Ecosexuals Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens Play With Fire in New Doc

Filmmaking artist-activists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle don’t shy away from the alarming facts. Rather, they showcase the issue of fire, and fire management, in their new documentary Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency.

Acknowledge it or deny it, the climate crisis is ubiquitous. Deserts expand even as seas rise, hurricanes rage, and floods create devastation as never before. Recent summers have been unusually hot, and they’re getting hotter, resulting in tinderbox conditions that threaten forests and wildlands with fires that can be sparked by lighting. Headline-making catastrophes like the Hollywood Hills fire earlier this year and the blaze that devastated the Maui city of Lahaina in 2023 grab global attention, but they are merely the tip of the inferno. This summer’s ferocious heat contributed to fires in Spain that have reportedly incinerated nearly three-quarters of a million acres over the summer — and several of those fires continue burning even now.

Filmmaking artist-activists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle don’t shy away from the alarming facts. Rather, they showcase the issue of fire, and fire management, in their new documentary Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency.

If you haven’t heard of ecosexuality before now, you’re not alone; it’s a concept that married couple Stephens and Sprinkle have explored in their 2021 book Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth is Lover [ https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517900199/assuming-the-ecosexual-position/ ] and films like Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2014) and Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure (2019).

Goodbye Gauley Mountain, about mountaintop removal strip mining, was perhaps a natural point of interest for Stephens, a West Virginia native. In Playing With Fire, the local is just as specific and central. The film celebrates Boulder Creek, California, where the couple live — a town of less than 6,000 located in the mountains of Santa Cruz County that came close to obliteration in 2020 after an intense lightning storm ignited numerous fires. The psychic toll resonates even now, as residents recall their experiences for the filmmakers’ camera.

Playing with Fire takes a whimsical approach to it serious subject matter, giving voice to local animals like goats tasked with eating potentially flammable grasses and a local peacock named Arthur. More importantly, the film explores fire not as a villain, but as a longtime and versatile companion to human endeavors. Fire has been as necessary, and as misunderstood, as many other natural elements throughout the ages, and Stephens and Sprinkle unpack how and why this has happened, as well as how to more constructively think about fire.

Stephens, a professor at UC Santa Cruz, has perhaps had a more traditional path as an artist and activist, whereas Sprinkle, a former adult film star, sex educator, and self-professed pleasure activist, has faced censorious congressional wrath and, she tells us, shunning from more traditional elements of the environmental movement. “The Sierra Club is loosening up,” she notes, “but I didn’t always fit as a former porn star and someone who likes to dress up and show cleavage. They thought I was not good for the movement.” Adds Sprinkle: “I was discriminated against.” But that hasn’t dimmed the couple’s curiosity and verve. “We’re trying to appeal to the sex workers, punk rockers, erotic massage people — people on the fringe,” Sprinkle noted during a recent interview with QulturVultur.

QulturVultur: Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency has an environmental message, but there’s a lot of humor in the film, too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a trigger warning advising that a film contains explicit ecosexuality and performance art.

[Laughter]

Beth Stephens: We are artists, and so we thought that was funny. I have seen a lot of environmental films, and after a while they just have the same message — a lot of it’s doom and gloom. Really huge structural change needs to happen, and people can do that through small gestures. Humor opens the heart to know that what’s happening is horrible and absurd at the same time.

Annie Sprinkle: It’s a queer strategy to use humor. If you think of drag queens and some of our great comedians, it’s a coping strategy. It makes the medicine go down. We have to protect the earth. The earth is our lover.

QulturVultur: That’s what how the term “ecosexual” is explained in the film. It’s a way of cherishing the earth and thinking of it as a life partner.

Annie Sprinkle: We are the earth, too, so all sex is ecosex, really. There’s sex going on every day, all day long, everywhere. When you’re making love to another human, you’re making love to the Earth. It can be hella sexy. You can imagine the Earth however you want. We anthropomorphize, which is, give human attributes to the whole planet. To us, the Earth is trans; it’s all genders. Sometimes it is our mother or our father, or our friend, or our dominatrix. She can be a cruel mistress, and there is no safe word.

QulturVultur: Among other things, the film feels like a celebration of your town of Boulder Creek and the people, and the peacocks, in it.

Annie Sprinkle: The peacock narrates the film. It was a wild white peacock that lived in our neighborhood for 35 years, and he was very beloved. That peacock brought together a lot of different kinds of people in this little town of Boulder Creek, from very conservative so-called rednecks to people like Annie and I. I mean, I have a little redneck in me, too, but really, the peacock brought people together.

