Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American who lived in Paris most of her life. She was an experimental writer. She wrote stream of conscious pieces, novels, plays and poems. The book that launched her career into the mainstream was The Autobiography of Alice B. Tolkas, which despite the title was her autobiography. It became a bestseller. Stein’s book Q.E.D was one of the first books about coming out as a lesbian that was published after her death. She did not hide that she was a masculine woman.

Stein held weekly Saturday night salons in Paris with the premier artists of the time that “brought together confluences of talent and thinking that would help define modernism in literature and art.”, quote from here. The guests often included Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Henri Matisse. She collected modern paintings, especially cubist paintings.

Alice B. Tolkas, a writer, was her life partner, Hemingway referred to her often as Stein’s wife.  One of Stein’s most famous quotes is “A rose is a rose is a rose.”

I first saw Annie Sprinkle at college. All the chairs were full so I sat on the stairs in the packed auditorium. I listened, watched and had my mind blown.

I had NEVER before seen a woman embrace her sexuality with so much fun, love, play and lack of judgement. She stood there in front of us with epic sized beautiful breasts decorated in glitter, sequins, boas and effused love.

She told us about how she had done public cervix announcements where she put a speculum into her vaginal canal and had people come by and take a look. She told us stories about when she had been a porn star and showed us pictures of her various sexual encounters, including one porn she made with a little person and another with an amputee where she was having sex with their stump. She talked about how lovely the person was and how fun it had been. She was happy to share with us how she had shared her body, she didn’t have all this shame, guilt, and judgement about having had sex with lots of people. She wasn’t upset or ashamed about having been a whore, she was so very fine with it.

Whatever you think about her professional choices, what really stayed with me about her was the total lack of judgement about sexuality. In my early 20’s, she changed my world view. At that time I had honestly never heard of, met or seen a woman who was living without the fundamental idea that being highly sexual with many people was bad or shameful. She expanded my sense of what was possible in terms of being a woman, of having a sexuality that didn’t have as a foundational belief that sharing your sexuality was bad, evil, slutty and ultimately diminished and dissolved your worth is as a woman. That, my friends, was a game changer for me. Annie Sprinkle showed me that one could choose who you have sex with, enjoy it and still be a loving, good person and have self-worth fully intact, and that was a revelation to me at that time.

She brought such fun to it all. She covered her breasts in paint and made tit prints. I LOVED them. Inspired by her I made bright blue prints of my own breasts and gave them to my college boyfriend as a christmas card that year and put others on my fridge. They made me so very happy and sparked lots of fabulous college girl conversations around our kitchen table.

Over the years she has professionally moved away from sex and into performance art. Annie and her partner (Beth) Elizabeth Stephens, an art professor at University of Santa Cruz, did a 7 year art project called the Love Art Lab where they had a public wedding ceremony each year to celebrate each different chakra. The first year, Annie got breast cancer, so they included that in their art project and dressed up in costumes for chemotherapy and shaved both their heads in a hairotica piece. She said their motto was to “eroticize everything.” Annie and Beth’s spirit of bringing so much fun and play to some of the hardest moments in life is clearly inspiring.

Now they both are focusing their art projects on being ecosexuals, being lovers to the earth. They aim to be part of shifting the idea of the earth as mother to the earth as lover. Their hope is because that is so much sexier, perhaps people will be more motivated to care for the earth. Annie and Beth’s artistic adventure continues.

Annie Sprinkle is like a fairy godmother of sex, art and love. I am ever grateful for the impact Annie Sprinkle had on my young life, showing me there was a playful way to be a woman, be sexual, live without shame and talk to and impact thousands of people’s experience of sexuality in a lifetime.