Last weekend, the Portland Mercury hosted its first iteration of HUMP!, an amateur porn festival. I went and I saw, and there were buttholes, penises, vaginas, yarn dolls, anal hooks and Larry King. And more. Together.
And maybe that all just sounds so damned depraved, but I have to say, of all the times I’ve viewed porn in my life, it was by far the least sexualized. There are a lot of reasons this was the case.
The whole atmosphere of the festival was designed to make everyone, from the performers to the audience, feel as comfortable as possible. Its sex-positive mission created a fun atmosphere. “Asshole comments” were strictly prohibited—cell phones and cameras too. (“Porn stars for a weekend, not for a lifetime,” Dan Savage said.) We were packed into Cinema 21 so tightly that I would venture to guess no one was masturbating.
My point is this: The porn in this context was not a sexual stimulant—it was entertainment.
Considering the breadth of different fluid-exchanging scenarios presented on film, this was a good circumstance.
Nowhere else in my life besides HUMP! will I encounter so much gay sex in dumpsters, sadomasochist paingasms or things that aren’t penises going into bodily orifices. (Or cute lesbians riding bikes and getting into bed together.)
This is another reason why the festival doesn’t really function as porn viewing in the traditional sense: There isn’t a person in the world that could find all of its variations equally enticing. The experience isn’t so much desensitizing as much as it is overwhelming, which is sort of the same thing. Over the 90 minutes of short films, I stopped caring about which parts were going into what other part on which gender, and I just sort of took it all in.
You know that saying about different strokes? Well, that definitely applies here. Different people get off on different things and that’s cool, but I only get off on certain things, which is also cool. HUMP! is not really about giving anybody pleasure, it’s just about showing that it’s OK to seek pleasure in whatever (consensual) form it takes.
Another defining aspect of the whole HUMP! experience was the amateur quality of most of the submissions. Turns out, people in Portland and Seattle (where the festival got its start five years ago at The Stranger newspaper) are pretty damn attractive and creative.
All of the submissions that made it had a sort of gimmick or story that went along with them, and some didn’t even have full nudity. A lot were just funny, sex-related spoofs. Maybe this says something about the overgrown small-town nature of Portland, but I am an acquaintance to at least a few people that “starred” in the festival.
Yes, there were some big penises and big breasts, but the body types were fairly diverse, if mainly concentrated on people in their 20s.
What HUMP! really confirmed, I suppose, is that Portlanders, at least those who run in my social and political circles, are pretty OK about different expressions of sexuality. It is not immoral—as the lone protestor outside of the theater suggested—but instead a recognition of collective humanity.
We’re different, dude. Get over it.