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In order to discuss what it means to be a man today, Sleek invited two experts on the trials and tribulations of masculinity: Glenn O\u2019Brien and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Interview by Francesca Gavin
Photography by Paul Mpagi Sepuya<\/p>\n
The changing boundaries and definitions of gender is something close to the heart of Glenn O\u2019Brien and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge alike. Ex-Interview editor, TV presenter and Warhol affiliate O\u2019Brien\u2019s latest book How To Be a Man is a manual on \u201cstyle and behaviour for the modern gentleman\u201d, hinting at modes of masculinity for an audience looking for sartorial and social advice. Performance artist, musician and Throbbing Gristle maestro P-Orridge has made a career out of breaking all set notions of gender. He underwent dramatic plastic surgery with his wife Lady Jaye in an attempt to turn them into a united pandrogynous figure. Speaking of himself as \u201cwe\u201d, he has continued this project after her death in 2007; it is the subject of a new cult documentary, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye. Although they used to move in the same circles, O\u2019Brien and P-Orridge only met for the first time for this interview, at P-Orridge\u2019s Lower East Side apartment.<\/p>\n
Sleek: Let\u2019s dive right in and talk about redefining the connections between creativity, gender and identity. Glenn, you\u2019ve written a book titled How To Be a Man.<\/p>\n
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Have you? I didn\u2019t know that.<\/p>\n
Glenn O\u2019Brien: Yeah. Actually the title is a bit of a joke.<\/p>\n
GP-O: I wish someone had told me that.<\/p>\n
GO\u2019B: I thought the title would make women want to buy it.<\/p>\n
GP-O: And did it work? Probably did.<\/p>\n
Sleek: Do you think we live in a time where the idea of how to be male or female is confused enough to warrant a guide book?<\/p>\n
GO\u2019B: I think men are really confused, more confused than women about what they\u2019re supposed to be today. There\u2019s a lot of pressure on men to confirm a certain image but they are a bit clueless as to how it should look. Maybe it has to do with parents not educating boys the way they used to.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sleek: Your childhood, Genesis, trained you to be a certain type of man and you rebelled against that completely.<\/p>\n
GP-O: Nearly 100 percent. I went to this school in England that considered its students the future leaders of Britain. I was a scholarship boy, and the others were from privileged families, diplomats\u2019 sons, aristocracy, industrialists. When I needed to get boots to play Rugby I got them from a thrift store. When one of the boys in my class got his driving license he got a Rolls Royce \u2013 to have something to go to the golf club at weekends. I lived in a house with three generations of women, my grandmother, my mother and my sister. Father was always travelling with work. It only recently dawned on me that this could\u2019ve had something to do with being in such a split situation \u2013 a completely feminised home setting and this ridiculous masculine daytime. When I was in the army cadets they trained me to be a sniper. No joke, I was a first class sniper with a 303. Interestingly the targets were American soldiers. This was 1964-68, so obviously we weren\u2019t going to Vietnam, which was good news.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0Sleek: 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?<\/p>\n
GP-O: I remember vividly in 1962 or \u201963 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\u2026 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\u2019 clothes basically.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
GO\u2019B: 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\u2019t sing the lyrics \u2018Lets spend the night together\u2019, so he was singing \u2018Lets spend some time together\u2019, rolling his eyes. The father of a friend of mine destroyed all his Rolling Stones records after seeing the Ed Sullivan show.<\/p>\n
Sleek: You both live in New York now, allegedly an exceptionally open-minded place where they\u2019ve just legalized gay marriage. So has it all become very liberal these days?<\/p>\n
GP-O: Well, we might not be so popular for saying this but we don\u2019t really understand why people would actually want the right to get married and basically emulate something that\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 to be dealt with a bit more openly and actively.<\/p>\n
GO\u2019B: That\u2019s what I thought at first, you know, \u2018Just wait until you get sued for half your money and start paying alimony\u2019, 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\u2019s really about having the same legal rights as heterosexuals.\u00a0<\/p>\n
GP-O: That bit I understand absolutely. Are you married?<\/p>\n
GO\u2019B: Yep.<\/p>\n
GP-O: Congratulations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
