The Power of Love –
In Sickness and in Health

By Katharine “Dr. Trixie” Hikel

To celebrateValentine’s Day, we called up our favorite love goddess, Dr. Annie Sprinkle, renowned sexologist, porn star, feminist, and political activist. We chatted about her multiple weddings to partner Elizabeth Stephens, experimental artist, professor, and ‘sexy dyke playboy’, and about their continuing work as artists and life partners.

Vermont Woman: So you’ve been to this area?

Elizabeth Stephens: Yes, on a bike trip – around Burlington, across the lake on a ferry, through the Adirondacks, and back; it was incredible; I’ve been back many, many times.

VW: And you’ve got another wedding coming up, your Blue Wedding, in June, in Oxford, England.

Annie Sprinkle: We’ve had five weddings already – we did two in our Green Year, in 2008. We took vows to love and cherish the earth.

VW: We read that you also vowed to be more biodegradable and sustainable; to spend more time cleaning the beach; to drive less, walk more; and to install a gray-water system in your house.

AS: We vowed to make the environmental movement more sexy; and we invited our wedding guests to do so along with us.

VW: I know you’ve been busy touring, and I read the terrific review admiring your bare breasts in the New York Times by Charles Isherwood – did you know him?

ES: No! When he was there we were so nervous because he was growling the whole time. But the guy sitting beside him – I don’t know if it was his boyfriend or not, but he was laughing and giggling and slapping his knee.

AS: I lost my mike the night he was there, and I never do a show without a mike, so I was very grateful that the review came out as well as it did.

We toured the show, which was a love story, culminating with our breast cancer art project, which is up on the Love Art Lab Web site (see www.loveartlab.org); we toured for two years; and we’ve been doing performance art, weddings, and works about love. So, for Valentine’s Day, we’d love to invite people to come to the Love art lab Web site and have a look at our projects, and sign up on our mailing list.

VW: You have been through so much as a couple since we last spoke (Annie found a lump in one of her famous breasts in 2005 – went through lumpectomy and chemo); you created “Exposed; Experiments in Love, Sex, Death and Art.” I have to quote what you wrote about that:

“We created a new genre of erotic photography we coined ‘cancer erotica.’ My feeling was that it could be interesting to a.) reveal physical and emotional vulnerability during lovemaking, and  b.) to show ourselves having hot sex during a health crisis. Death can be erotic, because there’s a lot of energy around it—lots of emotions and hearts are cracked open. Besides, I had documented my sex life for over thirty years, why stop now? I think it’s a positive thing to depict human sexuality in all its forms—to show older women, round women, and women in chemotherapy.”

We wondered how did you manage to create art during the intense and exhausting process of chemotherapy?

AS: I don’t know how people get through it without making art!

ES: It really gave us something to focus on other than the illness.

VW: It clearly touched so many people – you toured internationally; what were the audiences like abroad?

AS: They were very sweet.

ES: Europeans have always been very kind to us.

AS: I would say that over half of our good-paying gigs are in Europe. They come to us!  They are very sexually liberated, and they are better-funded for art.

VW: Here’s what you wrote about performing at the Museum Kunst Palace, in Dusseldorf, Germany:

The evening was part of a magnificent, huge art exhibition, “Diana and Actaeon: The Forbidden Glimpse of the Naked Body.” With a title like that of course we had to get naked and we did!
First, Annie performed her signature piece, “A Public Cervix Announcement.” This is only the second time in fifteen years that she has done that. Second, we did a one-hour “Naked Kiss” in an intimate gallery where drawings of nudes by Joseph Beuys, Picasso, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Emile Nolde, Rodin and others. It was amazing to kiss among these masters. Thirdly we did a new work called “Nude Spoons” in the lobby of the museum. We entered, removed our elegant evening attire, and spooned naked on a black leather couch during the last hour of the evening as people were leaving the space. People could see us from the two floors above as well. The museum gave us the most beautiful flower bouquets in the world.

The photos on the Web show your nude bodies nestling together like sculpture on a the black couch, right in the lobby of the museum. It was quite a hit!

ES: Europeans are more sophisticated around the arts, and more sexually sophisticated, but there’s a funny kind of sexism in Europe that doesn’t exist in the United States; there’s a different tone.

I think women are more liberated in the United States. The male-female dichotomy is more prevalent; there’s less queer activism; but queer marriage is legal in most of Europe, even in Catholic countries like Spain. Legally, queers have more rights in Europe than here in the States. But there aren’t many out queers on the street; it’s not as obvious or visual as it is here in the United States. There aren’t as many gay or queer activities. They’re starting, but they’re behind. Of course we do live in the San Francisco area.

VW: Kind of at the top of the universe there.

ES: Vermont has a queer studies program there at the University, even though it’s in women’s studies; so it’s not just about San Francisco. It’s expressed differently in Europe than it is in the United States.

AS: It has to do with pornography, probably.

ES: It probably has more to do with human rights.

AS: Porn influences everything. I don’t think we’d have a black president if it weren’t for all the interracial porn.

ES: (laughing): I don’t know about that! I think Martin Luther King had a lot more to do with it!

AS: So did rap music! Popular culture helped a lot. And porn is popular culture.

ES: (laughing): Popular culture is a lot of work! We just got the software to keep track of how many hits we’re getting on the Web site – I haven’t looked at it yet – and we’re trying to get really hip, and set up Facebook pages, and MySpace, and Twitter – it’s a lot of work; and you have to follow it all up, so we’ll have to hire someone, and we don’t have that kind of money.

