Podcast: Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens Playing with Fire

Video (28.20): The Queer Love Podcast interviews Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens about their recent film and their life as a queer couple and an artist duo. Playing with Fire is the spectacular third installment of their eco-documentary trilogy, following Goodbye Gauley Mountain (2014) and Water Makes Us Wet (2019).

[The copyright of the video above remains with the original holder and it is used here for the purpose of education, comparison and criticism only.]

What Is the Ecosexual Movement?

Together since 2002, Annie and Beth are the pioneers of the Ecosex Movement. They published the Ecosex Manifesto and began hosting public performance art pieces where they literally “married the Earth,” the moon, and the sky. The Ecosex philosophy urges humanity to stop viewing nature as a mother to extract from, and instead treat it as a lover to be protected and pleasured.

About the Artists

Annie Sprinkle, PhD, is a legendary multimedia performance artist, filmmaker and sex educator. She got her start in New York in the 1970s, working as a sex worker and explicit adult film star before morphing her experiences into groundbreaking, sex-positive feminist performance art. Over her multi-decade career, Annie has used radical pleasure as a form of activism and education.

Beth Stephens, PhD, is an acclaimed filmmaker, activist and a professor of sculpture and intermedia at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she also directs the E.A.R.T.H. Lab. (https://earthlab.ucsc.edu/) Her work explores queer ecologies, environmental justice and institutional critique through performance and physical art. She’s also a recipient of both a Eureka Fellowship and a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.