Chapter I: Annie and Beth
“Love is language. Sexuality is its alphabet”
Beatrice Favaretto’s The Lovers is a project realized in San Francisco in the fall of 2025, during a residency with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens. This text takes the form of a diary of that experience—a record of a moment lived through an evolving encounter with a new form of sexuality: The Ecosex Movement. The English translation is by Allison Grimaldi Donahue.
“Lover”—adj. and n. m. and f. [present participle of “to love”]—one who loves, who has a passion for something, who enjoys or has almost professional experience in something; a person with whom one has free or extramarital love; someone who has affection, attraction toward a specific object; enthusiast, amateur, connoisseur, expert, admirer, aficionado, friend, passionate one, lover, mad one.
The concept of “lover” expands in many directions. It defines a series of different loves, never the same, always unpredictable, free and outside the rules, directed toward certain objects, bodies, and living beings. When we speak of lovers we think of sexuality, of the romantic relationship that is established, of that wild and adrenaline-fueled desire for the other. Of burning desire. An action fueled by the use of our senses: physical recognition, penetration, fusion, the sexual act—physical or metaphorical—of touching, licking, biting, embracing, rubbing, penetrating. Loving as a profession, as a form of life, as art, as psychomagical religion.
Love is language. Sexuality is its alphabet: dialogue, touch, fusion, stepping outside of the self. A system of relational measurement. A guide inside the body of the other, an activator of fluids. A motion of aggregation and destruction of atoms: we exit and enter ourselves. A temporal door.
We were in the car in Bernal Heights, it was almost sunset. Beth pointed at the sky and shouted: “Sometimes I forget I’m married to the moon! Look how wonderful my wife is.” From that moment on, I never looked at that circle of light in the sky the same way again.
Can the things around us be possible lovers, husbands, wives, partners? Can I love something simply on the basis of its existence in the world?
A daisy wears a wedding veil, a tree touches us, water wets us, the sky walks with us, food passes through us from one opening to another.
S. once told me: “The body is made of millions of holes and pores and we only use a tiny fraction of them. It feels so limiting. Sticking needles into the skin is like penetrating someone, an attempt to enter in a different way, an attempt to use another possibility of the body. To live it and make it yours by opening new passages and intimacies.”
Huge breasts, nipples covered in lip gloss, pronounced belly, a tattoo of a vaginal interior on the shoulder, a tattoo with Beth’s name, curly red hair, very long extensions, red nails matching hands and feet, a tattooed ring in the shape of a diamond, false eyelashes. A red lipstick spilling outside the lips, jewelry hanging from ears and neck. Buzz-cut hair, double eyeliner, mouth slightly tilted to the right, small firm breasts, abundant hips, leg hair, hands and feet with matching blue nail polish, a tattoo with Annie’s name. Butch’s tail. His smell fills the room. An endless series of fabrics, clothes, sequins, objects, photographs. One of my feet with a sock, a glimpse of my grey pants. My laughter.
Theirs: Annie and Beth. The lovers, of everything and everyone. Ecosexual lovers.
9.09.25
I am flying to SF.
11.09.25
I think I’m a bit sick, maybe jet lag. Annie, Beth and I are getting to know each other. Language doesn’t help. San Francisco is stunning: hills in the ocean. At 7 p.m. the fog arrives, punctual, they call it the Dragon’s Breath. The city is full of colors, wooden houses, huge bridges over the sea. I am on one of the highest hills in the city: Bernal Heights, the home-studio of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens. A red two-story house. A garden and a room all for myself.
The garage is full of photographs, collages, costumes, containers, glitter, glue, paints, brushes, lightboxes, puppets, records, DVDs, CDs, wigs, tables, props, phallic and vaginal forms, books, pens, colors—any kind of tool imaginable. There are 40 years of their life together as artists and partners. A small treasure chest between dust and flickering light.
15.09.25
I spend my days mostly assisting Annie. I cut breasts out of magazines.
