Image courtesy of HUMP!

Before the invention of the VCR, if you wanted to watch pornography it was going to be a communal experience. Now, sex columnist and co-creator of the It Gets Better Project Dan Savage is inviting D.C. to “watch porn the way your grandparents did” when his HUMP! Film Festival returns this weekend.

The festival “started as a joke,” says Savage, who put an ad in the newspaper for homemade erotica more than a decade ago in Seattle. “We didn’t know if anyone would want to do it. We were shocked by what we got.”

And so began HUMP! Three years ago, Savage took the festival national, screening the best films throughout the country—including in D.C.

While pornography is the organizing theme for the submissions, “in a lot of videos, nobody’s naked. It really runs the gamut from comedy, erotica, soft-core, hard-core. It’s more of a celebration,” says Savage, who interrupts himself to ask “Is that cheesy? I don’t want to engage in an act of auto-fellatio over the phone.”

Whether it’s a self-BJ or not, one of the participating filmmakers agrees with the sentiment.

Jenna, whose film “Level Up” won this year’s Best in Show award, says that growing up, “I was fed the same heaping spoonful of bullshit that many like me have been fed-that porn is just wrong, shameful, and dirty.” She likes that HUMP! “makes adjectives like ‘dirty’ a positive thing.”

Unlike most amateur porn, these videos will not make their way onto the internet. This promised anonymity opens up participation to folks who might otherwise beg off. That means that catching HUMP! when it comes to town is essentially your only chance to see this hour and a half of unique porn, from 50’s-esque educational video “Let’s Try To Fuck” to a version of “Cake Boss” you’ll never find on Food Network.

And in ensuring that no one in the audience is filming on their phones, Savage has gotten to see their reactions to the festival’s entries.

“At first, the wind is knocked out of people,” he says. “You have gay guys watching cunnilingus, straight bros watching butt sex. All they can see is the difference—’that’s not my thing, that’s not my plumbing type.’ And then there’s this shift to seeing what we all share: lust, vulnerability, desire, sense of humor. There’s a moment where the audience snaps in and that’s a beautiful, fun moment.”

Savage says the thing that makes HUMP! so special is that you’re watching porn you didn’t click on yourself.

Jenna says that attending is “a unique opportunity to not only mentally explore your own sexual boundaries, but to be exposed to sexual kinks and arenas you’ve probably never even thought about.”

“Level Up,” for instance, is a pornographic video game parody about fighting the patriarchy.

For star Amory Jane, “we wanted to make the kind of porn we’d like to watch! Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of films out there that include things like pansexuality, politics, humor, and mixed-gender, bisexual group sex.”

Savage says he’s been heartened by how the submissions differ from conventional offerings. “When HUMP! first started, friends and lovers aped the conventions of mainstream porn, and the audience didn’t respond.”

Another trend in many of the 22 videos is former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s book God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy. In the first video, “Hysterical Bullshit,” a woman in a blazer reads aloud from the book as it becomes clear there’s something else going on below. Including Huckabee’s tome was a form of “extra credit” for submissions.

“Politicians are constantly wanting to insert themselves into our sex lives,” says Savage. “My feeling is that if they want to be all up in our sex lives and our porn, we should return the favor.”

When HUMP! was accepting videos for this year’s festival, the governor was firing up his bid for the White House. Now, he’s has been out of the presidential race for seemingly an eternity and Savage says he’s “delighted by his diminished relevance.”

And the multi-genre approach might lead you to feel some surprising emotions during the screening. At last year’s HUMP! in Baltimore, the film “Glory Hole” details how one couple met in, well, a glory hole.

“We don’t associate hard cocks being brandished on screen with people being moved,” says Savage.

We do now.

HUMP! will be screening at the Black Cat on Friday May 6 and Saturday, May 7 at 7 and 9:30 p.m. Tickets are $20.