We are Above and Beyond the Call of Gender: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on the Birth of Pandrogyny
In 1993, artists Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer embarked on their most ambitious collaboration: pandrogyny. Influenced by the cut-up technique, the duo underwent body modification to resemble each other, thus coming to identify themselves as a single pandrogynous being named Breyer P-Orridge. Seeking to liberate themselves from concepts around identity formed by growing up in society, Breyer P-Orridge underwent surgical alteration, including receiving breast, cheek, and chin implants; lip plumping, eye and nose jobs, tattooing, and hormone therapy, while also adopting gender-neutral and alternating pronouns. The result was a pioneering new approach to redesigning one’s entity beyond fixed binaries and definitions.
In the summer of 2004, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge sat down for a private interview with filmmaker Jake Yuzna as they began research for their feature film OPEN, to be shot in the Twin Cities. The following is a section of the never-before-published conversation. Nearly 20 years later, this conversation highlights a small piece of the long lineage of those who have pushed against societal binaries of sexuality, gender, and identity.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
[Reading from a written note]
“Pandrogyny means that we are above and beyond the call of gender. The pandrogyne is dealing with reality. Reality is a conglomerate of perceptions agreed over and described by language. So, reality is malleable. It is created by language. The disintegration of taboos as genders destabilizes any traditional fixation and weakens control. The pandrogyne is neither gender.
Although it contains more than two, it is like the third biological mind. The pandrogyne is a viable intersection for contradictions. There are loads of stuff in here.”
[Reads from another note]
“Pandrogyny state of being is an example of a proposed alternate gender or identity: a redefinition. Androgynous is an objective.” (laughs)
Ultimately, it represents the absolute necessity for evolution and change for the human species to maximize its potential and view itself with love instead of guilt. It’s a state of not being afraid. I mean, the world is run by fear at the moment. We all know that. And fear is fueled by difference. People in control use something that is an other, something different, to intimidate their population. Whether it’s McCarthy with the communists or born-again Christians with Muslims, or heterosexuals being afraid of gay people, there is always an outside other. A different “other” is used to scare a group of people to unify them. Violence and intimidation are then used to attack that which is other. By embracing the other with pandrogyny, you are refusing to be part of that cycle of violence and regression. (smiles)
Jake Yuzna
Could you introduce yourself?
GBP
My name is Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and I am a pandrogyne. I’m 56 years old and was born in Manchester, England, but I think of myself as a nomad. I move where the action is.
JY
How did pandrogyny come about?
GBP
In the late 1960s, I quit university, having done lots of radical politics, performances, and happenings. Moving to London, I became part of an experimental street-theater kinetic art group called the Exploding Galaxy, which was an ad hoc group of poets, writers, painters, dancers, and sculptors from all over the world.
Through the Exploding Galaxy, I met the queer Filipinx sculptor called David Mad and the Gay Street Theater, who was active at the time. One of the policies of the Gay Street Theater was that being a transvestite was a political act. This was one of the first times I started exploring gender, dressing up in drag, considering what could exist between the restrictive ideas of “male” and “female.”
From there, I started my own performance art collective and commune called COUM Transmissions. With COUM Transmissions, I moved away from focusing on radical gay politics and more into the whole concept of behavior and identity. One of the examples of how that emphasis changed was that, instead of just dressing up in drag, we had a big room in our collective house that we were squatting in at the time, called the Costume Room. Inside that room were lots of big benches, and we had racks of clothes, costumes, accessories, strange toys, and all sorts of stuff. Many things we found in the street, thrift stores, or flea markets. We would go in and put on different arrangements of these clothes and see how that changed our personas. We explored how these changed our identities.
Over time, this gradually developed various archetypal social characters. There was the angry old lady, Mrs. Asquith, who was always mad about everything and thought everything new was annoying and bad. Then there was the Alien Brain that had come to visit from another planet and got trapped on Earth. The Alien Brain thought everything was strange and tried to make sense of human behavior. There was a harlequin clown, who was kind of the jester-cum-shapeshifter.
These various characters developed their own particular outfits. Every weekend people would come over, and we would all pick a character and get dressed in the outfits. Then from Friday through Monday, we would have to be in character all the time, 24 hours a day. If you ended up being the Alien Brain, you had to behave and respond as if everything was completely new to you. If you were the old lady, you had to complain and whine constantly. Whether you were out in the shops or a restaurant, you were still the old lady that was complaining. It was fascinating work.
People had to keep switching characters, and you started to see how other people perceive reality and how arbitrary behavior is. How much is built on prejudice. How little of it has to do with the mind. That people’s personalities and behavioral patterns are really inherited and imprinted from outside.
JY
Did this lead to becoming Genesis P-Orridge?
