Beth Stephens
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“Fire is Like Sex — Neither Good Nor Bad But What You Bring To It”: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens on Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency
In the first two films in their trilogy of environmental-themed documentaries, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle married — literally — their loving spirit of “ecosexuality” with urgent debates around the preservation of our natural resources. In 2014’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain — An Ecosexual Love Story, Stephens returned to her West Virginia home with Sprinkle only to find the eponymous ridges she remembered from her youth undergoing the environmentally-destructive coal-mining process of mountaintop removal. In the film, as Wren Awry wrote for Filmmaker, Stephens says, “Sometimes I feel like fighting [mountaintop removal] is a losing battle. Then I imagine that some […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 23, 2025 -
The Making of an Ecosexual Adventure: Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle on Water Makes Us Wet
Water Makes Us Wet – An Ecosexual Adventure is Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s ecstatic exploration of the pleasure and politics of water. Premiering tonight at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, the doc is part road movie, part experimental film, part activist project. Water Makes Us Wet combines the allure of sex and environmental justice as it takes viewers on a trip through California, a state recently ravaged by drought and wildfires linked to climate change. Moving from San Francisco’s wastewater treatment plants to Sprinkle’s childhood house to the shrinking, toxic Salton Sea, the queer couple and artistic duo create a vivid […]
by Miriam Tola on Feb 25, 2019 -
Eco-Sexuality, Mountaintop Removal and Goodbye, Gauley Mountain
I remember the year that Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle showed up at Mountain Justice Summer, an annual training camp for anti-mountaintop removal activists. They were at camp, in part, to lead an eco-sexuality workshop. I was twenty-one, a resident of a direct action community in southern West Virginia, and surly as hell. Eco-sexuality, or what I presumed it was, annoyed me. Sure, I was queer, but I was queer as in “fuck you,” not queer as in “let’s rub ourselves in dirt and marry things.” I did not attend their workshop, or any of their events in Appalachia. But […]
by Wren Awry on Nov 16, 2015
