Whoever says that anyone in a relationship for 23 years can’t learn something new about their partner has never met Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens.
As I started my interview with Sprinkle, the legendary adult film actress, performance artist, and sex work advocate, and her wife and collaborator, UC Santa Cruz professor Stephens, I asked them each to share their pronouns. When Annie (she/her) heard Beth request she/her, they/them, her eyes grew wide.
“He’s using ‘they,’” Annie warned. “Great,” Beth replied. “OK, great,” Annie said.
“You can use whatever you want,” I put in, trying to smooth it over. “Tell me your preference.”
“I did,” Beth said curtly before bursting into laughter.
There was a lot of laughter during my conversation with these two. Annie and Beth co-directed and are starring in Playing With Fire—An Ecosexual Emergency, a documentary screening June 20th at the Roxie Theater as part of this year’s Frameline programming.
The pair lives in Bernal Heights with their dog Butch and spend time in a rural idyll near Santa Cruz. Their work sits at the intersection of sex, art, and environmental advocacy. In addition to Playing With Fire, they’ve made other films like Water Makes Us Wet—An Ecosexual Adventure and co-authored several books including Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover.
As you’ll see in the following interview (which was edited for length and clarity), Annie and Beth don’t take themselves or their work too seriously, except when they do.
What is ecosexuality?
Beth: Well, it's a new sexuality, relatively new.
Annie: It's a label, but probably people have done it for centuries.
Beth: It simply means that you love the Earth. And we've created a movement around this term. We didn't invent this term, but we adopted it.
Annie: We took the ball and ran with it!
What attracted you to it?
Beth: I’m from West Virginia originally and I grew up in the woods literally. I always loved — and still love — being out in the woods. I mean, I am in love with the woods. And I was going home one month and I flew over the mountains and I looked down and saw this unbearable scarring and destruction. And I was like, What in the hell is that? It was mountaintop removal coal mining.
We were doing a project where we were doing these weddings. It was around the time of same-sex marriage and we decided that we we would do a wedding every year, but it was becoming too sort of self-referential—
Annie: Self-indulgent.
Beth: It seems self-indulgent. We really thought about who needs the rights and the privileges of marriage? Human beings are doing fine. The earth needs to have those rights. So we had a big wedding to the earth, a huge performance in 2008. And we woke up the next morning and we were like, what the fuck did we just do? And who are we now? And that's when the word ecosexual really resonated with us.
If the Earth is your lover, how does it feel to see it so abused and so neglected by people?
Annie: By the way, we consider the Earth trans. We don't say ‘it’ usually, we use him/her/they.
Got it. So how do you feel about your love object being so abused?
Beth: We hate it. It makes us really sad. It’s heartbreaking to see the Earth so abused and the Trump administration is just going to double down on the abuse.
Annie: War is the worst polluter of all.
Beth: We're also the Earth. This is a radical thing about what we're doing. We’re not creating binaries of culture and nature, human and nature. We feel that human beings are the Earth. We’re mostly water, right? Mostly water, mostly carbon dioxide and oxygen, and we have iron, we have calcium, we have all of the minerals of the Earth. We're made out of exactly the same thing. So when we see the Earth being abused, we're being abused.
Annie: A big part of this film for me is, you know, redefining sex in some ways. Like, I've spent 52 years doing work about sexuality from one extreme to the other, and this is an extension. Is that a pun?
You can't help yourself, can you?
Annie: Well, we do use humor. It’s an extension of the work I’ve been doing about sex, which Beth has been doing. That's why we're a match made in heaven.
You bring a real lightness of touch to what you're doing. How intentional is that?
Beth: It’s very intentional because the harder things get the more you need some relief and humor provides that relief. It also holds communities together. You have inside jokes, you can laugh together. Like I said, I grew up in West Virginia, where it’s really, really poor. And poor people have a great sense of insider humor. Now, that really helps hold the community together. And queers are particularly prone to using humor. Could you imagine a drag queen that was like a serious academic and that's all they did?
