Here’s your chance to see the Hump!
A touring festival of amateur porn is coming to Brooklyn for the first time on Aug. 28. Seattle’s annual Hump! Festival has showcased regular-person smut since 2005, and its traveling version stuffs 18 of the festival’s best entries into a single steamy screening. The curator of the festival, sex-advice columnist Dan Savage, says that the show offers up “crazy, fun personal porn.”
The often-humorous scenes of rumpy-pumpy cover a broad spectrum of sexualities, genders, and kinks, and Savage says that people grow to love the variety during the course of the festival.
“All anyone ever sees in the beginning is the difference, and about a third of the way through everyone is relaxed and cheering,” said Savage. “At some point everyone is tapped into what is exactly the same.”
Despite the diversity of creators, Savage and the team who choose the films (“the hump jury”) often find submissions trending towards a particular theme each year.
“We get these zeitgeisty things, like one year we got like five or six James Bond parodies. This year it was a lot of lesbian films using fruit and vegetables as both sex toys and metaphors,” Savage said. “It was a crowded field for mango in p—- this year.”
Organizers want the audience to have fun, says Savage, but will crack the whip on anyone who violates theater etiquette. Each screening enforces a strict no-photography policy, as part of the festival’s commitment to keeping its pornographic participants off of the Internet.
“It’s become a little more difficult in recent years, but there really are no exceptions,” said Savage. “If you take out your phone, we’ll grab it and turn it off, and before we get there, the audience is usually trying to grab the phone too.”
Hump! Festival at Roulette [509 Atlantic Ave. at Third Avenue in Boerum Hill, (917) 267–0363, www.roule
