Dan Savage Can Show Dirty Movies In Pittsburgh

Dan Savage's Hump Tour has been rolling across this great land of ours, bringing the best in amateur adult videos to cities all over America, but it looked as though Pittsburgh wouldn't get to share in the fun thanks to a bunch of cock-blocking douchebags.

According to the Pittsburgh City Paper (link below), cooler heads seem to have prevailed, and a change of venue has enabled the tour to roll on. Hooray for common sense!

...the festival will not be appearing at Dormont's Hollywood Theater, as originally planned, because of objections raised by borough officials last week. Organizers have found a new venue for the June 13-15 event — Lawrenceville's newly opened Row House Cinema — but say the local controversy was unexpected. Since the festival's founding in 2005, "We have never had a complaint from a city in nine years," says Robert Crocker, executive producer of the Hump! Tour.

"The films are explicit but also very artful and real," says Crocker. "The ‘porn' label is there due to the sexual nature of the shorts, but it's not really porn. It's much more an artful and real expression of human sexuality." Borough officials in Dormont, however, didn't see it that way.

I can't wait to hear what those damnable borough officials had to say about such level-headed reasoning. 

Borough Council President Bill McCartney says he doesn't know how many citizens raised objections to Hump!, and says it isn't "relevant" anyway. "Does a theft constitute a theft even if no one sees it?" he asks. "Does a violation of a code constitute a violation even if no one reports it?" He cites another local ordinance that asserts, "It shall be unlawful for any person to promote pornography. The description of the Hump! festival uses the term ‘porn star' in its publicity," McCartney notes.

Ah, come on Bill McCartney, you're clearly trying to argue semantics here. At least he didn't use the "what am I supposed to tell my children" excuse. And as they say, the show must go on, which it will.

Via Pittsburgh City Paper