We are preparing an exhibition at Cushion Works, an independent gallery in SF, where there will be a retrospective of their work. At the beginning of production they discovered that Annie has breast cancer, and this is her second time. She has to start radiotherapy.
So instead of facing the illness privately, they transformed the experience into a collective exhibition celebrating the breast as a symbol of pleasure, nourishment, identity, vulnerability, survival, and community. The show will be called Bazoombas in Love. There will be collages and photographs; altered mammograms; sculptures, bronze casts, historical works related to the theme of the breast; works by many artists from their queer-feminist network; materials from their personal collection. A fundamental part of the project are public events: ecosexual walks; performances; “Tit Print” workshops (prints made with breasts); meetings with cancer survivors; public readings called “Tit Lit”; sessions of participatory artistic and therapeutic practices.
16.09.2025
Today I went with Beth to see the route she wants to take for her performance. Beth is organizing a new Walking Tour, their way of combining art, politics, and environmentalism. A form of performative activism mixing rituals, nature observation, linguistic games, and collective participation to create a more intimate relationship with the environment.
“An Ecosexual Walking Tour In Search of the Elusive Boobie Bird” is the one created for the exhibition, through a walk in San Francisco’s Mission District. The tour is guided by Beth Stephens and artist/environmentalist Amanda Starbuck, and includes the neighborhood’s landmarks: sex worker areas, shelters, medical centers for prevention, independent spaces, art centers, new green areas, and places that tell the story of the city’s urban evolution.
The idea plays on the double meaning of the word “boobie”: in colloquial English it means “breast,” but it also refers to the booby bird, a seabird. During the walk, participants are invited to symbolically search for this “elusive boobie bird” across different urban spaces. The walk is interspersed with storytelling moments, speakers, artists, poets, activists, costumes—an ideological carnival preceding the opening of the exhibition. I’m very curious to see how it will turn out. I might also write a text for the event.
I like boobs.
The first time I touched one, it was my mother’s. Then my own. After that, I saw thousands of them: my grandmother’s, my friends’, my cousin’s, my niece’s. My entire dynasty of breasts — chosen family and bloodline. A feeding point. A care point.
The first time I made out, I couldn’t stop touching them. I licked them, kissed them, held them, talked to them, played with them. They were soft — like candy, clouds, cakes, cherries. Hypnotic circles of lust and love.
Boobs seem alive, as if they carry their own consciousness. Fluid entities. They stand there, each one preferring a different position. Most of the time they are blind, but they have other senses — sharper ones. When the body is too cold or too hot, they activate. They regulate emotions. They always seem to know when it’s time to hide and when it’s time to show. They are transformative — they can fit into everything. Soft silk dresses, shiny and glittering bras, tight shirts, latex corsets, wool sweaters: they adapt like water to any garment.
I like boobs.
I didn’t know how much until I became, in a sense, a professional boob-cutter. Annie and Beth gave me this task: cut every breast you see. Find every size, color, dress, texture. We have to collect them, display them, make a show — an altar to honor them.
Annie has breast cancer, and we are creating a protective circle for her. Sam and I steal breasts from newspapers and magazines, cutting them out as a kind of spiritual ritual — We press them together, to have fun with it, to play with scars, shapes, imperfections, flesh. To face fear and overcome it. To transform pain into power. To find our beauty inside ourselves, through love and acceptance.
Breast comes from the Latin word sinus, meaning “cavity”; it is said that within it resides the soul.
We extract the breast to uncover the body’s most hidden and fragile part — our center. Our identity, our inner and primordial self. We give our breasts as a sacrifice — to be exposed all together. A community of visible and invisible women, gathering from across the universe to say: We are one mutual godness, with or without boobs.
29.09.2025
Yesterday I went to the Folsom Fair, the BDSM fair.
