On Stage with Annie

When I was a little girl I lived out in the sticks. Nothing went on for years at a stretch. I was a smart little girl and bored to tears with my lot. I passed the time by reading biographies of famous and important people, first those little blue-covered ones that we had in grade schools in the fifties and sixties. Abraham Lincoln, Madame Curie, and Jane Addams (who started Hull House)—I suppose this is where I got some of my focus on doing good works and opposing injustice, that and from listening to scratchy Woody Guthrie records. I developed a fervent desire that someday my life would no longer be boring—that, in fact, I might be blessed with a life interesting enough to write a biography about.

Be very careful what you wish for, my children.

Take the busy day in early April 1994 when Annie Sprinkle called.

Annie’s one of my pals, and we talk on the phone once in a while. We probably see each other, on one coast or another, more often than we call. I expected her in town soon; she was scheduled to do both her show Post Post Porn Modernist and her Sluts and Goddesses workshop.

As a matter of fact, she was calling about the show. Opening night was to be a benefit for COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), with special seating for whores plus a reception for Margo St. James. Annie had decided she wanted to add several women to her show’s finale, and she asked me to be one of them.

If you’ve been living in a hole in the Antarctic for the past few years, just got to town, and don’t know about Annie’s show, let me give away the punch line so I don’t lose you: The finale of Post Post Porn Modernist involves Annie coming onstage to tell the audience about the ancient sacred prostitutes and the sex rituals they did. Then Annie recreates such a ritual, complete with candles, flame and a cordless vibrator. Yep, she masturbates—to orgasm, if the energy is right—right there onstage, in front of four hundred people.

Actually, I don’t think masturbation is the right word for it, and Annie prefers not to call it that either. I know lots of people hate the word to begin with, and it does have a really sex-negative etymology—but usually I just use it, figuring people know what it means, it’s fairly graphic (but discreetly Latinized at the same time), and folks should just get over their squeamishness and get into it. But what Annie does onstage transcends any kind of jerking off or even “making love to yourself” experience had by anyone since—well, since the sacred prostitutes.

I’ve masturbated quite a lot; I wasn’t very good at it, to begin with, but then I found a vibrator and really made up for lost time. The orgasms I learned to have with the help of my horrendously loud antique Stim-u-lax Junior kept me going for years when I couldn’t yet come with a partner, ’til finally, somehow, I learned to transfer the skill. I learned to masturbate in front of partners, then in front of strangers at a Jack-and-Jill-Off party, then in front of customers at the peep show. I’ve actually masturbated in front of more strangers than just about anyone I know (well, except Annie); in fact, I think I prefer masturbating in front of strangers, big exhibitionist that I am, to doing it alone.

But I had never, never masturbated in front of four hundred people. Of course I said yes right away.

So we gathered together with Annie on the night of the show, dressed in flowing scarves, plenty of jewelry, and not much else. Joining me were performance artist Nao Bustamante, retired porn actress Juliet Anderson (a.k.a. Aunt Peg), Annie’s Tantra teacher Jwala and several other women. Annie told us to bring oil, vibrators, dildos if we wanted them, and any sacred objects we liked, all on a tray that we could carry onstage with us. I liked this idea of a compact altar and sex space; each of us had completely different items on our trays, especially where sacred objects were concerned. Stones, feathers, Goddess figurines—plus I brought my favorite altar item, an antique box of Trojan condoms (empty) that I found in my dad’s effects after he died. He had probably been holding on to that box since World War II, and it’s the most sexual talisman that connects me to my parents. (Why did I want to bring my parents along to masturbate in front of four hundred people? Well, that’s a complicated question. Let’s just say they needed it even more than I did.)

I’m not sure how to describe the experience, either from the outside—I can only imagine we looked like a wall of pure, flaming sacred sex, flanking Annie three to each side on the big stage—or from within. I had one of my first nongenital orgasm experiences, of the type that people who practice Tantra strive for, while working in the peep show—one night a very interesting man who knew a lot about sexual energy came into my booth, where I’d been masturbating already for hours, and with him I found that I could orgasm from stroking my foot, my neck, anywhere. Being onstage with Annie felt like that, only a thousand times more intense.

We lit candles and fire bowls—have you ever masturbated looking into flames? Try it sometime. We spread oil and red paint on our bodies to represent menstrual blood. One Tantrika had brought a didgeridoo, the Australian Aborigine wind instrument that sounds like a cross between a foghorn and—a mating muskox? The sound that accompanied our actions was a low-pitched combination of a honk, a growl and a rumble. It was very primitive, very sexual, especially because we could feel its low rumble in our bodies. We all synchronized our breathing with each other’s and with our body movements—the Tantrikas do this all the time, but I rarely do; it had both a ritualistic feel and also a very body-centric effect.

Then we switched on the vibrators.

