Dan Savage has been a sex worker now for the past 25 years. Not the usual kind that stands on windy street corners late at night. In fact he does it all fully clothed sitting at a desk. Ever since he told his friend Tim Keck that the weekly newspaper he was starting in Seattle would need a sex-advice columnist and inadvertently talked himself into a job, he has been talking to people straight about sex. Actually not that straight as what he brought to the job was a gay man's perceptive and sensibility that made him an instant hit with heteros and homos alike.
Now as a highly successful journalist, author, theater director, TV pundit and radio broadcast Savage has gained a remarkable reputation as both an activist and a highly and very visible opinionated leading member of the LGBT community. queerguru takes it's hat off to Savage in particular for co-creating the It Gets Better Project to help gay teenagers in light of the suicide of 15-year-old Billy Lucas, who was bullied for his perceived sexual orientation.
Savage hasn't forgotten about sex either. Eleven years ago he had an unconventional idea in his column Savage Love and he asked people to send him homemade dirty movies, and surprisingly, they did. Before you could say 'Linda Lovelace', his mailbox was brimming with films so hot, so hilarious, and diverse that he felt compelled to share them with the world, and so Hump! was born.
Hump! Film Festival which tours across the US is the only public place to see creative, homegrown porn. The films cover a very wide spectrum in every sense of the word and include all body sizes, shapes, ages, colors, sexualities, genders, kinks, and fetishes, and all under the welcoming umbrella of sex-positivity and sexual expression. Savage who acts as Editor and Curator of the Festival Program stresses that first and foremost Hump! is about acceptance and redefining conventional porn, with more than a smattering of humor in some of the pieces.
Savage adds "We bill HUMP! as an amateur porn festival, but it's more than that. It's rare for people to watch porn that takes them outside their comfort zones— it's rare for people to watch porn that, if they were home alone in front of the computer, they wouldn't choose to click on and watch. At HUMP! straight people watch gay porn, vanilla people watch kinky porn, gay people watch lesbian porn. And people laugh, they gasp, sometimes they cover their eyes. But at the end of every film people clap and cheer."
We've been privy to seeing a preview of this years Festival Tour which kicks off in Pittsburgh next week and were shocked at how fresh and funny ..... and downright sexy it was ..... and Savage is right, there were times we really did have to cover our eyes.
For details of the Tour : 16 Cities so far and more being added all the time click here
