grateful for HUMP!

This post is about pornography.

Okay so I'm a huge slacker who did not post over the weekend so today you get three days worth of posts. Isn't that wonderful? Let's do it!

This weekend, I finally attended the HUMP! film festival which is something that I have wanted to do ever since I learned of its existence. HUMP! is a film festival in Seattle and Portland hosted and curated by the legendary Dan Savage of "Savage Love". The premise of the festival is that it is comprised of submissions of short films (5 minutes or fewer) made by amateur filmmakers and ordinary people who want to be porn stars for a day. At the end of the festival, all films are destroyed in front of the audience and the grand prize winner of the festival is awarded $2,000.

The idea behind the festival is that it stars regular people of all shapes, sizes, colors, orientations, pairings, kinks, and genders to do whatever they think is sexiest and share that with the world. There are categories other than sexy, as well. You can vote for: best humor, best kink, and the overall best in show. At the end of the film, you turn in your ballot with your votes and after the completion of the entire festival, the awards are given to the filmmakers.

Now, how was it? InFUCKINGcredible (pun intended). Seriously, this is a must-see for anyone interested in this kind of thing. It was sexy, it was funny, it was sweet, it was impressive, it was frightening, it was sad (one of them actually made me cry). It was an entire year of emotional experiences in about 90 minutes. I'm serious, I've never had a film-viewing experience like that before. It was just real, man; real people, being real, making me feel like its okay to be real too. So amazing.

Anyway, here's a breakdown of some of my favorite films.

The first film was completely metaphorical done with a goofy soundtrack and brightly colored backgrounds. It starred such acts as poking at flowers with floppy hot dogs, pressing calculator buttons with a peeled banana, spraying a girl with balloons stuffed in her shirt, and squirting frosting at a disco ball. It was fucking hilarious and so well-done. Like seriously high-quality filming.

Next was one called "Desert Pussy". It was pretty cute. It was just a couple having sex in the desert in the middle of nowhere. They tried to add funny banter here and there and film their shadows at one point. Tricia and I rated it m for "meh".

(I'm not going to remember all of these but I will do my best).

There was a very strange one called "A Sunday Hike" which was a guy running through the woods who is attacked by a sexy/ scary forest elf who scares him back to her lair and possibly has sex with him while the other elves looked on but that was unclear because the other elves were only there for a few frames and then were gone. So I don't actually know what the point of them were. Anyway, the cool thing was it turned out the running guy was actually trans and where you expected to see a penis, there was definitely a vagina. And the forest elf had a shaved head except these super long lime green braids coming out of the top. Anyway it was cool but the story line was confusing so it was also a "meh".

Okay there was this one that I was so mad at for enjoying. It was just a hot dude and a chick who meet at a laundry mat and go do it in the alley. Like c'mon, just serve me a bowl of vanilla ice cream why don't you? But alas, I voted that one in the "sexiest" category and felt like a real jerk for doing it. Then I felt like even more of a jerk when at the end of the film, they reveal that they were a married couple who was just playing a sex game. Ugh. Sometimes I hate myself. Anyway, moving on.

One of the best (and the one I voted for funniest) began with a couple talking about the latest Lyft ride one of them had taken. He was telling his (boyfriend? husband? friend?) about how he hooked up with the Lyft driver by using a special "code". He said, "All you have to do is take out your junk and move it like this: up, up, down, down, left-right, left-right, and say start, and then it's on." They pick out their favorite Lyft driver (Javier), get in the car, and with much trepidation, the inexperienced guy initiates the code. We then flash into the world's most gratuitous threesome sex scene you have ever seen in your life. Like, they are doing things that should not be humanly possible and they quickly cut from one to the next as the acts become more gratuitous and obscene. After a couple of minutes of this, you see them booted into the road, half-dressed and completely confused about where they are and how to get home. With a half smile, one looks at the other and asks, "You wanna get a Lyft?" I think I just about died.

The one that made me cry was about a mattress. It began and ended with a woman staring a worn out old mattress propped up in an alley with that look on her face that you know only comes from one thing in the world. That determined, heartbroken, furious, absolutely decimated look that hides behind a mask that looks like mild consternation. The look that happens after a breakup. The film flashes back to the day they met, the fun sex they had that night, the first Christmas, the playful wrestling, the mild kink, the sweet cuddling, the drunken humping, the first fight, the mini-breakup, the rebound she has with a girl from the bar, the makeup sex, the hate sex, the botched proposal, the desperately-trying-to-fuck-the-love-back-into-each-other-but-that's-never-going-to-happen sex and finally laying on the mattress alone furiously balling her eyes out. I mean, it was a lot. By the time we get back to the woman in the present staring at the mattress I am destroyed. It was made all the poignant by the glass bottle she throws at it that ineffectually bounces off and just sort of lands on the ground and rolls away. That one really fucked me up. Beautiful. I voted it "best in show" with no competition.

There were some other honorable mentions that aren't really worth their own paragraph. There was the couple that took turns penetrating each other with an eggplant, a brutal dystopian bondage hunter one, a beautiful one that involved really impressive modern dancing, a funny one about a girl masturbating over the amazing coupons that she clips out of the newspaper, a very strange sparkle elf kink that involved a pink, embroidered gimp mask, and some really uncomfortable ones that wanted to be a political film but were doing it in the form of pornography that just made you go, "yuck".

Basically HUMP! is my new favorite film festival and I will 100% be going back every single year from now on. Tricia had just as much fun as I did and we agreed on all the best and worst ones. I just love seeing that kind of inclusion, and freedom, and artistic expression all in one place. I think perhaps the cherry on top was the signs they had hanging in the bathrooms:

If you are concerned that someone is not using the correct bathroom please see note below: 

1. Mind your own business, they know better than you do. 


I love Portland. Have I mentioned that I love Portland? Because I love Portland.

<3