This weekend, sex-positive film festival Cinekink will bring two nights of cinematic inquiry into spanking, furries, and compulsive eating to the District. For D.C.'s closet fetishist population, the film festival will also provide a convenient pretense for discreetly attending a BDSM dungeon party.

Cinekink kicks off in D.C. this Friday with a viewing of the festival's most popular fetish-related shorts; on Saturday, the festival will present a series of female domination-based films followed by Alexandria native Zach Clark's nurse-dominatrix feature "Modern Love is Automatic." Following each night of screenings, Cinekink will host a $40 "play party" at Southeast D.C. haunt The Crucible,  D.C.’s only “for-profit Pansexual Alternate Lifestyles play event."

That little arrangement—come for the cinema, stay for the pansexual alternative lifestyle—is a boon for D.C. fetishists, who must constantly negotiate their sexualities within the confines of the District's buttoned-up social mores.

D.C.'s fetish scene "is definitely more of an underground kind of thing," explains Cinekink organizer Lisa Vandever. "There’s certainly a crowd for this in D.C., but it’s more secretive. You know: A lot of government workers."

Vandever's promotional duties for Cinekink give her a rare glimpse into the depths of D.C.'s repression. In cities like Las Vegas, where fetish activities are more openly accepted, "people are more comfortable announcing and sharing the event on Facebook," Vandever says. In D.C., word about Cinekink is more likely to spread through anonymous, fetish-specific sites like Fetlife, which protect festival attendees from the judging eyes of employers, neighbors, and family members. “The anonymity thing is sort of a truism in D.C. in general,” says Vanderveer. “You hear a lot about people’s private dungeons.”

For fetishists interested in exploring a more public dungeon scenario, Cinekink offers a perfectly vanilla alibi: "The festival is a nice opportunity for someone who is kind of curious, but doesn’t want to just walk into a dungeon," Vandever says. "There will be plenty of people there who are just in it for the movies. And if someone does see you there? That means that they were there, too."