The audience was shaking rattles. We were buzzing. We were also miked, so when we began to have orgasms, one of us and then the next, the pants and growls and cries filled the auditorium. It was what might be called in German Urmusik—music from the beginning of time.

You’ve never seen so many orgasms at once.

I was out of control of my body, which undulated like a snake. The Tantrikas would call it Kundalini, the body’s own serpentine energy flow, unleashed. It felt wild and wonderful. I couldn’t stop coming; I was in a trance from it. I don’t think I’d ever really understood what sex ritual might mean, even though I’ve paired sex and ritual before. This was different—totally primal, caught up in an energy that would not be denied or controlled, and it lasted for a long, long time. Maybe it was the fire. Maybe it was that pack of COYOTE whores egging us on in the front row (which was ribboned off with a sign that said “Reserved for Sacred Prostitutes”). Maybe it was the whole audience. Maybe it was Annie.

Certainly it was the Goddess.

All I know is, I want to have sex like that all the time. Do you suppose I’ll have to start a religion?

I used to be one of those people who relentlessly pooh-poohed spirituality. I was a wild little atheist in my younger years; I think now that stance had everything to do with my suspicion of the anti-sexuality of all the Christians I knew. Indeed, for those who understand “spirituality” and “religion” to be synonyms, there isn’t a lot of hope held out in the contemporary religions of the world—not if we want spiritual support for feeling good about our bodies, our lust, our sexual explorations and adventures of every kind. It’s no wonder that for many of us, desire to feel good about sex won out over religious faith.

But body-hating, sex-negative Christianity—and all its close relatives—are not all there is to spirituality. When I discovered Paganism, which holds everything, including cunts and cocks—especially cunts and cocks!—sacred, a very different world of spiritual possibility opened to me. This is also why so many Westerners, especially in these parts, have flocked to Tantra, Taoist and other sex-positive Eastern religious/spiritual practices. (I say “in these parts”—the Bay Area—because we have so many Tantra teachers around here. Not to mention so many people who attend their workshops.)

So onstage with Annie I had not only an extraordinary sexual experience, but a very powerful spiritual experience. It actually gave me a new level of insight into Christian sex-negativity—if this is what the “heathen” Goddess-worshipers were doing before the new religion came along, no wonder Christianity has tried so hard (and so relatively successfully) to colonize sex. This stuff would be big, big competition.

You heard it from me, folks—the Religious Right has their panties all in a knot about queers, but the biggest threat to their dominion is brewing in every woman and man who sees God/dess in a orgasm. It was alive on stage with Annie. It wouldn’t take much for us to keep it alive all the time.

Will you get down on your knees for that?

Some Neo-Pagan historians are quite convinced that the sort of spiritual experience I had with Annie dates back to pre-Christian times—that is, if you could set the controls on the time machine back far enough, you could touch down on a scene very much like our onstage recreation (minus, of course, the vibrators—unless you believe the rumors that Cleopatra used to get off on a papyrus box full of buzzing bees). Others argue that history doesn’t really give us enough clues to know for sure how the sacred prostitutes, for example, lived their day-to-day lives. Skeptics (some of whom are quite supportive of the culture that is forming around these literalist beliefs) suggest that we jaded, post-industrial prisoners of the twentieth century are making up a matriarchal, sex-positive history out of the depths of our need to believe in an ancient lineage of sacred, sexual women and the men who worshiped them.

Want to know what I think?

I think it doesn’t matter one bit, because, true tales or not, these dreams of sacred whore ancestors have begun to birth such a culture here, now. Most of our mothers grew up in an era that regarded the vulva as unspeakable and even unclean; today you can find women and men who regard the primal birthplace as gorgeous and sacred. (Here we should mention not only the Pagans and the Tantrikas, but the pioneering work of artists Betty Dodson and Judy Chicago, who brought feminists—some kicking and screaming—to the altar of vulva-worship.) Many Americans think of prostitutes as drug-addled and degraded; today some sex-work activists look to the archetype of the sacred whore, who showed strangers the embrace of the Great Goddess, and see their calling as spiritually powerful. Many people have never seen another person be sexual in front of them, aside from viewing porn; today sexuality is openly on display, if you know where to look for it, often honored as ritual.

These developments are all extraordinary, even if they are embraced only by a minority. Small stones ripple the surface of a pond just as large ones do, and the Neo-Pagan and Goddess movements are, after all, hardly tiny stones. In particular these spiritual philosophies have found fertile ground in the sex communities—or is it that they have provided the ground in which those communities could flourish anew? People comment with wonder on my ability (nay, predilection) to exhibit myself and my sexuality publicly—whether verbally, as I do when I’m lecturing, or all the way to nudity and sex acts, as in my performances. But I doubt I would have come to this state of unveiled anti-modesty had I not come upon the Charge of the Goddess, one of the powerful texts of paganism, and heard her say, “Make music and love, all in My presence…. Behold, all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.”

