Review: GOODBYE GAULEY MOUNTAIN Arouses at Abron Arts Center

In 2013, the book "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt" was published under the genre, Crime. For his research, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning, Occupy Wall Street Journal newspaperman Chris Hedges walked the SACRIFICE zones of West Virginia. He chronicled the brutally honest, GRASSROOTS American reality of people versus capitalism in hard-bitten, fastidious prose while LISTENING to multigenerational landowners and land defenders like Larry Gibson.

According to Gibson, who had preserved fifty acres of precious West Virginian land from the devastating extractive industry of coal companies, the still unspeakable national loss of 9/11 pales in comparison (despite the inability to truly compare human deaths) to the deleterious effects of coal emissions.

In America alone, twenty-four thousand people die every year due to the immediate impacts of the infamously loathed industry that Upton Sinclair defamed almost a century ago as "King Coal". That's not COUNTING over half a million PREMATURE births, and birth defects afflicting newborns. Gibson's testimonies hit home with an unnerving reminder: Coal kills.

Goodbye Gauley Mountain is the love child of couple Beth Stephens, the beloved UC-Santa Cruz professor and world-renowned interdisciplinary performance artist, and Annie Sprinkle, a charming former sex worker who earned her name peeing on masturbating men in porno flicks.

The community showed up at the old Georgian Revival-style theater in downtown Manhattan now known as the Abron Arts Center. This classic venue at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge has seen the likes of everyone from George Burns to Martha Graham to Dizzy Gillespie. The building hasn't changed much since 1915, and was once graced with the onsite directorial presence of none other than Orson Welles, not an easy act to follow for a cute couple from foggy Frisco.

Stephens's early teacher and her best student sat in the cozy, underground screening room with the film's Brooklyn-based cinematographer and environmental activist Jordan Freeman. Several others in the audience were well acquainted with the ecosexual Lover Earth marriage ceremonies that the enchanting couple performs with artists and communities throughout the globe. (Stephens and Sprinkle are pioneering the concepts, ecosexual and Lover Earth, the latter which replaces what, to them, is the outmoded notion of Earth as maternal, and instead, opening people up, everywhere, to the apparently glorious experience of making love with nature.)

In high fashion, not a few inches taller each in impressive bootstrap platforms, the adorable pair appeared illustriously justified to open the Queer New York International Arts Festival. Of course, Sprinkle's proud chest hung loose for the audience to gawk in the lighthearted mood, as Stephens began her lecture on ecosexuality, straight-faced and professorial. They both delighted with sharp wit, candid theatrics, exuding a true American love story so deservedly expressible for the 21st century.

The now well-traveled documentary film, Goodbye Gauley Mountain, first begun as an experiment in the wild idea-driven mind of Stephens, finally makes its NYC premier at this year's Festival. Since the 2014 release, Stephens has led audiences around the world to visualize the dramatic human struggle in confrontation with mountain top removal (MTR) and extractive coal industry in her humble, BACKCOUNTRY hometown in West Virginia.

Sprinkle lives up to her name, "sprinkling" a most invigorating sexuality through the ecological stream of consciousness of her better half. In the midst of conceptualizing the documentary, the two have forwarded genius prescience. They are merging the Queer movement, inspired by the city they call home, San Francisco, with the environmental movement. In a word, they've nominated the movement "EcoSexuality" and have even GONE so far as to encourage a global membership of card-carrying ecosexuals.

They have an absolutely delightful sense of humor, and while the subject matter in Goodbye Gauley Mountain never ceases to speak to the GRAVITY of the environmental, and really very human travesty at hand, Stephens is as gentle with her audience as a new lover, essentially inviting everyone to see a homeland on American soil that is worth fighting for no matter what.

In fact, only the Amazon rainforest outmatches the biodiversity found in the Appalachian range, which is also the very oldest string of mountains in North America. They even predate the mythical Himalayas and Andes.

What is at stake has arguably been said best in the thick, West Virginian drawl of a mine worker on the job. In the film, a local man says his peace with the coal mining companies, referring to them he refers as the "big man". Speaking in reference to the homegrown poor up against the corporate rich, when the "little man" wishes to gather highly valued American ginseng he's outlawed, while mountaintop removal (MTR) effectively disintegrates any semblance of ginseng growth in the disaster area.

The "big man" steps on the "little man" from every direction, he bemoans, standing around mines that once fatally drowned innumerable black migrants in their own silicone-hardened lungs.

Simultaneously a touching portrait of a queer woman's exploration of her folksy hometown, and a solemn salute to the land defenders of West Virginia, and so, also of the country and the planet, Goodbye Gauley Mountain is a must-see gem in the burgeoning ecosexual movement.

Stephens and Sprinkle are equally vibrant and charmingly quirky. More, they are extremely humble leaders toward what seems the perfect, and finally, quite human solution to effectively and lastingly overhaul environmentally destructive and socially obsolete ways of living and loving. Ecosexuality is the fresh, positively org*smic, and very renewable worldview of the future.

They've even crystallized ecosexuality into twenty-five matrimonial vows, the last of which reads, "Vow to love, honor, and cherish the Earth - until death brings you closer together forever."

Photo Courtesy of GoodbyeGauleyMountain.org

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