Sophia Sky and the Art of Sex in the Pacific Northwest

Seattle Is Horny with a Probability of Rain & this Art Maven Helps Keep It That Way

Seattle has a marriage of maritime culture and inclement weather that’s bound to make a remote outpost sexy. Lore is that in olden times the city was populated by hundreds of professional “seamstresses” when there was but one sewing machine in the area. Today’s conversation partner is another force in keeping Seattle sexy, Sophia Sky, Executive Director of the Seattle Erotic Art Festival.

Sophia is up there with the very most accomplished sexual voyagers in my universe of creative connections. We discovered each other in 2004, on a long-since deceased social media platform. She and I bonded over the long-forgotten spectacle of Humphrey the Whale. Concurrently, my mom’s funeral was happening. And I was struggling to finish the first piece of fiction to be published under my name.

Sophia Sky as digital distraction is in itself enough to lodge her in my memory. As you’ll read, there would be a number of other reasons for Sophia not to have been forgotten.

An annual event invented by the Pan Eros Foundation, the Seattle Erotic Art Festival showcases consistently excellent erotic art in a range of media. The visual arts, but also poetry and literature and interactive installations. From a modest debut that featured 40 visual pieces, the festival has grown to include live music and burlesque, ballroom dance and circus arts.

In 2022, SEAF spawned the Pan Eros Film Festival, a concurrent festival that showcases short films with subjects and narratives that span the spectrum of sexuality. The films are broken into two sections, short features screened at the SIFF Film Center and the silent shorts that are screened continuously within SEAF for the duration of the festival.

Not so much as the Humphrey connection, I remember the moment I decided to go to SEAF. It happened in Venice, at the dining room table of the woman with whom I was splitting. Seattle is so far, I thought. But I went and things weren’t after that the same.

Sophia Sky and I spoke on on Tuesday morning, after she attended a concert in Berkeley.

Sophia Sky, pictured at the most recent Seattle Erotic Arts Festival with exhibition curator Andrew Moran, aims to see erotic art more widely accepted in art and gallery spaces.

Hi Sophia Sky. How are you doing?

I’m doing great, Donnell. So good to talk to you.

Yeah, we don’t talk enough.

It’s true.

I know you went to an UNKLE show last night and it sounds amazing. Was it a good show?

It was a very good show. I greatly enjoyed it. One of the interesting things was that the main guy of UNKLE is mainly a producer. He didn’t have his performer hat on. The music was great. The stage show like… “Eh, I‘m going to close my eyes because I’m not getting, like, fabulous energy cues from the performer.”

That’s very resourceful.

My only critique.

A lot of people would have just had a bad time.

I’m all about maximizing my pleasure.

I know that about you. I thought we’d have to work our way up to that, but I guess not.

It’s at the forefront of my life.

[Laughing]

I want to treat you as an individual, but let me ask you something general: Are people in the Northwest especially horny? I’ve got this theory that the higher you go up the West Coast the more sexually untamed the cities are.

I’m going to agree with that, because unless you have really good rain gear you have to spend a lot of time inside.

Do you remember how we met, online?

We met on Tribe.net, but I don’t remember when we started talking to each other first, but I know we ended up going down a lot of rabbit holes in conversations.

I always remember Humphrey the Whale.

Because of Rio Vista? [Laughing] We bonded on that. We were like, Yeah, we both know that place.

I think I told you that I’d just moved to California when it happened. I was like, “What the hell?” I was in Sacramento and Rio Vista is like, what, an hour south, down the river?

It’s only an hour because you gotta go through all of the winding, small roads.

I’ve done that. It’s amazing, it feels like another time.

The Delta is pretty stuck in like the 1940s.

Did you experience that?

I lived in Rio Vista for about a year, and then my mom lived in a little place called Bird’s Landing that’s not very far away from that. I think it was 12 people that lived there. The post office closed 15 years ago because the post master retired.

Part of your SEAF bio that stands out to me is: When she isn’t immersed in the arts, she is fascinated by bodies. Have you always had an outsized interest in bodies?

Yes. My mom ran a bookstore and then later on she bought it from the owner. So there were always books around. We had really good medical texts? Like, the old-fashioned Gray’s Anatomy, the ones with eight different volumes for the whole body. I was always fascinated with all the different drawings. So, like bodies are kind of amazing. Plus, my nana had a lot of health problems when I was growing up. I was very aware of all her heart surgeries, how she managed her diabetes, and the brain tumor that she had.

And I was a child athlete. I was a competitive swimmer and always being aware of taking care of my body. When I got into massage therapy and started learning more, it was like, Bodies are just kinda… impressive… and kinda poorly designed in some ways. But overall, impressive.

