An interview with
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

Gen: The very first thing we did was get me a vasectomy because we then started thinking about Burroughs and Gysin. They were huge influences, and their concept of the Third Mind. By both of them collaborating and cutting up things that they’d both written, a new piece of writing would appear that didn’t belong to either of them. It was the result of the two becoming one, and they called it the Third Mind. So we thought, what if we take that into the material world with a physical person, the body, and we start to cut that up and reassemble it? Can we create a third being? So, that became the pandrogyne; the possible androgyne. And we thought about DNA. You know, writing is a recording that you can cut up and reassemble. Sound is something you can cut up and reassemble. Film, video, you know, the main tools of culture can all be cut up and reassembled. So DNA is the recording hidden within the human being. It’s got a programming that dictates how our bodies change. How they evolve and become a final shape. Which gender we are and lots of other much more secret aspects of our being that we don’t always discover. So that program, is there a way to cut it up, and reassemble it, too? And that was why we did the vasectomy, to cut the continuity of the DNA and to say, this is a declaration of a rejection of the program that we’ve inherited.

MS: Almost like a ritualistic kind of circumcision.

Gen:Here’s the line. We now perceive DNA as, not exactly as an enemy but as a questionable recording, an unfinished recording. Who knows what other imperatives are being added to DNA over the thousands of millions of years that we may not really want to be a part of.

MS: Then you decided to expand on that.

Gen: Then we decided to go into the surgeries. Not so that we became female or Jaye became male or anything. To become, as far as we could be, hermaphroditic.

MS: Nobody ever uses the word trans in reference to pandrogyny.

Gen: No. Well, one reason that we were glad to have that word was ’cause it didn’t have any baggage. It can be defined by what everybody is thinking of it. So, it’s an umbrella that’s open-ended at the moment. On Valentine’s Day 2003 we went for our breast implants together. It was so liberating.

MS: Why was it liberating?

Gen: Well more for me, because Jaye just had different breasts, but for me it was this whole rejection of all that masculinity that we experienced in public schools and British society in the fifties and sixties. It was this really beautiful way to say: No, I’m not gonna be part of that! Fuck that! To separate myself from the masculine trajectory which is so archetypal and has so many, to me, negative connotations. It’s very much the masculine trajectory that is responsible for war and violence, generally, and rape and suppression of other beings, women especially. So we….neither of us felt comfortable with the idea of masculinity itself and so as a private, personal emotion it was just good for me to say, “Thank God I got rid of that.”

MS: Did you feel oppressed by it earlier in your life?

Gen: Yeah, I did. It’s literally embarrassing at times to be male and see the way so many males behave, the crass attitudes that they express. The sort of jock attitude, and the boastful discussion of sex and so on.

MS: It’s two-dimensional.

Gen: For sure that is what we experienced at that school too. Where it was an all-male school with this whole, you know, sports and the army and everything. It was a real cesspool of masculinity and power too, because it was a privileged school and most of the people who were there were going to be politicians, masters of industry, and officers in the military. I mean, that was their destiny. So to sort of push that away was for me really personally very liberating.

MS: Right, or a redefinition of power, of perceptions of power.

Gen: And of course there’s a huge novelty value in suddenly having breasts. That was really quite exciting. We did go through a somewhat infantile phase of enjoying showing them off.

MS: That’s okay. They were novel. They were new.

Gen: Yeah, we forget about it of course.

MS: And you’ve had them reduced since then.

Gen: Yeah, after Jaye dropped her body we got them reduced to the same size she was then. For a while mine were bigger because the plastic surgeon that we used, cosmetic surgeon, the ratios didn’t look right in terms of body shape because we’ve got bigger shoulders. Having asthma so much my chest is bigger here. So, we were trying to get the mean; the look rather than the precision of measurements.

MS: How long have you had asthma?

Gen: Since we were a baby. It’s had a really strong influence on my life.

MS: How so?

Gen: In probably about ’57 we were really getting sick every summer we would be off school because the pollen would give me asthma so we would just have to stay indoors the whole time. Then they came up with this new super drug—steroids. Cortisone was the first of them. So they started to give me cortisone for my asthma and it did help, but they didn’t know at that time because it was such a new wonder drug, all of the side effects. In my early teens it dawned on me that a lot of the asthma attack, was my panic. So we started to just really discipline ourself to avoid panic, to try and just breathe at a certain pace and we would rock to get this rhythm and sit up on the side of the bed right through the night, for days on end.

MS: Was the panic about the asthma or was it something entirely different?