And that fire. Everyone was helping everyone, regardless of their political ideology, and a lot of the rough footage of people fighting fires was given to me by these guys who stayed behind and recorded whose houses had burned down, where the fires were. These guys are lumber guys, they’re not intellectuals at my university, and I love them, do you know what I mean? I feel like if there were more communication with people in rural areas by people who are criticizing [them], the United States wouldn’t be in this fractured political position it’s in right now. That’s another thing that I hope people get from this film.

Beth Stephens: Our little town could be anywhere. There’s catastrophic events happening in Greece, Australia, Italy… Fire is a metaphor for a world on fire, and the violence and the fear. But there is hope and renewal and growth that comes from after fire, so we hope our film offers hope.

QulturVultur: It seems appropriate to draw these parallels with sexuality and love and compassion, especially since you, Annie, have had a fascinating career as an adult film star and sex educator — and as a pleasure activist. I love that!

Annie Sprinkle: The Porn Film Festival’s giving us a lifetime achievement award because our film is also about sexuality. Sex is bigger than just our bodies. You can still have erotic sensual pleasure if you’re in an old age home, or recovering from cancer, or don’t want to have physical sex. [With] ecosex you always have a lover. We get a lot of pleasure from being in nature, and that’s part of our sexuality. It feels good in our body to be pummeled by a waterfall, or feel the sunrays penetrating our pores.

QulturVultur: Tell me about the fire massage shown in the film. I’ve never saw anything like that before.

Beth Stephens: That was with our friend Barbara Carellas, who has a book out The Book of Ecstasy. We taught sex together for 10 years. She’s a fire fetishist, so we knew when we were making this film that we had to bring Barbara out to give us a fire fetish massage, and it was just incredible. It was very exciting; she could bring us right to that edge. After we did it for the film, our entire crew lined up to get a little treatment. Everyone got 10 minutes after our shoot. This is not something that the uninitiated should try at home, but it is really fun.

QulturVultur: You’ve had a movie about mountaintop removal, which one might think about as representing earth, and you had a movie about water, and now a movie about fire. I wonder if something about air might be coming along.

Beth Stephens: Well, Annie is swearing that she’s never making another film, and she’s done this through every film. I, of course, do want to do a film about air. We fight all the time about AI, so I think that the next film — and hopefully no one will steal my title, but if they do, I’ll just put it in AI and steal it back — It’s going to be called AI(R).

QulturVultur: How rewarding is it to be creative partners as artists and also life partners?

Annie Sprinkle: It’s intense. A lot of our friends have broken up that were coupled when we got together, so somehow the universe gave us a gift of a perfect match. I had a lot of lovers before Beth, and she had a lot of lovers before me. We tried them all and finally found each other, and it’s such a blessing. Our love has grown to cosmic proportions. We started out doing art projects about our relationship. We weren’t allowed to get legally married, so we did a bunch of weddings, and then, at a certain point, we married the Earth, and that was actually more profound than marrying each other. Finally, we did get legally married when it became legal.

Beth Stephens: We’ve been married legally twice: Once in Canada, once in the United States.

Annie Sprinkle: We’ve had about 30 weddings as art. We actually married fire in Berlin.

Beth Stephens: I love working with Annie. It’s fabulous to work with Annie. We’re lovers, and we’re fighters, and then we get to make up, which is the best of all. The creative process is a wild ride. You can’t really control it, and, you know, relationships are like that, too. We try to hold space for each other to be who the other person is, because when two hearts beat as one, somebody’s dead.

Annie Sprinkle: We also do we do butch/femme really well. Like, she does the butch stuff, I do the femme stuff. I’m a feeder. I’ll make the meals, and she’ll handle the money and get the grants. Thankfully, Beth was able to fund our film largely with grants. It’s no joke; making a film is a lot of work.

Beth Stephens: Well, we got a Guggenheim. That was really nice — a Guggenheim Foundation grant. So, we’re Guggenheim fellowets.

[Laughter]

Annie Sprinkle: We are multimedia artists, and film’s just one of the things we do. But right now, our big goal is to get this film out in the world because it’s also an activist film to try to help people cope with this massive change the world is in.

Beth Stephens: Yeah, our art’s our activism. I think what art does is changes the world, and so if you can figure out how to keep a roof over your head and food in your belly, and you can have the privilege of being able to make work that gets out there and speaks to people, that’s a life worth living. We’ve been very fortunate to be able to do that, and to do that together. We look at each other every day, and we go, “Oh my God, we are so lucky,” and I think that keeps us together.

Annie Sprinkle: We’ve been very blessed.

Beth Stephens: And we’re very grateful. And we try to share.

Annie Sprinkle: We do. We try to spread the love. We’re pollen amorous. We spread our seeds all around.

Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency plays in select cities throughout October and releases on streaming services in November, date TBA. For more information on the film and on screenings, go to https://sprinklestephens.ucsc.edu/playing-with-fire/