Since 2005, Dan Savage’s HUMP! Film Festival has been bringing a new and unusual type of porn to the people: homegrown, artisanal, ultra-heady pornography. In this day in age, we’re steering away from the mass produced, the artificial and the generic, well, everything—so why not do it with our porn? We are the Millennials, hear us roar. We want to buy local. Give us our small batch porn.
The HUMP! Film Festival is a contest for the most creative, hottest and unusual styles of pornography, made by people just like you and me. All of the submissions are less than five minutes long, so if something’s making you squeamish—or horny—hang tight, it’ll be over soon. The winners are hand selected and taken on the road, touring around the country and showing at indie theaters from Seattle to Philly. This hand curated menagerie of smut is funny, touching (hehe), endearing, sexy and—at times—even educational. And, while seeing closeup shots of genitals on the big screen is sometimes slightly jarring, HUMP! is entertaining as hell.
HUMP! features all sorts of curious kinks, hilarious scenarios, naughty animation, colorful music videos, gay, straight, queer, trans, black, white and brown sex. Mouth stuff, hand stuff, genital stuff, butt stuff. S&M, BDSM, bondage, hot wax, fire, indoor sex, outdoor sex, twosomes, threesomes, fivesomes, whatever. Stuff you couldn’t dream up if you tried. Stuff you’d already dreamt up and tried not to. HUMP! is ultra sex positive, encouraging all walks of life to flaunt it, be proud of who they are and show us how it’s done.
Each year, HUMP! has a few suggested themes that are reoccurring throughout all of the videos and this year, those were hula hoops and Mike Huckabee’s book Gods, Guns, Grits, And Gravy (because poking fun at Republicans is fun for this festival—the more vulgar, the better). Highlights from this year’s HUMP! included an erotic reading (all the while trying to keep a straight face) of the aforementioned book, while something sexy was clearly going on beneath the table. A film entitled Cuckold realistically portrayed just how emotionally complicated having a threesome is. Film Bonoir depicted a black and white dick-puppet private investigative drama (googly eyes and all). The Collector was a deadpan comedy skit about an all-American, regular guy who loves to garden… and who collects cum (this film could’ve used subtitles, as your could barely make out the dialogue over the roaring laughter of the audience).
My personal favorite was arguably the strangest, entitled Lube Dispenser. There were animal masks, plastic bags over heads and outfits made of ACE bandages… and fisting. Level Up was a Mario-inspired journey through an empowering feminist video game, where a couple of fairies fought and defeated the patriarchy, which led to a really hot group sex scene. And there was a Dick Song that will probably be stuck in everyone’s heads while they’re at work all week, silently laughing to themselves while recalling the Peter Gabriel-style music video that had accompanied it.