Via

“There’s just something so celebratory and non-exclusionary about HUMP!,” Dan Savage explained to me on Thursday night about the amateur porn film fest brought to Washington over the weekend. “It’s not just kink. It’s not just queer. It’s not just anything. It’s like straight vanilla porn and crazy kinky queer porn and everything in between. That’s what I love about it.”

Savage has built a reputation as the country’s go-to voice for liberal sex advice. Based in Seattle, his syndicated Savage Love column runs nationally in alt weeklies like the City Paper, and he dispenses advice through a podcast. His It Gets Better project offers support to LGBTQ adolescents. And he’s famously created his own definition for Santorum. He’s built a dedicated following of straight and gay readers and listeners, everything beyond or in between.

And so his everything beyond and in between HUMP! tour packed the Woolly Mammoth Theatre for eight shows over three days. It’s the first year Savage has taken what started as “the Pacific Northwest’s biggest, best, and only amateur porn festival” on the road. He assessed the crowd as “a fine and receptive audience but quiet and shy” compared to the crowds met in Chicago and the raucous university students that had just seen the proceedings in Madison, Wis. Opening night was filled with what appeared to be fairly buttoned up straight, gay, and lesbian couples and friends. One girl wore fishnet stockings under a sensible red dress. Other than that, attendees were fairy tame-looking.

Buttoned down they may be, but D.C. crowds packed the theater, selling out the titillating run. And though they may not have had too many other local sexy film fests to compare HUMP! to, three things about this one are remarkably unique.

Firstly there’s the preserved anonymity of the people behind the films. That leads secondly to personal work that wouldn’t otherwise be produced being put out there. Lastly there’s the diversity being screened under one roof.

One hallmark of the festival is the temporary approach of gathering homemade blue movies for public consumption in the Internet age. Organizers take steps to ensure that clips or images of the amateur performers and their dirty work will never show up online. There are no Vimeo clips, organizers vow to confiscate any phone a patron would dare take out during at the theater, and all copies are destroyed on stage at the end of the festival.

“So what you could do at HUMP! that you could do nowhere else with pornography these days,” explains Savage, “is at HUMP! you could be a pornstar for the weekend, not for the rest of your life.”

The allure of private and fleeting exhibitionism — and the $10,000 given out each year in prize money — leads to rather unique expressions “because the films that are made for HUMP! are very personal,” says Savage. “It’s not like industrial-produced pornography where someone’s trying to guess what a consumer might want. The people that make films for HUMP! are making them for themselves. It’s what they think is sexy and what they enjoy doing.”

Then there’s the gathering of some truly divergent tastes. This inaugural national tour lineup features 15 short films, all-star resubmissions from the last several festivals. Hetero sex, gay sex, gay sex with E.T., lesbian pain sex play, nerdy evenings of Dungeons & Dragons that turn into orgies. “You’re going to see stuff if you were at home with your pants around your ankles,” Savage told the audience before the film rolls, “you would not click on.”

It’s easy for everyone to find laughs in the funny entries like The Legend of Gabe Harding about a gay “fluffer” in demand on straight porn sets or in a mockumentary about the taboo love between humans and centaurs, portrayed by puppets. Or poignancy in Krutch, proving to the world that people with disabilities have genitalia that work just fine. But what about when the subject is just hot sex, and of the type that the viewer wouldn’t otherwise be watching?

“A film shows hardcore queer fucking and the place erupts in cheers almost everybody’s straight,” Savage says. “And then some totally straight vanilla porn shows and the place erupts in cheers and the gay people are cheering for the straight porn and the straight people are cheering for the gay porn and the vanillas for the kinks and the kinks for the vanillas and the cisgendered for the trans and vice versa. And that’s how it really becomes the celebration of sexuality and everybody looking at, acknowledging, and celebrating and cheering for everybody else’s sexuality.”

If you missed it, you unfortunately missed it. The beauty of the project is that you won’t find the films the Internet anywhere. There’s no DVDs to be ordered. It’s for theater viewing only. You can plan a trip to New York City the last weekend of April when the HUMP! Tour stops there.

Savage does plan on making the tour an annual or biannual thing. Keep your eyes peeled for future years. Or for the more daring, get your scripts and video cameras ready.