Annie Sprinkle is proud to have had sex in thousands different ways. And as diverse as her sex life is, as a person she is equally multifaceted. “I am a lot of things a lot of people love to hate: I’m a woman, I’m a whore, I’m an artist, I’m Jewish, I’m a very round woman”. Sprinkle gained fame and notoriety in the eighties and nineties, mostly as a porn actress and a performance artist. Her legendary work, A Public Cervix Announcement invited the audience to take a deep look at her cervix through a speculum, educating both about the female anatomy as well as the male gaze.

In 2002, her 30 years of professional experience in the field of human sexuality manifested in her dissertation Providing Educational Opportunities to Sex Workers, featuring an empiric study that surveyed 150 sex workers. She used the collected data to develop a three-day workshop for sex workers called “The Sweat – Sex Worker Education and Training”. Apart from analysing sex work from both a legal and historical perspective, this was also meant to de-stigmatise sex work and provide sex workers with access to legal protection.

Annie Sprinkle’s annotated dissertation recently arrived at the Schwules Museum via the estate of Frankfurt escort Stefan Hölsmann. It will be exhibited as our Object of the Month in the museum’s café all through August. In September it will find a home in the rarity section of our library on the second floor, waiting for readers to come by and view it.