GO\u2019B: Third time. I\u2019m genetically programmed to marry.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sleek: Genesis, can you talk about your relationship with Lady Jaye?<\/p>\n
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\u2019 dungeon on West 23rd Street. A notorious building where Glenn also did the cable TV show.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sleek: In the dungeon?<\/p>\n
GO\u2019B: 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.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/Photo-%C2%A9-Paul-Mpagi-Sepuya_4-767x1024.jpg\" "\\"Photo")
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GP-O: That\u2019s where we met, myself and Lady Jaye. I\u2019d been out for three nights high on pharmaceutical ecstasy and eventually came back to Terence\u2019s 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, \u2018If I can be with that person for the rest of my life that\u2019s all I ever want\u2019. She was being told, \u2018Don\u2019t go in there, it\u2019s one of Terence\u2019s friends from England and he\u2019s bad news, he\u2019s a real sicko.\u2019 She was thinking, \u2018Mmm, sounds like my kind of guy!\u2019 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 \u2013 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\u2019s when we started thinking about cosmetic surgery.<\/p>\n
GO\u2019B: There\u2019s a really interesting little essay by Cocteau. He says that an angel is literally from the word \u2018angle\u2019, and that an angel is a being that is created from the intersection of two humans. It\u2019s a really interesting idea.<\/p>\n
GP-O: Makes total sense to me. We noticed that nearly all religions, if you dig deep enough, say that if there\u2019s a god it must be male and female \u2013 a divine hermaphrodite\u2026 Of course it goes with Warhol \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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Sleek: Your book, Glenn, focuses on the aesthetics of masculinity. Is masculinity expressed purely through the aesthetics, the idea of a costume?<\/p>\n
GO\u2019B: People always want to know what the rules are. I say that you should think of your appearance as an expression of your personality, and it\u2019s like a little art form in itself. I got interested in the idea of dandyism because it was really a political thing. Beau Brummell was a fascinating character. In a period where men were wearing gold and ribbons and really outlandish things, he invented a very stark outfit like the modern suit. It was about expressing the body, think of those slender trousers, and you could see which \u2018side\u2019 he was dressed on. It made him famous, maybe he was the first celebrity. The Prince of Wales who became king was his biggest fan. He would come over and watch Brummel getting dressed in the morning. It was about the transition from royalty and the idea of nobility to the idea of personality as the leader of society. Dandyism was a revolutionary concept, Baudelaire wrote essays on it. I think if you really want to change our culture you have to think about how you look. I remember how exciting it was to be a hippie and you\u2019d see other hippies and give them the peace sign and you\u2019d be afraid to drive into Philadelphia because you knew the cops were going to come after you. It was a visual manifestation of what was inside of you \u2013 and I think that\u2019s something we\u2019re kind of out of touch with.<\/p>\n
GP-O: If you had long hair in Britain, you knew you could arrive in any town and if there was somebody with long hair around then they\u2019d probably let you sleep on the floor and give you some food. It only lasted a couple of years.<\/p>\n
GO\u2019B: Right. By 1974 the cops had long hair.<\/p>\n
GP-O: We\u2019ve become very fascinated again with the idea of how to recognise people who to some degree will think like you or disagree with the same things that you do. How is it going to work as the economies crumble and things become chaotic? That\u2019s why we\u2019ve been taking a few tips off the bikers and selling these patches through our website, because there\u2019s nothing more intimidating to the reigning powers than when they think there\u2019s a tribe and they don\u2019t know what it\u2019s about. It drives them crazy. It\u2019s an important aspect of rebellion at any given time.<\/p>\n
Sleek: Are you calling for a return to politicised dress?<\/p>\n
GO\u2019B: I think people need to realise that style is not fashion. When I look back at what people think of as Punk Rock and New Wave, everybody looked fantastic. The idea that anyone would buy anything from a designer \u2013 nobody got their look from somebody else, they created it and I think that\u2019s what people need to get back to and that they should stop believing in fashion advertising.<\/p>\n
Sleek: Where else can one turn to for interesting new definitions of what masculinity is now? By the way, it feels very strange talking about masculinity all the time when the interviewer is a woman.<\/p>\n
GP-O: So am I sometimes.<\/p>\n
Sleek: Two for the price of one!<\/p>\n