Naked bodies in the streets. I was alone but I felt safe. There were people of every kind freely experimenting in public. Trying different tools, outfits, and forms of pain. They were exploring new things to try, laughing, getting aroused, organizing their personal pleasure. I was fascinated by skin, black latex, blood, wounds, bruises, sounds, screams, laughter, breathing. The indifference toward people making love or reaching orgasm in the streets. Fisting, pissing, bondage—every imaginable practice was there unfolding before my eyes.
The area dedicated to women was enclosed in a tent where free sex was practiced. It was very exciting to see those bodies so free to lick, kiss, bite, reach orgasm. A girl brought me into a threesome; I was very shy but I let myself be carried away. She licked my breasts, pulled down my pants, and started spanking me with a strap.
Do you think I could become a dominatrix?
Would you like to do it?
5.10.25
I would like to ask Annie many things, but I don’t know when I’ll find the right moment. I think after the opening of the exhibition might be ideal. For now I’m reading all her books—I didn’t think she had written so many. Her sexual perspective is giving me new research and self-work ideas. It is a simple path where psychomagic is used as a basis to reach one’s desires, where self-determination comes from experimentation, self-knowledge, play, and the fusion between art and life.
13.10.25
We went to the Santa Cruz Film Festival where we presented their new film: Playing with Fire. The third film in the trilogy, after Goodbye Gauley Mountain and Water Makes Us Wet.
Watching it was very powerful, full of joy, laughter, and tears. Beyond its seemingly naïve form, the content is very strong: the birth of a new genre—the ecosexual film.
Ecosexuality is the use of sexuality as a tool for activism, in this case environmental. Removing any scientific or didactic framework, ecosexuality aims to create empathy between humans and nature, showing how the relationship between them is a romantic, almost love-like one. It promotes care, conservation, and replaces the idea of being passive children of the world with the idea of being active lovers and collaborators in relation to things and people.
And so the film blends emotions with ecological themes. Love and sex as a form of conscious relationship toward everything that surrounds us.
20.10.2025
I went to S.’s house. They tied me up; we tried different positions and knots. At first they made two different ones, but I didn’t feel anything. I felt somewhat detached from reality.
The third time they wrapped ropes around my breasts; I felt very sexy and started getting aroused. We kissed. I liked being enclosed in those ropes. Then they tied my legs and laid me down. It felt like acupuncture—I was sleepy. I felt the rope pressing against all my accumulated tension; I liked it a lot. I felt safe. We then tried stronger ties.
28.10.2025
Last dinner together. Almost Halloween. I cried from emotion. At the sunset of my 32nd year. I had dinner with their closest friends. It was beautiful.
I met Joe Cramer, who teaches erotic massage and tantric practices; Carol Queen, sexologist, writer and activist; Guillermo Gomez-Peña, artist and performer from La Pocha Nostra; Jane Hamilton, former actress, sexologist and sex worker.
We toasted through tears. A vortex of emotions rose inside me. A mix of childish feelings, love, and bitterness about my departure. A small universe formed inside me.
I gained a family that taught me a new form of love: collective love—for things, people, friends, strangers, objects, for everything. It is not easy to explain this new way of feeling. A form of unconditional love I hadn’t felt in a long time. The impossibility of falling. Freedom as absence of fear. Free to be everything in every possible form.
At that table filled with crackers, corn, blueberry cheese, chips, salmon, fried chicken, tacos, guacamole, muffins, and margaritas, I wondered what to expect next. What could come after Annie and Beth? Butch was breathing on our legs while we talked about life, death, and the future of art.
5.11.2025
I left SF.
The last days were very beautiful; I finished everything I had to do. I made the video of A+B, simple but intense. I managed to capture what I was interested in: the meaning of their love and how I became part of it. It will be called The Lovers. A sudden intimacy opened between us, where we became a single creature.It is strange to leave this hill above the ocean. So much melancholy. I managed to say goodbye to everyone before leaving. Now I am ready to go to New York. I carry talismans with me: A.’s bunny, a pin of Albert the white peacock, a red dress given to me by Annie and Beth, my marbles.
My first appointment in New York is with Annie Sprinkle’s best friend: Veronica Vera.
