Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency opens with a bright red “WARNING. This film contains environmental destruction, explicit ecosexuality and performance art.” It’s a playful start to a cinematic project prompted by a devastating event — a massive wildfire that ripped through Stephens and Sprinkle’s Boulder Creek community in Northern California. Though the pair, life partners and artistic soulmates for nearly a quarter century, returned to their refuge in the Redwood forest to find their home had been spared, not all their neighbors, plants and animals included, had been so fortunate. This in turn spurred the filmmakers to do what they’ve been doing since 2013’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (hailed as the first queer environmental doc) and on to 2019’s Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure: transform climate grief into radically joyful queer action.
Beginning with images of a quaint and scenic Boulder Creek, the shapeshifting doc swiftly expands to include talking head interviews with a slew of memorable humans, and even some “talking” goats. (The “hotshot hoofers,” fire prevention ruminants who spend most of the movie munching on foliage, “speak” via text bubbles that pop up above their heads, including when a cadre of flamboyantly costumed performance artists appear while they’re working/eating: “Is it drag queen story hour?” “WTF?” “Let’s get back to fire prevention.”) Charmingly narrated by Stephens, Sprinkle, and a resident peacock named Albert — voiced by Rodney Earl Jackson, Jr., the artistic director and co-founder of The San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company — Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency ultimately delivers a heartfelt lesson in fighting fire with love.
The couple’s journey to environmental enlightenment actually began back in 2008, when they started identifying as “ecosexuals,” reimagining Mother Earth as a lover and partner. The artist-activists and 2021 Guggenheim fellows (and 2020 Tom of Finland Lifetime Achievement Award-winner in the case of the legendary porn star Sprinkle) soon found themselves performing mass weddings to the various elements of nature for folks near and far, all taking vows “to love honor and cherish the earth.” (Cut to scenes from campy Sun and equally theatrical Moon Weddings.) We’re likewise treated to clips of the pair’s somewhat more conventional advocacy at protests featuring eye-catching signs that read, “I am stardust,” “Aquaphiliac,” and “There is no pride on a dead planet.”
Touring around their small town (population 5000+), the filmmakers tout their many favorite attractions, such as a main street parade and a delicious Chinese restaurant. But they speak empathetically with the still-shellshocked residents as well, who reflect on the CZU Complex Fire of 2020, in which an area bigger than the size of Connecticut went up in flames. They’d worried deeply about the creatures left behind in the evacuation, including Albert, who miraculously survived. (Albert, for his part, says he was “stoked” to see his friends Beth and Annie had returned.) We also learn that Albert’s co-directing besties had each separately lost homes to fire before.
To process the grief and survivor’s guilt, Stephens and Sprinkle then do what any free-spirited, forest-dwelling ecosexuals would do — visit a witch-therapist named Oak, who offers her “10 Top Tips for Staying Sane in Insane Times.” (Both helping and humor make the list, as do art and nature because they heal the soul.) Later they sit down with an Indigenous scholar who points out that our society has been out of balance with fire since colonization began, when Native Americans were prevented from doing prescribed burns, which were usually perceived as demonic acts.
We’re introduced to sex educator and fire fetishist Barbara Carrellas, who guides the co-directors in some “hot” tantric play (cue the duo rolling around in the steaming lava of a cartoon volcano), as well as transgender artist and LGBTQIA+ activist Cassils, creator of a performance piece simulating self-immolation. We also meet a couple of lesbian musicians, a pair of queer game designers who “make sexy digital games about navigating dystopian futures,” a Palestinian-Jewish activist, and a BDSM educator and former fetish model (to name but a handful of the two dozen or so participants). There are even some shockingly straight folks, like Brandon Smith, co-founder of the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program that helps formerly incarcerated firefighters obtain employment in the field. He notes that incarcerated firefighters get paid around a dollar a day for the same work as their counterparts on the outside.
After Sprinkle’s mom passes away at the ripe old age of 95, they film her cremation too, an intense experience for a daughter slowly being seduced by fire. (Though at one point, Stephens says that her partner has always loved roasting marshmallows.) “Father Tree is so well hung. And so ecosexy,” Sprinkle sighs as the co-directors hug and run their hands along a giant Redwood that’s survived the Boulder Creek inferno. Of course, no ecosexual dramedy would be complete without a proper wedding (and a fire prevention goat wondering, “If we go will we get canceled?”). And as the filmmakers take fire to be their lawfully wedded element, the final part of Stephens and Sprinkle’s queer environmental trilogy comes to a close, going out in a delirious blaze of glory. Indeed, even the earth was moved.
DIRECTOR: Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens; DISTRIBUTOR: E.A.R.T.H. Lab SF; IN THEATERS: October 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 11 min.
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