were preventable by condom. We learned that herpes can linger in the body for years before causing an outbreak, and that most people get it anyway, and that while it’s not curable, it’s not a huge deal, and certainly not a reason to laugh at someone in AP History with obvious facial scabs. We learned how to prepare for anal sex, if we were interested in it.

We learned plenty of terms even comprehensive sex ed doesn’t cover: bear, adult baby, cuckold, cuckqueen, vore, sounding. We learned that many women fake orgasms. We learned that oral sex comes “standard” in a relationship, and that any man or woman who refused to perform oral on a giving partner should be returned immediately to the lot.

Years have passed and I remain a Savage listener, albeit one with considerable reservations. I have listened to every episode of his podcast, read the full archives of his column all the way back to the early nineties. I have read most of his books, and even made a visit to his childhood home in northern Chicago using the address he provided in The Commitment. His snarky, spare, punchy writing style has greatly informed my own. I love the guy. But I know he’s a dick.

Dan gets a lot of flack these days for dispensing problematic nonsense. He’s been maligned for using terms like “tranny,” “retard,” and “pussy” in a pejorative sense. He supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He tells women that they have to accept their boyfriends’ porn usage, no matter the circumstances. He blamed the passage of Prop 8 in California in part on “black homophobia;” conspicuously, almost every caller on his podcast is white.

I’ve been able to witness his slow, sometimes hesitant evolution over the years. He doesn’t use “tranny” or “retard” or “pussy” anymore, and hasn’t in years. While he once believed asexuality and male bisexuality to be nearly nonexistent, he doesn’t anymore, and has apologized numerous times for making ignorant comments about both those identities. Nowadays he often brings experts onto his show to smooth out his areas of ignorance.

But he’s flawed. Sometimes he says provocative things thoughtlessly. For that, he gets glitter-bombed and loudly criticized, and he often deserves it. Savage will often find a way to make a genuine apologize and improve on many of these issues, though he always seems to find new mistakes to make.

Savage will never be for everybody. He’s still pretty clueless on trans issues, and his brash,“edgy” Gen-X prattle can grate on a lot of people. But while I understand these limitations, I will always be indebted to him. I’ll always love the guy. And for a certain breed of hapless, sexually inexperienced teenager, I still believe Dan Savage is a great source of information, because he so effortlessly blends information with discussions of ethical dilemmas, while remaining wryly entertaining the entire time.

In person, Dan was not the rip-roarious high-energy iconoclast he was on paper. He could perform and provoke even while drunk with tiredness, but he could not entertain a gaggle of bright-eyed teenagers at dinner.

I owe him a lot. I owe him for every STI and sexual injury I’ve avoided, for every sex toy I’ve ever bought. Not because he’s an ideal sex educator or social justice advocate or even an ideal dinner partner. But because he’s a hell of a lot better than Operation fucking Keepsake, and at age seventeen, those were my only options.