GP-O: Wouldn\u2019t it be better to have two of everything if you could?<\/p>\n
GO\u2019B: I was saying the other night, now that gay marriage is legal shouldn\u2019t we be able to have two?!<\/p>\n
GP-O: Yeah! You know the common question I get asked of course is, \u2018Have you still got a penis?\u2019 and I say, \u2018Why, does it matter?\u2019 But if we could we\u2019d have one of each for sure.<\/p>\n
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GO\u2019B: One of the things I\u2019ve observed in the last 30 years, I guess as a consequence of gay liberation, those kids you see who are like 22 you don\u2019t know if they\u2019re straight or gay. It\u2019s wiped out codified behaviour and stereotypes. It\u2019s more mysterious.<\/p>\n
GP-O: We\u2019ve noticed that, for example, in the Village Voice sex ads for a long time it was almost always biological female girls offering sex for heterosexual guys. Slowly but surely over the last ten to fifteen years it\u2019s become something like 60 percent she-males. Yet the clientele are still almost all heterosexual. So what does that mean in terms of the evolution of the species, their desires, and their potential future? Burroughs once said to me, \u2018This is your task: how do you short circuit control?\u2019 Talking with Jaye about this we thought, maybe control is actually DNA. Burroughs was so much into cutting things up, and if you cut up the body and then redesign it, you deny DNA\u2019s power to say what you\u2019ll look like. And instead of it being about clothing, you could say, \u2018Let\u2019s grow fur, or feathers\u2019.<\/p>\n
GO\u2019B: Be careful here Gen, because you\u2019re playing into the hands of the Republicans because they\u2019ll say, \u2018If we give them gay marriages then they\u2019ll want to marry their pets!\u2019<\/p>\n
GP-O: Are the Republicans somewhat afraid of tinkering with the gene pool? Weird to think that where it used to be underground LSD labs we\u2019re going to have to have underground genetic labs.<\/p>\n
GO\u2019B: I think straight guys like transvestites or transsexuals because they grew up watching Marilyn Monroe and Kim Novak and these exaggerated forms of femininity and they got turned on by it, but women aren\u2019t like that, so the most feminine out there are men, because for them it\u2019s an art. They put everything into it and that\u2019s very rare among women.<\/p>\n
GP-O: For us it\u2019s 24\/7, even without Jaye\u2019s body here physically continuing. We\u2019ve been travelling the world with that movie, it\u2019s won nine prizes and been sold out everywhere. Something is going on, people are reassigning the way they imagine gender and they\u2019re comfortable with it. They see a movie about me and Jaye starting to have surgery to look more and more like each other and declaring that we are one being in two halves, and they come out crying because it\u2019s a wonderful love story. Back then, at the dungeon I worked as a telephone girl under the name Lady Sarah, to see what I was passing as and what we could get away with, and we actually did quite a few sessions with heterosexual men who thought that I was a biological woman dominatrix, sometimes with me and Jaye together. It was hilarious and hard not to giggle, you know it\u2019s a pretty ridiculous situation already and then we wondered what would happen if we suddenly said, \u2018Do you know you\u2019re being fucked with a dildo by a man, technically?\u2019 They would probably freak about and go, \u2018That\u2019s not what I paid for!\u2019 Problem is that we did it together with Jaye for so long that it would be too emotional to do it without her, which is a real drag because I really could do with the money. Perhaps we\u2019ll get over it when the bills start coming. So maybe you\u2019ll hear about Lady Sarah the cruel English mistress again. Because of course the story was that I was an English school mistress from public school, and I can be very convincing, especially with the caning.<\/p>\n
GO\u2019B: I have a friend who\u2019s a writer, he grew up and went to school in England and he said that at the beginning of term they gave a speech to the boys because they didn\u2019t want them to go into town and have sex with the town girls, so they told them, \u2018For God\u2019s sake, if you absolutely must have sex, have it with a boy!\u2019<\/p>\n
GP-O: That\u2019s Britain! Lad culture.<\/p>\n
From Sleek 31 “XX\/XY”<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In order to discuss what it means to be a man today, Sleek invited two experts on the trials and tribulations of masculinity: Glenn O\u2019Brien and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.\u00a0 Interview by Francesca Gavin Photography by Paul Mpagi Sepuya The changing boundaries and definitions of gender is something close to the heart of Glenn O\u2019Brien and…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[288,410,411],"class_list":["post-5200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-francesca-gavin","tag-genesis-breyer-p-orridge","tag-glenn-obrien"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n