Tantrikas tell me that in ancient India the entire community would gather in the temple to watch the earthly embodiments of Shiva and Shakti make love. Imagine what would have to change in our understanding of religion, community and propriety to hustle the kids into the station wagon so the whole family could go down to church to gather around the Reverend and Mrs., following every caress with our eyes so as not to miss a single sacrament. Think Jesse Helms might find something else to fulminate about, had he had an upbringing like that?

Whether or not we grew up Christian, most of us are poisoned by the cultural biases about sex and the body that stem from that religious world view. Our anti-sex laws are grounded in it. Even non-Christians rarely speak up loudly enough in support of sex and diversity. And even people who like and cherish sex still tend to see it as a private matter, something to relish in the bedroom but accord no pomp and circumstance.

Suppose sex mattered so much that we were all drawn to its spectacle openly, not through the surreptitious medium of porn. Suppose we could go watch Annie and her priestesses undulate and howl in full-body orgasm and not even have to call it “performance art.” Suppose our public spaces were like Pompeii and Herculaneum, decorated with friezes showing people fucking. Suppose the new President was not sworn in by placing his hand on a Bible, but (as kings were of old) by having to pleasure the High Priestess.

Sex would not only be laden with a spiritual significance it has, over the millennia, been shorn of. It would also have public significance—community significance. In other epochs and places in the world, sex has had just such importance: In some cultures youth are brought into the tribe through ritual with a strong sexual component, and some subcultures are marked and defined by their (often public) sexuality: post-Enlightenment brothel whores, post-Stonewall gay men.

But most contemporary Americans, even those who find their way to sexual rites of passage—the first time, sexual commitment, coming out—live their erotic lives in small, private circles. Who are our sexual role models? Who is our High Priestess? Dr. Ruth? If so, I want to be able to go to Madison Square Garden and watch her fuck. For that matter, I know I’d feel better about the President if I could see for myself whether he really does give good head.

We may be slowly shaking off Puritanism, but we’d be mistaken to set our sights too low. Plenty of people—including neo-fascist, paramilitary Christians—would still like to control our sexualities, a handy stepping stone to controlling us utterly. When sex is privatized, our pleasure in sex does not affect our understanding of ourselves in community, and our distress within sex is not allayed by those around us. In either case, we find no community support for change.

This is one of the reasons heterosexuals, whose sexuality is theoretically culturally sanctioned, are so often envious of the gay and lesbian communities. Aside from the public space provided by swing clubs and sex-industry venues (neither of which is universally accessible), straight people are expected to identify sexually around monogamous couplehood. Even though this lifestyle is on the endangered species list, and in fact lesbians are probably better at it than straight people, it’s still the culturally understood norm for hets. There is no such universally accepted norm for gays, lesbians, bisexuals. Queers come out into a subculture of public discourse about sex, and often public sexual accessibility. Wistful straight people are forever confiding to me that they wish hetero social structures existed that parallel gay ones. Poor sweeties! What they wish for—the generally more sex-positive, sexually open atmosphere of queer subculture—exists, but only in pockets.

Sex community doesn’t necessarily equal—or require—communal sex; it means at minimum that sexual behavior and sexual diversity can be openly acknowledged and discussed, that people can find each other based on sexual interest, that resources to support people in their sexuality are available on a community level. Communities like this are rare. The one I live in, the Bay Area, is richly developed and includes queers, the transgendered, sex workers, leatherfolk—and yes, even some heterosexuals. Our “community standards” deviate rather substantially from those of Middle America, perhaps, at least as far as sexuality is concerned. (That’s why all the obscenity trials happen elsewhere, in towns that still have populations of shockable jurors.) However, most other places can’t be said to have sexual community in any meaningful sense—certainly not community that embraces people of all erotic orientations.

The right wing would like us to believe that most of America’s community standards—they like to call them “family values”—leave queers and pervs and feminists and non-Christians behind. I’m not so sure. Instead I think that below those family values lie intense confusion, pain about sex and relationships, dissonance about families and family life, and a deep, if inchoate, longing for a spirituality that does not split body from mind. There exists little leadership to wean these confused ones from the rhetoric that seeks to co-opt them into foot soldiers and drones.

Sexual and spiritual community grows as, one by one, people leave behind hateful or empty religious systems that do not feed them anything but xenophobia. Sexual and spiritual community grows because people want to connect, to feel themselves one with another person, with the earth, a great web of love and pleasure and affiliation. Deep down none of us wants to be estranged from our sexuality, from erotic delight, from the embrace of others, and as long as this is true, sexual and spiritual community will continue to grow.

So every sacred orgasm, whether or not four hundred people watch it take place, is an offering to community, to the community that wants to worship the body, the orgasm, each other. And all acts of love and pleasure are our rituals.