Gen: Yeah, it was the sense of drowning—of not getting enough oxygen. Bit by bit, during the sixties we actually learned to control it so we didn’t have attacks anymore. We saw our doctor in around the year 1967 and he said, “Well you don’t have asthma attacks anymore so you might as well stop taking those pills.” Hooray! Great! Went home, stopped taking the pills, and this particular Friday, a couple days later, we started to feel a little bit sick, but it was a bit vague, just didn’t feel right, and by Sunday we felt really off but we still couldn’t figure out what it was, and on Monday morning when we were meant to go to school, my mother came upstairs and we started to feel like we were having another asthma attack. So we sat on the edge of the bed and said, We can’t go to school, we feel really weird, can’t breathe properly. She went back downstairs and they got worse and suddenly we couldn’t get any oxygen. It was too late to try and shout or anything. We just sort of felt this horrible sensation of not getting any oxygen and then passed out and fell off of the bed onto the floor. My sister heard the thud and ran up the stairs, and found me basically unconscious on the floor. Our doctor lived directly opposite in the same street and was late for work. So my sister ran across and got the doctor and he’d just read an article in a medical magazine saying that long-term use of cortical steroids could destroy your adrenal glands and because he’d read that article that weekend [chuckling], he injected me like in Pulp Fiction, a massive amount of adrenaline to my heart to keep me going and meanwhile, we’re still unconscious. They took me to the hospital and rushed me into the ER. And we remember this bit, the out-of-body experience; the classic floating above, looking down, and seeing me down there on this gurney and nurses and doctors panicking and rushing around, and then hearing them discuss who was going to tell my parents that I was dead.

[Pause]

Gen: Then one of them went out and my mother tells me this bit, they came out and they said, “We’re really, really sorry but we’ve lost him and all you can do now is pray.” So, she prayed. We don’t remember how, but we did get somehow back into the body and it’s the next day and we’ve got all these tubes and oxygen and everything. They realized that they’d destroyed…it turns out the adrenal glands have two cortices; the one cortex is fight and flight—anger. The other one, it releases a small amount of adrenaline all the time, and that triggers other organs to work and function. So if you take that away, everything slows down and stops, which is what had happened to me. My fight and flight still work but the everyday bit is gone. So, they told me that we’d just have to take the pills forever. We still do. So every day we stay alive by choice.

MS: But your asthma didn’t keep you from singing or affect your voice. You’ve learned how to live with it.

Gen: We know how to deal with it. The doctor came up to me that first morning and told me you could live a normal life or you could drop dead any day, we don’t know. To think, it was a new syndrome. That was the day that we decided one hundred percent that we would not do what people wanted us to do, not even parents, but that we would follow the path that we really believed in, which was to be creative.

MS: Because you didn’t know how much time you had.

Gen: You know there’s a Sufi idea, which is that you should live every day as if it’s the last day you’re gonna have and that your whole life will be judged on that day and that’s kind of what we do. Except it’s very real and that’s one of the reasons that we treasure time so much, because we know how truly precious it is and that every second is actually a gift and wasting it is sad and, to me, somewhat baffling. Also, for whatever reason we have a compulsion to try and share what we’ve found out, or things we’ve thought about, in case they’re useful to someone else. To us that’s part of it, being any kind of artist or creative person. To us there’s a sort of spiritual obligation, a duty.

MS: Do you think that you’re a guru for some people? I think you are. [Pause] Well what word would you use?

Gen: Mmm… That’s a funny word but certainly people have umm… a lot of respect and really find things we’ve said and done inspiring to them. That they change the way they do life based on what they’ve learned from how we’ve done life, which in fact is, of course, a huge responsibility. It’s hard to know what to say back so we just say, thank you. But we see that there’s an even deeper responsibility because people are trusting me on that level, and trusting Jaye too because everything we do now was influenced by her. It’s important to remember that and try and be as truthful and open-minded as we can.

MS: Was she really that shy about being at the forefront? I remember that from the documentary. That she didn’t really want to be in the band and she started just kind of hovering in the background and you absorbed her into it.

Gen: Well she managed it perfectly now, didn’t she?

MS: [Laughing] Well, yes.

Gen: [Laughs] She wasn’t shy in the usual way, because you see those bits when she’s onstage and she’d do crazy stuff at Jackie 60 but she didn’t require or even enjoy being recognized for having done it, for whatever reason.

MS: So she enjoyed the performance element itself but not necessarily the face recognition and being noticed in that way?

Gen: Yeah, and she found that awkward sometimes, as a person, when she was with me. Going shopping and having people stop us and say “Oh Genesis!” But she got used to it, just as she got used to being in a band and she enjoyed that. Even so, she’d always sit right at the back behind the drum kit so that people couldn’t see her. She was very ambivalent about being noticed for what she did. And to an extent it suited her way of doing things perfectly to have me as a mouthpiece so that she didn’t have to deal with that side. She could just enjoy the ideas and the thinking.

MS: She did performance art in the nineties in New York?

Gen: She did a lot of stuff at Jackie 60. She was in Black Lips with Antony Hegarty and she did things in the small clubs like Squeezebox. She didn’t keep documentation though.

MS: Of herself, none at all?

Gen: Not from before we were together and would’ve destroyed a huge percentage of photographs if she could.

MS: Why?

Gen: She didn’t like having anything there that was documentation but we brought that into her life in ways that could work. And when we finally started with pandrogyny then, for that in particular, she was totally dedicated regardless of the world outside. The reasons? We’re not sure, we never found out exactly what it was, because she was such a larger-than-life character. In actuality really it seemed odd. Something from way back must have done that. Maybe from the horrible Catholic school she went to where she wanted to hide away…

MS: Very few people survive Catholicism successfully. They teach you shame. Catholics are big into shame. Jews are big into guilt.

Gen: She had absolutely no interest in being known or not known. She just wanted to do this; the work. And for whatever reason they acted the part of it, which is the public knowing about it. She found that really awkward. She would happily have never been noticed, but yet she was driven to perform. It’s one of those odd things, like a lot of comedians are depressives and a lot of performers are actually shy.