Hot Wet & Blue

A queer marriage to the sea

On August 28, 2009 two ecstatic artist-brides married the ocean in an Eco-Sexual Blue Wedding, at the Biennale in Venice Italy. Performance artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stevens, together with a crew of exotic friends from the four corners of the globe vowed to «love, honor and cherish the Sea until death do us part.» I was invited to participate in this unforgettable, hot, wet wedding party and here is the report I promised you in last month’s NEWSLETTER.

I had been planning to bring the ORGASMOBILE to Annie and Beth’s blue wedding. I had imagined the fun of cruising around the magical city by the sea, offering orgasms to all the female tourists who had floated into town for the weekend. And I had been ignoring the realities and practicalities of transporting a wheeled vehicle through a city of boats. As the intense heat of August brought me back to my senses, I realized that it would be best to leave my romantic pleasure wagon at home and make the trip with just a small suitcase to pull through the city. It ended up being a good decision.

Beth and Annie are an artist couple dedicated to doing art projects that explore, generate, and celebrate love. They orchestrate performance art weddings in collaboration with various international communities. Each wedding is site-specific, interactive, and utilizes a different theme and color based on the seven chakra system of the human body. The wedding is a symbolic gesture, which aims to instill hope, to be an antidote to fear and act as a call to action.

So this was to be the BLUE wedding, associated with the fifth chakra, the throat, communication, water, flow. Annie and Beth would marry themselves to the sea and all the participants in the feast were invited to do the same. This would be an opportunity to expand our love to include all the waters of the world. What better place to celebrate wet love than in Venice?

We were all invited to meet up with the bridal party at the Fear Pavilion, part of the 53rd Venice Biennale. All well and good, but getting around in this magical city is not as easy as you might think. First thing to do when you land at the airport in Venice is get a map. Then buy a pass for the «vaporetto» – the speedy, over-crowded transportation boats that bus people through the canals. I had traveled from home with two sweet girlfriends and on this extremely hot sweaty day, we struggled to find our way to the pavilion by boat and foot with the required map in hand. After many false turns, we arrived at the spacious converted factory hall that was the home of the Fear Pavilion (located right next to the Unconditional Love Pavilion). We discovered a delightful hoard of eccentric folk who had flown in from all over Europe and as far away as San Francisco. All of them like us, there to participate in the eco-sexual wedding with Annie and Beth. And everyone had brought along an exotic blue outfit to wear for the ceremony.

At 4 in the afternoon, with all properly attired in our blue finery, we began the ritual with a chant in the Italian language: Mamma mia che tettone, we sang together. It means literally, Oh mother, what a pair of boobs.
A hymn of praise to Annie’s world-famous, historically validated, cinema-worthy breasts. The day before on the piazza, a man saw Annie’s magnificent boobies and shouted, «Mamma mia, che tettone.» We were so impressed by his spontaneous prayer that the verse was immediately integrated into the ceremony. We chanted it together fervently for an entire minute.

Carol Queen called the directions for our ceremony and then followed a succession of performances that kept us enthralled until early evening. Some of my special favorites were:

THE ECSTATIC CERULEAN BEARDED SEAMALES, two blue mermaids who had to be carried into the circle because they had fins not feet
THE FUN OF CASTRATION by Tim Stüttgen, a really sensational performer who sacrificed his dick and then fell backwards into the sea at the end of his performance,
THE BLUE SQUIRTING FONTANA, a naked blue-painted Spanish artist who pulled a long blue sash out of her pussy while spouting blue water from her ass.
There were so many unforgettable performance.

We ended the ceremony with a precession through the town of Venice. The group stopped at a lovely square, had a meal and then the two brides stepped into a gondola for a ride to the open sea where they ceremonially cast their wedding rings into the deep.

It was a delicious adventure and I felt inspired to become even more madly creative and daring in the way that I love the world. Thank you Annie and Beth for your faithfulness, for drawing the queer folk together and for overcoming all obstacles and birthing such an amazing event on behalf of all of us.

May the Sea Goddess bless you both with wave upon wave of ecstasy, pleasure and creativity. May you be happy. May you be well.

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