“Fire is Like Sex — Neither Good Not 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, 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 good old queer ACT UP-style […] The post “Fire is Like Sex — Neither Good Not Bad But What You Bring To It”: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens on Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Jun 24, 2025 - 08:05

“Fire is Like Sex — Neither Good Not Bad But What You Bring To It”: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens on Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency

Playing with Fire (Photo by Barbara Carrellas. Montage image by Kate Bornstein and Saul Villegas)

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, 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 good old queer ACT UP-style […] The post “Fire is Like Sex — Neither Good Not Bad But What You Bring To It”: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens on Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.