Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens: Ecosexuals

Since 2002, multimedia artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have been exploring love, sex, and queer ecologies through filmmaking, performance, art exhibitions, activism, a book (Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover), and even walking rituals. It’s an unusual œuvre for a rather unlikely duo. Stephens has been a professor and two-time chair of the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz for more than thirty years. Sprinkle comes from a much different world that’s given her a higher profile. Starting in the ’70s, she was a sex worker and porn star for more than two decades, as well as a feminist performance artist and “pleasure activist.” (She also holds a PhD in human sexuality and has been inducted into all four adult film Halls of Fame.) The co-creators’ latest film Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency is billed as “a joyous ecosexual documentary born from the ashes of California’s devastating fires.” It’s an apt if brain-twisting description of this conclusion to Stephens and Sprinkle’s trilogy of queer environmental docs, beginning with 2013’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (the first queer environmental feature documentary, according to Susan Stryker), which was followed by 2019’s Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure.

To read my interview visit The Gay & Lesbian Review.