Annie Sprinkle

Calling her autobiography Post-Porn Modernist, Annie Sprinkle is a pleasure activist and a major player in the feminist porn movement. With a lighthearted comedic persona, she manages to deconstruct victimization with an amazing combination of humor, education, and spiritual belief. As an actor, writer, director, photographer, and sex worker, she has spread a sex-positive message throughout her career in numerous books, visual arts, and live performances. Since the early '70s, she starred in over 50 known porn films before directing herself in Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle in 1981. She stopped making mainstream porn in 1991, and turned to low-budget features, late-night cable shorts, and documentaries. Mostly appearing as herself, she has worked with experimental filmmakers like Nick Zedd, Nina Hartley, and Monika Treut. She focused on directing and producing with Linda/Les & Annie: The First Female to Male Transsexual Love Story and The Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop: Or How to Be a Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps. Her videos in the early '90s reflected her live performance art at the time, which was part sex education, part spirituality seminar, and part comedy show. Working alongside other feminist pornographers like Candida Royalle and Scarlott Harlott, she made her masterpiece, Annie Sprinkle's Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real, which recollected her 25-year career.