VW: Can’t you get a graduate student?

ES: Well, yeah, but even they cost some money! You can’t totally exploit the poor little things.

VW:  So here we are in the middle of a financial crisis. Love or money – does it come down to a choice?

ES: We’re in a very serious situation now, and we’re all going to have to stick together for this one, and we’re really going to have to help each other.

AS: My work was a lot about sex; but then after having had a big house fire, and having breast cancer, I keep learning more about love. And being in a relationship – we’re in our seventh year, and it’s just glorious, and interesting, and wonderful. As I learn more about love – it sounds like a Hallmark card, to talk about it, because you can’t really pinpoint what it is, exactly, or how it works – but it works.

VW: We saw on your schedule that you’re doing a five-day conference called “Porno-Graphies” at the Institute for Cultural Studies, in Mexico City. What’s going on down there?

ES: Well, there’s a big porn conference.

AS: It’s about alternative kinds of works, about the female body. We’ve both done work about pornography, and erotica; and now we’ve teamed up, and are doing what you might call alternative erotica and pornography — some sexually explicit projects, with the main focus – so we get invited to these conferences about pornography. Post-porn, we call it – it’s work about sex that’s more seminal, political, conceptual, artsy, feministic, experimental.

Everything we do is performance – our lectures are performances; we have a lot of fun but we also take it very seriously.

VW: It’s so dive-into-able. We’d love to take your classes; what are you teaching?

ES: Because I’m the chair of the art department now [at the University of California at Santa Cruz], I’m not teaching as many courses as I used to. I’m teaching a foundation course in sculpture. I’m teaching a range of things about sculptural practice, because I was trained as a sculptor. I subscribe to Josef Beuys’ concept of social sculpture as a way to make society that takes into consideration the whole system of how everything works — culture, politics, education – how they fit together and interact as one great work of art. So I teach everything from straight sculptural process like rounding, to the work that Annie and I do, to the work that Joseph Beuys did. He was a leader of the Green party, in Germany. He was instrumental in making it a viable party, which then came to the United States.

AS: He created new ideas about art.

ES: At Santa Cruz, I’m proposing a PhD program in environmental art, which would be among the first PhD programs in that field in the United States. I’m integrating social sculpture with environmental art. My university has been very generous about supporting my research; they’ve been a big supporter of our work.

AS: Love Art Lab is devoted to projects that generate and celebrate love. So we did a project where we took the earth as our lover.

VW: In Vermont, Lake Champlain, which is terribly polluted, could use some help. If you’d like to come up here and marry Lake Champlain, I’m a Justice of the Peace.

AS: We would love to, if we found an organization to sponsor us. For our weddings, we ask for no material gifts; instead, we ask for collaboration on the creation of the wedding. We like to create a big community event. We usually don’t know people where we go, but we find a community that’s like an instant family. People can be in the bridal party, or the mother of the bride, or the flower boy and girl, or do decorations – any of the things you do in a wedding. Everybody pitches in. And it’s a wedding for them: if we marry the lake, everyone marries the lake.

The performance is not like a traditional wedding at all, it’s an experimental wedding. It’s not about Beth and me; we play the brides, but it’s usually bigger than us; it’s for the earth. We married our community. We got legally married in Canada, as a statement; they’re very political site-specific interventions.

ES: They’re love interventions. I would love to marry Lake Champlain. One of the things we’d like to do is marry a mountain where mountain-top removal has been occurring, as in Appalachia; I’m from West Virginia originally, so I’ve been thinking a lot about launching this intervention with the PhD project at Santa Cruz, because it’s horrific what the mining companies are doing to the Appalachian mountains. We’re very interested in bringing these wedding rituals to places that need healing. Symbolic gestures can affect political systems.

AS: In Norway, we had a Neo-Nazi attack, and a protest by anti-porn feminists, even though we weren’t doing anything about sex. We had a free, outside sex clinic; we set up tables and chairs, and put on lab coats, and did sex-ed together, free, as a labor of love, outside, in a very public area; and the anti-porn feminists protested. It was silly, really.

VW: Well, they didn’t get it then, but maybe they will.

AS: I don’t know, they’re pretty tough in Norway. Our green wedding was in Zagreb – they had never had a queer wedding of any kind in the Balkans. Their gay pride parades get fire-bombed; they get hate mail. Our director got a death threat. So it’s a dangerous thing to have a queer wedding there; no one had done it. So we did one; and we married the earth; and it was an art project, so it was just safe enough, and nobody really bothered us. It worked out very nicely, so we’d like to take our wedding project and tour it around the world to places that have never seen two brides. It’s bigger than us.

VW: It’s all about love.

AS: If you are against war, and you want the war to stop in Iraq, let’s create what we’d like to have in the world, which is to generate more love.

VW: So let’s marry Iraq.

AS: Yes. The idea is to bring attention to political issues, and environmental issues, by generating love.

ES: I think, for Valentine’s Day, you should encourage all your readers to kiss a tree. Get out there and love the trees, love nature, love the lake, make love with the sky. You don’t have to have a partner. For all the single folks out there, just go out and do it in the dirt.

VW: Well, they’d have to do it in the snow.

AS: Do it in the snow! If single people think they don’t have a lover, they can always consider the earth as their lover, because she is filled with sensual and erotic possibilities. And she needs our love; she’s been our earth mother for a long time, but it’s too big a burden to bear, and it’s time for her to become our earth lover – because we take care of our lovers instead of expecting them to take care of us.

We hope people will join us in this work, to help make the world a more fun, sexy, tolerant, love-filled place.