For some doe-eyed couples, Valentine’s Day means sitting across from your squeeze at a rickety, dimly-lit table, eating overpriced, under-cooked food at a restaurant specially bedecked for the occasion with pink tinsel and the strains of 1980s power ballads. But if you’re not that sort of couple — or if you’re single and looking for something unusual to do on Sunday night — consider the very worthy alternative of an evening spent in the company of activist, author and erotic film actor/director Madison Young.
Like her mentor, the porn star, experimental performer and educator Annie Sprinkle before her, Young straddles with equal passion two worlds that rarely embrace: the adult entertainment industry (she is the recipient of no less than six Feminist Porn Awards, including snagging the “Hottest Kink Film” title for Bondage Boob Tube in 2008) — and the rarefied world of avant-garde performance and visual art (Young curates an annual performance art and experimental film event, the Askew Festival, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, used to run the now-defunct Femina Potens gallery in San Francisco, and has given talks at Yale.)

The Bay Area-based artist’s new multimedia theater piece, Reveal All Fear Nothing: A Journey in Sex, Love, Porn and Feminism, is a contemporary update on the Post Porn Modernist Show, an iconoclastic performance work that Sprinkle toured internationally from 1989 to the mid 1990s. That show covered Sprinkle’s sexual evolution from her early years as the painfully shy little girl Ellen Steinberg to the voluptuously open and politically forthright Annie Sprinkle in an effort to demystify the sexual underworld.
Reveal All Fear Nothing presents a parallel narrative for a new generation of sexually curious people and radical performance art fans. It charts Young’s own journey through the adult entertainment demimonde, and fittingly takes place in an intimate pop-up auditorium that’s been erected for the purpose in the middle of the gaping Roman Bath set at the SF Armory Building, where Young has spent much of her career to date producing erotic films. The experience promises, among other Valentine’s Day treats, a “blow-job ballet,” a segment involving anal fisting, and a special orgasmic ritual, handed down from mentor to mentee.
“No one could to a better adaptation of Post Porn Modernist than Madison Young,” Annie Sprinkle says. “She’s my porn/art daughter and a sex-art gladiator!” Catch the show Friday, Feb. 12 – Sunday, Feb. 14 at SF Armory, San Francisco. More details here.