GBP
One of our basic ideas from the very beginning, even with the Exploding Galaxy, was how to break the control of conditioning from society. How, in order for a person to be free, they had to break from any expectations and wipe clean the personality they inherited. By doing this, you could become something that was true to you. One way that you do that is by changing your name. In 1970 or ’71, I legally changed from my given name, Neil Megson, to Genesis P-Orridge. I didn’t do this because I wanted a funny name.
It was because I wanted to control the narrative of my own life. It is worth noting at this point that from very early on in my early teens, I was highly influenced by the cut-up experiments of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. They took literature and, to some degree, collage and painting, cut it up, and reassembled it in apparently random order to release the content of its authorship. They were letting the words and the language speak its coded information. It always struck me that there might be a way to do the same with one’s identity.
JY
How did Lady Jaye become part of this work?
GBP
It was funny: when Lady Jaye and I first met, she was changing outfits and identities. I was sleeping on the floor while staying at a friend’s place on West 23rd Street [in New York City]. The place was a dungeon owned by the writer Terence Sellers.
Back then, I used to come to New York from California for a wild weekend and sleep on the floor in the dungeon. It was a nice environment to wake up in. (laughs) I was lying under a white sheet and heard noises that woke me up slowly. There was a doorway in front of me, and this beautiful woman walked by dressed in all authentic 1960s clothes. I thought, “Wow, that’s a really nice outfit.” I like it when people get the details right.
As she walked back and forth in front of the doorway in the other room, she started changing clothes because she was getting ready to work in the dungeon. Each time I saw her pass by, she gradually removed her clothes until she was dressed entirely in fetish clothing. And all the time, she was smoking a cigarette very gracefully. She never managed to stop smoking very gracefully. I just thought, “I wonder who that is?”
Later, I discovered that the conversation she was having in the other room [that] I couldn’t hear was somebody else saying, “You don’t want to go in that room. The person in there is really strange.” Lady Jaye said that when she was told this, she immediately thought, “Oh, I’ll definitely go meet them if they’re really strange.” We’ve been together ever since. That was 13 years ago.
When we got married on Friday, the 13th of June, 1995, I instinctively decided to wear the white lace wedding dress. Lady Jaye wore black leather trousers, a vest, no bra, a mustache, and sideburns. We switched roles even to get married. Since we met, it has been instinctive for both of us to just play with identity and people’s gender expectations.
We were perfectly balanced from the very beginning. Lady Jaye created a very supportive and free environment for me to dream and imagine it. They are equally as adventurous as I am in pushing the mind and body.
JY
How does this influence your collaboration in creating other works—whether through art, music, or living?
BPO
Today, 24 hours a day, is pandrogyny. Whether it’s talking to you, making art, writing essays, or lyrics, it’s all linked. We keep pushing ourselves further and finding things out. The really interesting thing that Lady Jaye and I are interested in is the psychological possibilities, the psychological repercussions of pandrogyny. How people see things that are not what they expect, and how they adjust. How the nervous system reflects its environment. How it reflects emotions and experiences. By being pandrogynous, our nervous systems are adjusting.
We experience the world differently, but it’s very subtle at the moment. We’re trying to find ways to get closer to making the psychological aspect more difficult for us. (laughs) Lady Jaye always likes to say the body is just an old suitcase used to carry around the mind. It is important to emphasize that you shouldn’t get overly distracted by the body. Although we are making the body a work of art in a way, it still represents that our identity is only the mind. Consciousness is really the important thing. For me, I think I’ve liberated my consciousness a little bit from conditioning through the action of becoming pandrogynous. That has always been my aim from the beginning: To decondition myself and feel that whatever my life is, I’m in charge of the narrative and no one else. Although now it’s become, we are in charge of the narrative. (laughs)
There’s always more to explore. I wish they taught consciousness at school. That would be interesting.
JY
What do you hope might come next?
GBP
I want to see people walking around with antlers on their heads and fur. I don’t think this is just symbolic. We imagine a world where people redesign themselves or adjust themselves almost as easily as they change clothes until, at the very least, it doesn’t matter anymore. In the end, it’s ultimately about the way we are physically not being important. I’ve been surprised at how many people are interested in pandrogyny. It seems to be an idea whose time is here. I don’t expect every cis male to run out and get breasts, but I don’t think it would be bad if they did. (laughs) There’d be a lot less pompous. (laughs)
I think it would be great if we could find ways not to have any separation anymore. Give people options to be everything. We should be looking at being inclusive and extending our possibilities all the time. We should never think that something should not change because it was that way before. The whole planet is in a difficult stage of risking a new Dark Age. When the status quo, the consensus on reality, is imploding, it becomes increasingly important for any kind of artist to push in the opposite direction. It almost doesn’t matter what the opposite direction is, just as long as you don’t succumb to the status quo. You don’t have to accept what you’re being told.▪︎
Special thanks to the Estate of Genesis Breyer P-orride and New Discretions/Invisible-Exports for their assistance with publishing this interview.
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