You may not be surprised to learn that I’m a huge fan of Annie Sprinkle. She’s pretty much the living embodiment of Awesome Feminist Activist Artist. She’s like the end goal of all my attempts to be everything cool. She was a prostitute and porn star who got a PhD and became an artist, then an activist, and is now kind of like the Grand Poobah of Cutting-Edge Weirdness in support of activism, queer identity, artistry, and ecosexuality. She showed over 20,000 people her cervix. She beat breast cancer. She is amazing. So needless to say, I’ve been curious about the “ecosexual” movement that she and her partner, Beth Stephens, have been busily pioneering for the past decade or so, celebrating their relationship to the cosmos with a series of weddings at which they’ve so far married the sky, the sea, the moon, the dirt, the air, the sun, the rocks, and even the coal and metals inside the earth. I’ve seen photos from many of those weddings and always wanted to have a massive party that could even come close to measuring anywhere on the Richter scale of cool that they rock at… but I wasn’t really sure what was going on. I mean, really? Marrying the moon? Like… it’s cute and all, but what were they trying to do? Was this serious? Was it some kind of joke? Or something in between?
So of course, when I heard that this duo of fabulous would be giving a presentation at the Grace Exhibition Space in Bushwick, I hied me to the art space to share the same air as my idol Annie Sprinkle and the woman she shares her life with… and to get some insight into what the hell was going on with ecosexuality, or sexecology, or whichever moniker you’re going with.
And… you guys… I’m so serious. I AM NOW ECOSEXUAL. Or I think I was all along. I’ve always had a thing for trees—like a real thing for trees (just ask my friends who watched me talk to a tree for several hours that one time in college when there may have been hallucinogens present in my system) — and the idea of sex outside in the grass under the stars has always turned me on. And thunderstorms? SO HOT. It’s not that I want to have sex with these things, it’s just that these things turn me on. And, you know, why the hell not own it? As Beth put it so well on Thursday, the idea of connecting to the earth as a lover instead a mother or nurturer may help to bring people closer to it and make them more willing to see it as something worth giving back to. You love mountains? Awesome. Don’t just love them from a distance in the abstract sense—make a vow to the mountains to protect them, love them, nurture them, and value them. Marry them. Then, instead of expecting the mountains to do your laundry when you go home and make you sandwiches, you might be more willing to clean up litter along the hiking trail, sign a petition against deforestation, work to protect the wildlife… You know… Give a shit and do something about it. Of course, this could just speak to the way our culture has gone way downhill in our relationship to mothers, but that’s a different discussion; this discussion is about how sexy nature is. Nothing gets the human attention like sex, and why not? We need the earth like we need our lovers — we pine for it when we’re not in it, we need it to survive, and we literally can’t live without it. This is serious. This is personal.
And baby I’m ON FIRE for it. The thing about Annie and Beth is that they don’t sit around talking about environmental imperatives or how much it sucks that people don’t get how sexy rocks can be—they go out and they show people. They get naked on beaches and let the ocean pound them doggystyle. They make crazy outfits to celebrate their love for nature, and then they put them on display. The make art installations at ecological activism rallies. They live and breathe the art that is their activism, and they are fucking sexy. There’s nothing hotter than passion, no matter where that passion is pointed, and there are few things I care about as much as human sexuality and the environment. So, fuck yeah, let’s marry that shit together and let’s do this thing, with passion, with creativity, with love, and with sex. Lots and lots of sexy, sexy, sex.