Annie Sprinkle

Annie Sprinkle was born Ellen Steinberg. Her parents were both academics, and she grew up in suburban Los Angeles. She says, "I was not a sexual child -- I was very shy and inhibited. It wasn't until I lost my virginity at the age of 17 that I even became interested in sex." But once initiated, she embarked on a lifelong exploration of sex, art and spirituality. In her early years, she worked as a prostitute, then entered the porno film industry in the early 1970s, first in a variety of behind-the-camera roles and eventually as a performer.

Annie Sprinkle made around 200 porn films, specializing in assorted kinky fetish genres. In the early 1980s, she started taking more control of her projects and evolved from niche porn star into an artist, sex educator and sexual shaman embodying a warm, playful, ravenous, pansexual, spiritual brand of female sexuality. In 1982, she wrote and directed her first film, Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, in which she acts as a sort of variety show host introducing vignettes representing her sexual fantasies. Stylistically the film differed very little from mainstream hardcore films of the period, but Annie's smiling, intimate, exuberant direct-address running through the film is light years from the pouty, bitchy, slutty "bad girls" of so much porn. Later she embraced tantric sex, yoga and meditation, as seen in her film In Search of the Ultimate Sexual Experience (available on the Femme anthology video Rites of Passion).

Since that time, Annie Sprinkle has moved out of the porn industry into other artistic pursuits aimed at expressing and promoting healthier attitudes toward sexuality. As a performance artist, photographer, filmmaker, workshop leader, writer and editor, she promotes a view of sex as liberating, fun, free of shame and repression, and infused with creativity, lovingkindness and spirituality. She challenges the repressive trends in our culture -- the religious conservatism of the 1980s and 1990s; the misogynistic depiction of sexually voracious women in so much porn and popular culture; the anti-sex, pro-censorship wing of the feminist movement -- simply by spreading her pro-sex message as joyously as possible.

INTERVIEWS

Gary Morris interviews Annie Sprinkle about sex, art, politics, spirituality and her utopian vision of a sex-positive future. "In the future, everybody will be so sexually satisfied, there'll be an end to violence, rape and war. We will establish contact with extra-terrestrials and they will be very sexy."
Bright Lights Film Journal

Sylvana SilverWitch interviews Annie Sprinkle about art, porn and magick.
Sexuality.org

Lori Roniger interviews Annie Sprinkle about art, sex and her current show, "Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real."
MetroActive

Loraine Hutchins interviews Annie Sprinkle about her role in the film My Father is Coming and her Sluts & Goddesses workshops.
Loraine Hutchins

David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen Novick interviewed Annie Sprinkle in 1992-93 for their book Mavericks of the Mind.
Levity

Traci Vogel profiles and interviews Annie Sprinkle.
MetroActive (Apr 2002)

WRITINGS

Annie Sprinkle passes along some Native American sex secrets. "I wanted to take my sexuality to another level, from sex merely for pleasure to sex for healing, meditation and enlightenment. I wanted to combine sexuality with spirituality. I was hungry for the knowledge that would take me out of my cunt and into the cosmos via my cunt." So she took a weekend workshop in Quodoushka sexuality with teacher Harley Swift Deer.
The Position (Mar 2001)

In "My Brushes and Crushes with the Law," Annie Sprinkle recalls her run-ins with archaic anti-sex laws over three decades as a porn star, prostitute, stripper and performance artist, and her "uncontrollable romantic obsession and intense sexual fetish for female lawyers."
The Spectator (Jun 2001)

Annie Sprinkle questions the concept of "sex addiction". "Sex addiction often makes a disease out of what is often quite reasonable sexual behavior. It emphasizes negative aspects of sex. It takes away some of the personal responsibility for sexual choices and blames problems on a disease. It offers simple solutions to complex problems. Marty Klein points out that 'Sex addiction legitimizes sex-negative attitudes and supports sexual guilt.' It can make people feel bad if they simply have an active and varied sex life." (Oct 2002)

ARTICLES

Annie Sprinkle's photography exhibition, entitled "Sex Bombs and Bombshells," opened recently at the Good Vibrations store in Berkeley. The show features Sprinkle's portraits of "sex pioneers" Susie Bright, Shelley Mars, Lydia Lunch, Linda Montano, Jennifer Blowdryer, Carol Queen, Viva Knievel and others. "All have something they have pioneered in our erotic heritage. I look at them as living national treasures who aren't appreciated." The exhibition also features work by Tony De Bone.
San Francisco Chronicle

Virginia Vitzthum recounts Annie Sprinkle's evolution from porn star to director to performance artist and sex-positive activist. "She's run through as many personas as Madonna. But she's not trend-hopping; she's on a pilgrimage." The article discusses a recent personal setback, a houseboat fire that destroyed many of her belongings.
Salon

This article by Ziad Touma is entitled a biography of Annie Sprinkle, though the second half reads more like a grad school Feminist Cultural Theory seminar paper replete with references to Freud, Laura Mulvey and "the gaze."
Sexuality.org

Alex Burns profiles Annie Sprinkle, a "sexpositive shaman in a sex-negative culture."
Disinformation

Liz Highleyman reviews Annie Sprinkle's new book Hardcore from the Heart, and in the process surveys her remarkable career.
Spectator (Jan 2002)

GALLERIES

From The Position, a sample gallery of Annie Sprinkle's Post-Modern Pin-Ups Playing Cards.
The Position

Debbie Moore presents her series of Annie Sprinkle paintings in an annotated online slideshow.
Debbie Moore