Point 87: Walk on the Wild Side with Annie Sprinkle

by Paul King, Body Piercing Archive

On the cover of Piercing Fans International Quarterly (PFIQ)
Annie in the Mobilia Chair
Shopping for photo lights with Fakir Musafar in the early 1980s.

Having Dr. Annie Sprinkle speak at our conference has been a personal dream of mine for years. For those familiar with our community’s history, she needs no introduction or explanation for her importance, not to mention her greater celebrity within the performance art and adult entertainment worlds. She will be sharing her-story Wednesday May 16, 2019, at 12:30pm.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to see an original lecture created just for the APP Conference:

Take a Walk on the Wild Side: an Exploration of Annie Sprinkle’s NYC Underground Piercing Scene.

Most often our piercing history has been told from a Westcoast male perspective. For the first time, Annie will take us deep inside the East Coast piercing scene: the parties, publications, films, and crazy personalities of the 1970s’ and 1980s’ New York.

Annie Sprinkle was a NYC prostitute and porn star for twenty-two years, then morphed into an artist and sexologist. She has passionately explored sexuality for over forty years, sharing her experiences through making her own unique brand of feminist sex films, writing books and articles, visual art making, creating theater performances, and teaching. Annie has consistently championed sex worker rights and health care and was one of the pivotal players of the Sex Positive Movement of the 1980’s. She got her BFA at School of Visual Arts in NYC was the first porn star to earn a Ph.D..

She’s a popular lecturer whose work is studied in many colleges and Universities. For the past seventeen years she has been collaborating on art projects with her partner, an artist and UCSC professor, Elizabeth Stephens. They are movers and shakers in the new “ecosex movement,” committed to making environmentalism more sexy, fun and diverse. In 2013, Sprinkle proudly received the Artist/Activist/ Scholar Award from Performance Studies International at Stanford and was awarded the Acker Award for Excellence in the Avant Garde. –Annie Sprinkle