Dan Savage’s HUMP! amateur-porn festival all about heart

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      We all love to watch. Other people fucking, hot Mormon guys reaming themselves with dildos, ladies peeing on trampolines—it’s all good. Wait, what was that last one?

      “Hey, that’s somebody’s porn,” says Dan Savage, calling the Georgia Straight from Los Angeles. “And that’s part of what we love about HUMP!” It’s true, you’ll see real diversity and a fair amount of the exotic when Savage’s HUMP! Tour 2014 lands at the Rio Theatre this weekend (July 4 and 5). The amateur-porn festival was launched by the advice columnist in Seattle and Portland nine years ago. This road-show edition is drawn from award winners and some of the curator’s other favourites from over the years.

      “Oh, my God, everybody loves ‘Krutch’,” Savage says. “Everyone thinks ‘Edged’ is hilarious. ‘Lauren Likes Candy!’ flips people out, and then there are the head scratchers, like ‘Go Ahead, Pee!’ ” In those four shorts alone, HUMP! covers disabled sex, the exquisite art of avoiding climax, lesbian “cunt-slapping”, and trampoline waterplay.

      The very point of the festival was to create a positive environment and then invite the full spectrum of sexual and gender expression inside, although even an old pro like Savage admits that HUMP! is always turning up surprising new kinks. You might walk out of the theatre with the words “Just a fireball on my cunt, no big deal” still fresh in your mind (“Fun With Fire”). More to the point, each of the festival’s 20 films is defined, in Savage’s words, by its “heart and soul”.

      “That’s the common denominator,” he continues. “I have friends who work in mainstream porn—and I’m not shitting on mainstream porn when I say this—but the difference between HUMP! and mainstream porn is that these are friends and lovers doing what they enjoy. It’s very deeply personal and there’s a joy to it. You never get the sense watching a HUMP! film that somebody is either phoning it in or they’re there because they had no choice economically or whatever. What you see in HUMP! is this marriage of humour and sex, which is true to how we actually experience sex.”

      Not surprisingly, production values are equally diverse. “Ouroboros” is five masterfully composed, crisply lit minutes of hard-core gay erotica (with a nice metaphysical edge), while “Tuff Titties: Motor Boys” is like a trans version of “Scorpio Rising” with all the technique removed and dirt rubbed onto the lens. “Mythical Proportions” offers some exceptionally ropey (and very funny) stop-motion animation. “Hot ‘N Saucy Pizza Boy” barely strays from its overlit, single-camera setup. But the sincerity behind each project is palpable—something that HUMP! rewards with the good faith of its basic setup. In creating the tour, Savage and his cohorts actually had to track down a number of the filmmakers from memory because all the movies and paperwork submitted over the years were dutifully and publicly destroyed after screening.

      “We’ve been doing HUMP! for nine years, and we promised the folks who are in it we’re going to do everything in our power to make sure they’re porn stars in the theatre for this weekend and not on the Internet for the rest of their lives,” Savage explains. “And we take that commitment seriously.”

      As such, the first rule of HUMP! is a no-brainer: no cellphones. In a preamble to the show, the host declares that anyone caught with their mobile out will have it confiscated, forever.

      “We’re deadly serious. We absolutely, absolutely mean it. And we will be towering dicks about it,” he promises. ”Don’t tempt us.”

      And then what happens to the offending devices? “We take pictures of our dicks and we text them to your grandparents,” he says.

      More info at the Hump! Tour website.

      Follow Adrian Mack on Twitter at @adrianmacked. Follow Dan Savage on Twitter at @fakedansavage.

      Comments

      1 Comments

      Issue with zinc

      Jul 1, 2014 at 11:52pm

      Note to self - add texting plan to grandmas cell phone.