It’s Saturday night, and I’m getting ready to watch some quality porn. So is the man next to me. Same goes for the woman next to him. In fact, the whole audience seated in the Barrymore Theater is ready to watch more than an hour of porn with me.
We’ve all come in eager anticipation of the HUMP! Film Festival, as curated by gay activist and journalist Dan Savage. In layman’s terms, HUMP! is a grunting, cum-soaked celebration of human sexuality. It’s a series of short pornographic films spanning multiple mediums and proudly displaying all sorts of bodies, genders and sexual expressions.
The experience was, in many ways, exactly as one would expect it to be. The evocative playbill attracted Madison’s most progressive, a crowd easily mistaken for a group of Portlandia extras. Middle-aged men flaunt their leather finery with pristine utility kilts, artsy postgrads with septum piercings mill about in the lobby and older men with tasteful haircuts wipe craft IPA foam from the tips of their well-maintained mustaches.
What follows is a general schedule of my wild ride into the cinematic bone zone. As a disclaimer, times are approximate — phones are very strictly prohibited during the show, so I cannot guarantee pinpoint chronology for the following events.
7:30 p.m. — Lights dim and show begins.
7:39 p.m. — Audience roars with laughter as Beethoven’s Stiff showcases various genitalia playing instruments in rhythm with classical music (including an erect penis stroking a violin and a trumpet inserted into an ass).
7:46 p.m. — Pensive silence permeates the theater while FUCK presents a passionate poem about love-making accompanied with artistic black and white nude footage.
7:54 p.m. — Audience gets groovy to the tune of Twincest, a music video promoting the saucy benefits of sex with your twin sibling. Production effort is at a max here, as the film illustrates the sexual acts using animated cross-stitched family portraits.
8:03 p.m. — A man wearing a blonde Goldilocks wig collects a phenomenal amount of semen in his beard, a breathtaking seminal downpour gladly donated by three burly fellows surrounding him. Bedtime Stories leaves me questioning if this is the same version of Goldilocks that I read in grade school.
8:21 p.m. — Everybody’s hearts melt for The Glory Hole, a genuinely heartwarming story told by a gay couple about how they met some 20 years ago through the eponymous opening.
8:33 p.m. — Anal Alley marks a comedic zenith of the night, advertising a unique take on bowling in which a man lays on his back and clenches his anus to expel an enormous rubber butt plug, ejecting the rectal projectile with admirable accuracy at a group of bowling pins.
8:45 p.m. — Show is over.
All in all, I found that watching porn in a room full of strangers to be a very pleasant experience. HUMP! unabashedly explores rather niche areas of human sexuality, in the same way that the participants onscreen unabashedly explored each others’ nether cavities. It tackles the issue with tact and humor, expanding our sexual horizons in a humorous and welcome way.
The porn certainly wasn’t conventional, and in fact, much of the material displayed that night would be a catastrophic failure if employed for masturbatory endeavors. But HUMP! would have proved to be a janitorial nightmare if it intended to get a whole theater full of people to start masturbating. HUMP! is an entertaining ambassador of the erotically obscure, a champion of the sexual underdogs. I felt more open-minded and educated because of it.
I left the Barrymore with visions of puckered buttholes dancing in my head, and I didn’t even care.