What am I missing if I’ve never been to the Seattle Erotic Art Festival?

You are missing the chance to explore what eroticism can mean, to many different people. I would say that one of the big things about the art at Seattle Erotic Arts Festival is that we encompass all kinds of art, including the art of self expression. We very much want to give people a space where they can explore who they are and who they might want to be—through what turns them on, what they find alluring, what makes themselves feel sexy. We often forget that who we love and how we love them is a core part of what makes us human. Giving people a place where they can learn what that is is pretty powerful.

One of the things I focus on doing is having as much variety to the question, “What is erotic?” as I can. Because everyone experiences eroticism differently and gets turned on by different things. I want to make sure that when someone walks in, out of the 300 pieces of art at least one of them is going to make them say, “Ah, that’s me!” Or, “That’s what I like.” Or, “Somebody else likes what I like.” That’s a really powerful way to find connection in the world.

I’ve only been once, like a dozen years ago. I follow you and follow it, but I researched before this call and am shocked at how varied the history has been. You ought to make a book of it sometime.

We keep trying, but we get overwhelmed by how much there is.

Well you’ll have to farm it out to the likes of me, won’t you.

I was just thinking of that. Hmm… I could pay Donnell.

Well that’s an offline conversation. SEAF always strikes me as more brainy than I expected. I don’t know if I thought it was going to be some bacchanal right out of the gate, but this is a very thoughtful and intentional event. Was this always the case or have you shaped it your way?

I’ve shaped it that way over the years, but it’s always been fairly layered and a little on the cerebral side. Part of that is because we are in Washington State and we have some pretty backwards blue laws around our liquor laws. You can’t have any sexual activity or nudity where there is alcohol being sold. Now, if it’s art that’s different. You can have nude paintings or nude sculpture where alcohol is sold, that’s fine. But if you see a real live nipple while you’re drinking a beer or a glass of wine, I mean, you might die. We’re not quite sure why the people in Portland haven’t died yet, because they have alcohol and nudity together.

Part of it is that, that we have to keep it from becoming a bacchanal. There’s a long standing tradition of having a glass of wine or having a cocktail while you’re looking at art. I don’t know why that is, but it’s true. Having an art event with no alcohol would really drastically change it, in really strange ways.

It started out as just a visual arts festival with paintings and sculptures and photographs. Then films got added. Then lectures got added, then performances. Different types of art over time, so that it became more and more layered. And every time someone would want to add a different type of art there would be a big discussion of, Does this serve what the Seattle Erotic Art Festival is all about? The answer has always been: Yeah. Sexy poetry is art, and it’s erotic art. So therefore it should be in our show.

We’re kind of a thinky bunch. That’s maybe where it’s from. But also, coming from a sex-negative culture there has been an underlying desire to explain to people why this is important, why this is good. So often people are like [raises voice 1.5 octaves] “Ooh, sex is titillating. It’s not important.” And it’s like, No. Just because something is exciting and pleasurable doesn’t mean it’s not powerful and important in our lives.

I look at all of the website pictures and see that the festival has occupied different spaces over the years. Can you walk me through them and tell me why you were where and how the event has been shaped by the spaces you’ve occupied?

Oooh, that’s a wonderful question. Yes! When we very first started out we started in Town Hall. It’s not actually the Town Hall of Seattle, but it was at one point and that’s what they still call the building. Actually, we were in the basement of the Town Hall building. This was back in 2003. The capacity was 400 and they were like, This might feel a little empty. Because they’d never done this before. And there was literally a line around the block.

It completely took everyone by surprise, how interested everybody was. The original group that started it reached out to a whole bunch of artists and said, Hey, do you have any sexy art that you want to show. Every single artist said yes I have nowhere to show it. No gallery will show this art, I have a whole bunch of stuff.

Over the weekend there was always a line to get in, waiting for people to come out. That was very small to start with. Very few works, no performance art. There was a live auction and that was the entertainment. Then we moved to a place that was called Consolidated Works, which is now where the big Amazon buildings are.

At the time it was Paul Allen who bought that whole area. He was a big supporter of the arts and he allow Consolidated Works to rent this huge old, strong building that was a labyrinth and very warehouse style. He was like, Yeah, you’re a non-profit arts organization. Just pay me X percent of what you make a year as your rent. It was an amazing deal.

The first people who started it were in the BDSM/leather community. That community is really focused on volunteerism and being in service to the community. So what they did was say, Hey. We’re not rich, but have lots of people. For their rent they would go in and do a whole bunch of improvements as part of their rent. We were in Consolidated Works for, let’s see… 2004, 2005, and 2006. Then things changed and development was threatening. They couldn’t confirm a date for us and we lost that space.

