The world was very different when Dan Savage introduced an amateur porn film festival to curious Seattleites in 2005. 

That same year, George W. Bush began his second term as the President of the United States, North Korea announced they had nuclear weapons, and Hurricane Katrina devastated the US Gulf Coast. That was also the year the first video was uploaded to YouTube. Online streaming services were distant glimmers of possibility. 

In fact, all HUMP! submissions that year—Savage remembers receiving about 50 total—were sent to the Stranger offices via mail on VHS tapes, and all evidence was destroyed after the final screening.

Now, HUMP! is held twice a year and shown in more than 40 cities around the globe. Participants have upped their production and imagination, and, once COVID-19 hit, they also signed release forms allowing their work to be shown in a streaming library so fans can HUMP! at home. (And yup, they get a cut of the profits.)

Just before launching HUMP!’s 20th anniversary in Seattle at On the Boards on February 14, I chatted with Savage about some of the fest’s best and most memorable moments so far.

Do you remember what kind of response you got from the public when you announced the first HUMP!? Seattle is progressive, but I’d imagine there was some pearl-clutching or, at least, skepticism. 

The skepticism initially was inside the building. It was a couple of years before we got permission to do the call for submissions in the paper. We made the announcement not sure we would get any submissions. And we got a lot that first year! And then we booked the theater, like, “Okay, now we have to do this!” [Laughs] Then the question became, “Would people come sit next to strangers in a movie theater to watch pornography the way our grandparents did in dirty movie theaters?” The very first screenings sold out immediately—we had to add more. It was a hit from the very first year.

It was really interesting to watch what changed over the years. In the first few years, a lot of filmmakers aped the conventions of commercial pornography. You could see what audiences responded to, and it wasn’t that. Audiences responded to unique, idiosyncratic, really personal, and unexpected [films], and funny was a big thing. If you could make explicit pornography with a sense of humor—which you don’t see in porn much but we see in our own sex lives often—those were the films audiences voted for and gave awards to. It was the audience that curated HUMP! those first few years and made it what it is now, which is interesting, funny, touching, crazy, shocking stuff you won’t see anywhere else.

There have been a LOT of really memorable videos. Do any specific ones stand out? 

Breakfast in Bed is the one that people come up to me on the street and talk to me about, which is where the boy put a stick of cold butter in his butt, went grocery shopping, came home, made breakfast for his boyfriend, and then squatted over the toast and pushed out the now melted butter to butter his boyfriend’s toast. You saw it go from butt to toast to delivered to boyfriend to into boyfriend’s mouth in one continuous shot. People went bananas. And some people confronted me in the lobby because we have three rules at HUMP! about the content: No children, no animals, no poop. People were like, “That was poop!” Pooped doesn’t mean poop. By poop, we mean the substance, the noun, not the verb. So we allowed it.

There was a film one year where there were these hot young people who covered a room with plastic and were hitting each other in the face with pies, and that was all that happened. People were like, "That's not porn." But that's a kink. That's somebody's porn, and they shared it with you.

There was a woman jumping on a trampoline one year in a film called Go Ahead a Pee and she was just jumping on a trampoline in a gray leotard, with a voiceover that said, "Go ahead, pee." And suddenly, the gray leotard was much darker in the crotch, and the darkness ran down the legs. And that was, for somebody, that was erotic and their porn, and they shared it with us. And that's how the festival sort of became this celebration of diversity, but also this thing that became an engine of understanding. What I love, in an audience full of people—and it should be seen with an audience full of people—you have gay guys watching cunnilingus, and you have straight boys watching men have sex, you have cis people watching porn made by trans and genderqueer that is not made to please the cis market, you have vanilla people watching kink porn ... everybody's watching porn that, if they were home sitting in front of the computer masturbating, they would not click on. And what happens is so amazing to watch. For the first seven or eight films, all everybody can see is what's not theirs. People are a little knocked back in their seats. But after the first seven or eight films, everybody's cheering for every film. Everybody suddenly sees what is theirs in every film, because sexual interest, sexual orientation, gender identity, kinks, all of that's a thin veneer of difference on top of this insanely thick layer of what we all have in common, which is desire, vulnerability, a need to connect, a sense of humor. And there's this moment where you can see the audience shift. That's such a magic moment.

I wonder how many people then end up discovering kinks they hadn't known about themselves...

Or it gives people the opportunity to pretend they didn't know they were into something and initiate a conversation with their partner and blame it on HUMP! [Laughs] I've heard from a lot of people over the years who had a conversation with their partner or lover after seeing HUMP!, after seeing how crazy everyone else can be and how diverse sexual desire and expression can be. They felt less self-conscious about their unique thing or their kink and were able to talk about it in a way they couldn't before. 

I've had people come to HUMP! who've pulled me aside in the lobby to say they were there under duress. They don't like porn, they think porn is really dehumanizing, but their friends talked them into it, and they came, and they wanted to express their annoyance to me personally that they had to be there [laughs]. There was this one woman, 10 or 12 years ago, at On the Boards, who said that to me before the show. "I don't like porn. It's dehumanizing." And she came up [to me] after the screening to say she loved it. And then she was in the festival the next year. She went, in a calendar year, from "I hate porn" to being in a porn film in HUMP! The porn you see at HUMP! is humanizing, it's very deeply humanizing. I loved that woman's arc.

Okay, no spoilers, but I heard this year’s lineup includes the phrase “polar bear foreskin.” You said no animals!

There are no animals in HUMP! This is not even a furry, it’s not somebody who’s into anthropomorphic play who identifies as a polar bear. This is polar bear porn that you’ve never seen before, and even after 20 years of curating HUMP! that I did not see coming. This is the film that had us all on the floor.

2025 HUMP! Part One opens at On the Boards on February 14, with 6:30 and 9 pm showings every Friday and Saturday through March 15. Tickets are on sale now at humpfilmfest.com.