By Mara Math
In Humpday, two longtime straight male friends just reunited dare each other to have gay sex on camera for the amateur erotic film fest of the title, a dare that will test the boundaries of friendship, marriage, and self-definition. San Francisco Bay Guardian talked with director Lynn Shelton.
San Francisco Bay Guardian: What inspired the inventive plot?
Lynn Shelton: The starting point was actor Mark Duplass. I was looking for an idea for a film to center around him. And then when a straight filmmaker friend came back from Hump! (formerly Humpday), the real amateur porn festival in Seattle, and he was just fascinated by his first look at gay porn, and I thought it was really amusing and sweet. And I started thinking about the relationships between straight guys and gayness, and the tension inherent in super-passionate but platonic straight male friendships. There’s this low-grade homophobia — they don’t hate gay people but they still have residual anxiety about their own relationship to homosexuality. I find that very poignant, and I also loved the absurd deliciousness of taking two straight guys who are being so straight — it’s really about the extremities of straightness, in a way — that they can’t back down from this dare that neither of them wants to carry out … and that in fact is to be gay for a day.