In that space we’d added films, because there was a small movie theater in there. There was a big performance hall with great theater seating. That one saw burlesque shows and big auction dinners. And when I got involved it was broken down into different tent areas where there were different vignettes happening, with different kinds of of performances in each tent.

Because of the insecurity of that place—development in Seattle—we moved to The Fenix in 2007, which was a bar that had a big concert hall attached. That one was very interesting. We added lectures and had a decentralized performance aspect because the stage wasn’t terribly usable for anything other than music shows. We basically had a red carpet down the center of the whole venue. That’s where all of the performances happened.

It was very exciting to do it that way. Unfortunately, the person who owned that bar had some substance abuse problems and there were heart attacks and discombobulation, so about two months before our date in 2008 dude’s health went to hell and nobody even knew that we were supposed to be renting the place. It got shut down and we weren’t able to use that space, so we scrambled. That was the first year that SEAF almost didn’t happen.

We ended up talking to the Seattle Center about renting their Exhibition Hall—again returning to the basement. We were only able to get one night, so we did a gala, basically. It was literally 40 pieces of art from invited artists. It was just music acts and a party, just to keep the festival going. We’ve never missed a festival in 21 years—crossing my fingers and knocking on wood. We stayed at the Seattle Center in 2009 and 2010—

That’s the one I went to.

That’s the one with all of the beds.

I laid down with the woman who was going to be my girlfriend for the next seven years. Yeah, I remember that.

She was in the show that year, too. And I was introduced to her work through another one of our artists.

Well, it’s the woman who made that graphic novel.

Ellen Forney. That was a fun little connection there. We stopped renting there for a little while because, basically, we had a little kerfuffle with the union. We had these people who were in charge who weren’t respectful of the union rules of who’s allowed to do what.

It was terrible. It was very much a breakdown. So, the person who was in leadership took us to Fremont Studios for 2011 and 2012. Twenty-twelve was our 10-year anniversary—with two weekends—and were back in a place that had a small theater attached to it. it had a much bigger stage so there were big stage shows that happened when we were there. That space was actually quite lovely and really enjoyable to use. Unfortunately the people who ran that space wanted us to have our event during the Fremont Solstice Fair. When we did that in 2012 it was kind of terrible. It just didn’t work out.

Why didn’t it work? I’m not familiar.

The Fremont Solstice Parade and Festival is a weekend-long event where, I dunno, 100,000 people or more are in one tiny neighborhood with a four-block radius. Walking in your five-inch heels and latex dress from a mile where you had to park is not cool.

So you wrapped that one.

No, it didn’t work and they just weren’t willing to let us have another weekend. They had this idea that we were the perfect event to be in their space during that festival, because normally they were dark. So we went shopping for a new venue again and tried a bunch of different places. Interestingly enough in 2013—another year that SEAF almost didn’t happen—we ended up at the Sodo Showbox, in the same building as The Fenix, a bar that we almost did in 2007.

How did that go this time?

It was great. They didn’t make enough money off of us for them to promise us that we could rent the space again. Again we went with the decentralized performances—there was no stage. And we increased our live music and poetry readings. Spoken word performances built up during that year. After 2013 we went back to Seattle Center. In 2014, I basically went to them and said, “Hi. I’m in charge now and the people you had an argument with the last time aren’t working with us anymore. What do I have to do to get back in your good graces?”

We’ve been there since 2014, except for 2020. We ended up doing 2020 at our art gallery in Pioneer Square. We just basically chopped SEAF into three, and we had SEAF-doms. That’s what we called them.

[Mild chuckle]

We took a third of the art and each set of art was on display for two-to-three weeks. We did that from October to December. We basically allowed 12 people to be in our 3,000-square-foot space at a time to look at the art. People had to get an hour slot.

You’ve got to want to make this happen.

It was so important to me, because when the pandemic happened we had already selected all of the visual art and all of the literary art for the festival. The only thing that hadn’t been picked was the performance art, pretty much. And the large scale installation. So we didn’t do those that year. We did do some performances via Zoom, just like everybody else.

I felt really obligated to still make it happen because we picked the art. People had already created it. A fair number of people who submit to the Seattle Erotic Art Festival make the art specifically for the festival, for a jury to pick from. I feel really responsible that the jury sees their art, that we pick it, that it gets shown, because there are more erotic art festivals around the world now—there’s a nice handful of them—but there’s still not a whole lot of places.

One of my institutional goals is that I want erotic art to be so commonplace that one out of three art galleries in America has either a month or a room or a section of their collection where they represent artists who do erotic art.