Sleek: Do you think that the culture of the 1970s that you both emerged in encouraged a way out, by redefining the idea of gender and identity?
GP-O: I remember vividly in 1962 or ’63 in Piccadilly Station Manchester, one day I heard the tinkling of bells and turned and looked, and there were these really high-end mods with their girlfriends. The men were wearing eye-shadow and mascara and their hair was all teased back in these bouffants, and one of them had a little bell around his neck that tinkled… This feminised guy to me was an incredibly erotic and liberating image. I wanted to be a beatnik and write poetry, and I was there at the beginning of the whole beat music, the Beatles and the Hollies, and then the Stones. I remember when they went on the Palladium show on English television, all camped up, wearing their girlfriends’ clothes basically.
GO’B: When the Stones came to America they went on the Ed Sullivan show, and I think it really changed the country. Mick was really camping it up. They had said he couldn’t sing the lyrics ‘Lets spend the night together’, so he was singing ‘Lets spend some time together’, rolling his eyes. The father of a friend of mine destroyed all his Rolling Stones records after seeing the Ed Sullivan show.
Sleek: You both live in New York now, allegedly an exceptionally open-minded place where they’ve just legalized gay marriage. So has it all become very liberal these days?
GP-O: Well, we might not be so popular for saying this but we don’t really understand why people would actually want the right to get married and basically emulate something that’s been so oppressive. Maybe we came from the wrong part of the 60s, but we were involved with gay lib street theatre and drag as a political act and so on, and this just seems like an empty victory on so many levels. Half of all marriages fail anyway, and it’s no guarantee of any deeper love, it seems almost a petty diversion from what the real issues might be in terms of oppression and bigotry and hypocrisy and hate crimes of all types – to be dealt with a bit more openly and actively.
GO’B: That’s what I thought at first, you know, ‘Just wait until you get sued for half your money and start paying alimony’, but then I remember, when the Aids crisis was at its worst you had people dying in hospital and their lovers would come in and they had no rights, so it’s really about having the same legal rights as heterosexuals.
GP-O: That bit I understand absolutely. Are you married?
GO’B: Yep.
GP-O: Congratulations.
GO’B: Third time. I’m genetically programmed to marry.
Sleek: Genesis, can you talk about your relationship with Lady Jaye?
GP-O: She was a wild child. Ran away from Catholic home at 14 to live in a squat in Alphabet City, put herself through nursing college by becoming a dominatrix, which is how we met at our mutual friend Terence Sellers’ dungeon on West 23rd Street. A notorious building where Glenn also did the cable TV show.
Sleek: In the dungeon?
GO’B: In the same building. Terence wrote a book called The Correct Sadist, and I edited the book whilst sitting in the telephone-answering room of the dungeon, which was an interesting experience.
GP-O: That’s where we met, myself and Lady Jaye. I’d been out for three nights high on pharmaceutical ecstasy and eventually came back to Terence’s dungeon and crashed on the floor and just put a white sheet over me and went to sleep and woke up hearing noises. The dungeon was still completely dark but the door was ajar and I saw this girl with a perfect Brian Jones mod bob and original 60s outfit, holding a cigarette very elegantly. She started to gradually undress and get ready to be a dominatrix, and changed into this incredible fetish outfit, and something happened to me that had never happened before. I found myself saying out loud, ‘If I can be with that person for the rest of my life that’s all I ever want’. She was being told, ‘Don’t go in there, it’s one of Terence’s friends from England and he’s bad news, he’s a real sicko.’ She was thinking, ‘Mmm, sounds like my kind of guy!’ Well, we fell madly in love and got married 1995 in California. She wore skin tight leather with a leather biker vest with nothing underneath and drew on a moustache. I wore a white lace dress. We both had been performance artists. We both pushed against every limit we felt. We began merging our personalities as a fun thing to do – dressing the same and starting to do the same sort of body language and make up. We were thinking about Burroughs and Gysin and their book The Third Mind, and we thought maybe that could be taken even further to create a third being physically, at least conceptually, and call it the pandrogyne. So the two of us combined would be the two halves of this being. That’s when we started thinking about cosmetic surgery.
GO’B: There’s a really interesting little essay by Cocteau. He says that an angel is literally from the word ‘angle’, and that an angel is a being that is created from the intersection of two humans. It’s a really interesting idea.
GP-O: Makes total sense to me. We noticed that nearly all religions, if you dig deep enough, say that if there’s a god it must be male and female – a divine hermaphrodite… Of course it goes with Warhol – the art is the superstar, the person is the work. Definitely that had an influence on me creating Genesis P-Orridge, the person who is the artwork. It also makes me think that marriage is part of the agenda of becoming more and more like each other. Part of the whole costume if you like.