Dan Savage’s Amateur Porn Festival, HUMP!, is Coming to Brooklyn
In 2005, Dan Savage, best known for his syndicated sex column Savage Love and for co-founding the It Gets Better Project, convinced normal (i.e., non-porn star) people across the Pacific Northwest to submit their five-minute dirty home movies to be screened at the very first HUMP! Festival. These amateur porn stars competed for big cash prizes, comforted by the knowledge that their sex tapes would all be destroyed on the final night of the festival.
It turned out a lot of people really liked the watching amateur porn in a theater full of strangers. They didn’t have to delete their browser histories afterward or anything. HUMP! was such a hit that it went national last year, with the Best of HUMP! Tour hosting sold-out screenings across the country.
This weekend, The Best of HUMP! is coming to Roulette, in Boerum Hill, with an action-packed program featuring last year’s winning shorts and past favorites (not all the films were destroyed). Titles include Humparaoke, in which “Attractive people sing karaoke and somehow end up in a big, naked shower orgy lip-synching into a Hitachi Magic Wand!”; Beethoven’s Stiff, in which “a penis conducts Beethoven’s Fifth, a Vagina plays a French Horn;” and FUCK, “a moving and erotic spoken-word monologue filmed in black and white.” To protect filmmakers from winding up on the Internet, each screening enforces a strict no-photography policy.
The shorts “run the gamut of sexual styles: straight, gay, lesbian, transgender… every color in the sexual rainbow,” Savage says in a statement. “We bill HUMP! as an amateur porn festival. But it’s more than that. It’s rare for people to watch porn that takes them outside their comfort zones—it’s rare for people to watch porn that, if they were home alone in front of the computer, they wouldn’t choose to click on and watch. At HUMP! straight people watch gay porn, vanilla people watch kinky porn, gay people watch lesbian porn. And people laugh, they gasp, sometimes they cover their eyes. But at the end of every film people clap and cheer. It’s moving and wonderful and newcomers don’t expect it. The whole festival is a celebration of sexual diversity.”
Here, the mockumentary “Mythical Proportions,” a popular favorite from last year’s festival.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSWIfToGGsk
Hump! Festival happens at Roulette (509 Atlantic Ave. at Third Avenue in Boerum Hill) Aug. 28 at 7 pm and 9 pm and Aug. 29 at 6 pm, 8 pm, and 10 pm. $25.