Amateur Porn Film Festival Comes to Austin

This weekend – just when you thought temperatures were about to drop – Austin is going from hot to hotter, thanks to Dan Savage’s Hump! Tour. Come Saturday night, Savage’s amateur porn festival, featuring 18 homemade, low-budget films, takes over the Scoot Inn with two back-to-back screenings Saturday night.

Forget plastic body parts and degrading, overplayed “plotlines,” the Hump! Tour is all about “the real,” says executive producer Robert Crocker. “When viewing amateur porn, you see real people who are really into each other, not those being paid to perform onscreen. You see people in love, you see people doing what gets them off – not what some producer thinks will get people off. The resulting films are much more relatable for the audience even if the sexual acts displayed onscreen are not what the viewer would ever imagine doing.”

Of course, one of the highlights – or seat-shifting discomforts, you decide – is getting to watch porn in a room full of strangers. Think back to the dark days, before the Internet offered everything anyone could want at the click of a mouse. “The idea was to serve up a real and varied display of human sexuality and let people see porn they would not click on if they were home watching it on their computers,” explains Crocker.

And that’s exactly what they offer. As a growing festival that promotes real people and real relationships, the Hump! Tour’s selection committee aims to include a richly – or raunchily – diverse array of sexy shorts. This year’s final selection promises a little bit of somethin' somethin' for everyone. Queer films, straight films, kinky films – you name it.

“We don’t have a strict guideline for percentage of each, but instead look for great films that explore as many sexual preferences and kinks as possible,” says Crocker. “The goal being that the audience sees films exploring sex that may be outside of their comfort zones, be it gay men watching lesbian sex or straight folks watching gay porn.”

Savage, the well-known gay activist, writer, and author of the syndicated sex-advice column “Savage Love,” created the festival in 2005 with the goal of taking back porn from the porno industry. Every May, Hump! opens its call for submissions, and announces the year’s “bonus item” – i.e. random props to place in the film so that the committee knows which submissions were made specifically for the festival. Though not a requirement, it does give certain films an edge. 2015’s props were a hula hoop and a copy of Mike Huckabee’s God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy. Once the selection committee creates the list of films they find deserving of the Hump! Tour, Savage steps in and makes the final curation. This year, the Hump! Tour is turning people on and making them blush in 20 cities between the U.S. and Canada.

For those curious Austinites wondering what exactly to expect – the best advice is to expect only the unexpected. Crocker promises everything from “bedtime stories being enacted by three ‘bears,’ sibling sex set to music and animated with stop-action cross-stitch, and a karaoke party that erupts into an orgy.”

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Hump! Tour 2015 screens at the Scoot Inn Saturday, Sept. 26, at 8:30 & 10:45pm. For tickets and more info, see here.