Note: this article about HUMP! Fest in Long Beach contains content that some readers may find offensive.
Simply calling the HUMP! Fest an “adult film festival” is technically correct—but also wildly insufficient.
Because HUMP! has never really been about pornography in the way most people expect. It isn’t polished, commercial, airbrushed, or built around the usual industry shorthand of fantasy and excess. It is, instead, awkward. Funny. Occasionally beautiful. Frequently bizarre. And very intentionally human. Built entirely around amateur erotic films made by everyday people willing to put their fantasies, curiosities, humor, and bodies on screen, HUMP! Fest is, well, unlike any other film festival around.
Creator Dan Savage has long described the festival as a celebration of sexual diversity, but perhaps what it really celebrates is permission. The permission to watch. Laugh. Question. Squirm. And witness how many forms intimacy can take when ordinary people are the ones behind the camera.
And this touring short-film festival (with no film over five minutes in length) will return to Long Beach, where it first screened back in 2013, on Saturday, April 4.
What is HUMP! Fest and has it been to Long Beach before?
Created by provocateur and queer writer icon Dan Savage, the festival launched in Seattle and Portland in 2005 before growing into a national phenomenon—one where audiences showed up not just for sex, but for the communal strangeness of watching how other people imagine intimacy.
And that’s what continues to separate HUMP! from nearly every other thing that gets labeled adult entertainment: it asks viewers to surrender expectation.
Forget the silicone stereotypes. Forget the glossy production values, if those even exist anymore. And forget our digital obsession with it, where the blunt, mechanical pace that defines so much mainstream porn can be controlled by our fingertips. HUMP! thrives in the opposite direction. Toward absurdity. Vulnerability. Kink. Tenderness. Parody. Experimentation. And, occasionally, outright chaos.
What can viewers expect from HUMP! Fest in Long Beach?
The titles alone often tell the story, which will screen at the Art Theatre: “2 D***s, 1 Butt” is about the awkwardness of inviting a third person in on intimacy while exploring, well, double penetration. There are films that lean into comedy: “Bonk It!” is a porny mockery of the 90s kids toy. Fantasy: “C*MRAGS” finds two best friends meandering through dark rooms. Camp: “Magic Gloryhole” is about a woman who discovers a pink, fuzzy gloryhole that gives her every desire. Or complete unpredictability: “Starfish Sex Beetle” lets you witness a six-dimensional creature during its mating ritual.
Each one reminds viewers that sex on screen can be ridiculous and humanistic as often as it is erotic. That range is the point.
Some shorts are funny. A few are uncomfortable. Some are unexpectedly intimate. Some are explicitly hardcore. But all of them exist inside the same larger frame: an audience collectively reacting—laughing, gasping, cringing, applauding—to work that deliberately pushes beyond what they might choose alone at home.
HUMP! Fest is from the mind of one of the most defining gay writers of our era, Dan Savage.
As creator Dan Savage told me when the festival first came through Long Beach in 2013, HUMP! was never just about amateur porn.
“It’s rare for people to watch porn that takes them outside their comfort zones,” he said at the time. “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.”
That communal discomfort—and delight—is central to the festival’s identity.
The audience itself serves as jury, voting for the funniest, sexiest, kinkiest, and most memorable shorts, turning every screening into something closer to participatory theater than passive viewing.
And then, once the tour ends, the films are destroyed. That tradition has always been one of the festival’s most unusual gestures: a reminder that what viewers saw belonged to that room, that audience, that moment alone.
Which is perhaps why HUMP! has endured—not because it shocks, but because it reframes sex as something broader than spectacle: messy, diverse, playful, uncomfortable, inventive, and often unexpectedly funny.
HUMP! Fest will be hosted at the Art Theatre, located at E. 4th St., on Saturday, April 4. There are two screenings; one at 6:30PM and one at 9PM. Only those 18 years of age or older are permitted. For tickets, click here.