Annie: Can I say one thing about humor? It works really well as a strategy for like-minded people, but it also makes the work easy to critique as not serious.
Beth: Oh yeah, we've gotten in a lot of trouble for our humor, believe me.
Tell me about the communities you bring together because there are so many unusual overlaps in the film. There's hippies and queer folk and trans folk—
Beth: There’s redneck loggers! Lesbian feminists! So many people. We love difference. We love it. You know, we don’t want to just reflect ourselves all the time and everything we're doing. We feel it's really important to reach across difference at this point.
Because the left and the queer community — I don’t want to speak for the queers, but I’ll speak for the left — we’ve shot ourselves in the foot politically, in terms of creating these silos of communities and keeping them in different arenas. When we were doing these weddings — and these weddings were big, I mean, we’ve married thousands, we’re like Moonies — we always had a contingent of artists, sex workers, and academics. We always opened the wedding to anyone that wanted to be part of them. That’s kind of the same thing we've been talking about: the expansiveness of the term ‘queer.’ I'm teaching a class called Queer Art right now, and I did this beautiful exercise where all the students write down a definition of the word queer. Straight people want to be queer but they can't. You know what I mean? Because they don't think they can, right? They’ve got that boundary. So we give people permission to be whatever and whoever they want to be. And queer is a good term for that.
Annie: And we hope that straight people and even right-wing people will enjoy this film. You know, we’re not trying to only reach out to queers.
Beth, you mentioned teaching and I wanted to ask about what you’re seeing in the younger generation and its relationship to sexuality.
Beth: I think a lot of the younger generation is very sex positive and—
Uh, I think Annie made a face at that. Annie, what do you think?
Beth: Well, because Annie’s afraid to engage them. I'm teaching this queer art class now where I really let my students express their sexuality. Annie's afraid of that now because, you know, it’s dangerous, but I've got tenure. I mean maybe now Trump’s going to change that, you know, but I've got that.
I want to go back to the face that Annie just made. What do you think about the young and their relationship to sex and pleasure?
Annie: You know, there’s a lot of diverse perspectives on sexuality. One of our students said, "I can't handle the ecosex part of the class.” There's that perspective: very sensitive or tenderqueer, or whatever. Very sensitive. I used to show porn on campuses for 25 years. I wouldn't do it now. I have a little PTSD.
Well, you were in some of the real culture war battles of the ‘80s and the ‘90s.
Annie: Yeah.
I want to follow up on the young folks—
Beth: Can I say I just love them? I think they're so brave. They’re facing a world that is on fire. A world where there aren’t jobs. A world where you can’t fucking afford to get an apartment. A world where there’s food insecurity, where we don’t even know how surveilled we are. Every molecule in our body is surveilled now! You can’t get away with anything.
Then you start talking about having fun? Well, there’s no place to go have fun without being completely surveilled. A lot of my students are like, Well, fuck it. I'm doing it anyhow. And I just have tremendous respect for them. So, they get a little pissed off if you, you know, call them the wrong pronoun? But they’re making us be responsible for the fucking mess we caused. I don’t really like being schooled by them, but I’ll take it.
Annie: We turn to young people to try and understand what they’re thinking. They’re the next generation. During my generation, the street abuse used to drive me crazy. You don’t have that now because people fought against it. I am a feminist and but I’m also 70. And I’ve been fighting the fight for a long time, so I’m pulling back. This is my last feature film I’m ever going to do. I’m a little burned out.
You two obviously have so much fun. You take so much joy in being together. What’s the secret of being partners and collaborators?
Beth: We both do our own thing and we allow each other to do our own thing—
Annie: But we do it all together.
Beth: When two hearts beat as one, somebody’s dead.
Annie: Bottom line is, we’re conceptual artists and we love that about each other, we understand each other artistically.
