- HUMP!goers voting for their favorite films after a screening at On the Boards this weekend.
Seattle’s tenth annual HUMP!—the Pacific Northwest’s biggest, best, and only amateur porn festival—opened to huge crowds at Seattle’s On the Boards on Thursday night. All of last weekend’s screenings were sold out by opening night. But there are still tickets available for some of this weekend’s screenings in Seattle. They’re going fast—get your tickets now. I hosted the Seattle screenings last weekend, and I will be in Portland to open HUMP! at Cinema 21 this weekend. So the lovely and talented and hilarious Cienna Madrid will be hosting the second weekend of HUMP! in Seattle—she’ll be reading the rules, giving you your shots, and warning you to turn your cell phones off and put them away. (Portland: All but four of this weekend’s fifteen screenings are already sold out! Get your tickets now!)
The best part of HUMP! for me? Besides getting to meet the filmmakers and performers? Besides getting to hang out with the awesome staff at On the Boards and Cinema 21? Besides getting to knock back a Jack Daniel’s shot or three before every screening?
Getting to watch the audience from the projection booth.
We keep an eye on the audience to make sure no one takes out a cell phone during a screening. We promise HUMP! performers that we’ll do our best to make sure they’re porn stars for the weekend at HUMP!, not porn stars forever on the internet, so there are no phones in hands during HUMP!. (And no Google glassholes allowed!) But it almost never happens—people rarely take out their phones during HUMP! (And when it does happen it’s always someone who is drunk and forgot about the rule, or grabbed their phone without thinking when it vibrated; it’s never someone trying to make a HUMP! bootleg.) But here’s what we see at every single screening: straight guys watching gay porn, gay guys watching dyke porn, cissies watching trans porn, vanilla people watching kink porn, kinksters watching vanilla porn.
At first people can only see the differences. Many people are thrown back in their seats when they see something that “takes them outside their porn comfort zones” for the very first time. (Gay boys watching a giant tongue lapping a giant vulva; straight boys watching a giant cock pounding a dude’s giant hole; vanilla folks watching hardcore BDSM.) All anyone can see at first are the differences: the different plumbing, the different bodies, the different combos. But before the show is over—before the show is half over—everyone is cheering and clapping, and no one is flinching or being thrown back in their seats anymore. Because by the halfway mark everyone is seeing the similarities. The plumbing, bodies, and combos may be different, but the desire, the lust, the passion, the vulnerability, the humor, the joy—all of those things are the same, we all have those things in common, and everyone can suddenly see it. It’s magical.
Anyway… the ballot box at the top of the post? It’s not our only ballot box. Here’s the other one…
HUMP! continues this weekend at On the Boards in Seattle, Cinema 21 in Portland, and the Capitol Theater in Olympia. Tickets and info here.