Later, Jacqueline Breyer would recall her conversation that morning with a colleague, who'd strenuously warned her away from the dreadlocked lump on the floor of the S&M chamber. "There's this really weird guy in there Terence knows, and you can tell he's bad news."

To Jackie, that was a ringing endorsement.

Genesis was a performance artist before the genre had a name, doing everything from masturbating onstage to publicly wounding himself in the name of creative experimentationStill, "really weird guy" grossly understated the facts, given the British-born P-Orridge's well-established rep as a provocateur and troublemaker. A cult icon best known for his fearsome, and sometimes transcendent, stage performances, Genesis was one of the most influential musicians of the UK's post-punk era. He invented the genre known as industrial music and later helped pioneer acid house and the rave scene, all the while crafting an unsettling persona—shamanistic, sinister, and unabashedly deviant—that would inspire countless acts. His own output never found a mass audience, but as author Douglas Rushkoff, who briefly played keyboards for Psychic TV, points out, "If it weren't for Throbbing Gristle, people like Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor would never have existed at all."

The art world, too, owes P-Orridge a considerable debt. One of his early sculptures, displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, was a vitrine filled with live maggots that fed on menstrual blood and eventually grew into fruit flies—not exactly Matisse, perhaps, but a hot enough idea that when Damien Hirst did almost exactly the same thing (replacing the tampons with a cow's head) more than a decade later, the piece instantly launched his career. Genesis was also a performance artist before the genre had a name, doing everything from masturbating onstage to publicly wounding himself in the name of creative experimentation.

Meanwhile, he transformed body piercing from a fetish of the hardcore gay subculture into a mainstream phenomenon. He was an eager student of occultist Aleister Crowley and a practitioner of "sex magick" (credit him, along with Jimmy Page, for giving rock its satanic edge). He experimented with a panoply of narcotics; hung out with William S. Burroughs and Dr. Timothy Leary; and founded a quasi-cult, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, which claimed 10,000 worldwide adherents at its peak. He was denounced as a degenerate, a satanist, and a corrupter of youth by the Fleet Street tabloids; charged with obscenity for his indecent mail art; targeted by Scotland Yard amid the ritual child-abuse hysteria of the early 1990s; and essentially banished from his home country. In short, Genesis P-Orridge was, by conventional measures, not merely weird but off the charts. And this was before he had his teeth filed down to tiny points and replaced with solid gold replicas; before the cheek implants; before the boob job.

He and Breyer wouldn't actually get to talk to each other until the next evening, when they accompanied Sellers to a party at the S&M club Paddles, jabbering away like kids while Jackie ground the heel of her motorcycle boot into some guy's testicles. On the morning in question, though, there wasn't time. Jackie had to go to work, and Gen was on his way out. He hadn't really come to Terence's dungeon for punishment, anyway; he'd already had more than enough of that in his life.
In February 14, 2003, Gen and Jackie, who'd gone on to change her name to Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, lay on twin hospital gurneys, hand in hand. Having married nearly a decade before, they'd recently come up with a plan to take their relationship to the next level. The idea behind pandrogeny, as they called it, was for two people to literally become each other—or to come as close as possible. At first, it was a matter of simply dressing alike, going in for the same hairstyle, getting Jaye a set of contact lenses to match Gen's eyes. But that wasn't enough. The Valentine's Day operation gave them matching breast implants, size C. Later, Jaye had her eyes and nose done, and got a chin implant, to resemble Gen. Gen received cheek enhancements and a lip job. At one point, they looked into the idea of smoothing over their belly buttons, like angels.

Last summer, I arrived for an interview at the beige-colored brick row house on a drab block in Queens, where Genesis and Jaye have lived since moving in to care for her late grandmother. Psychic TV, which had renamed itself PTV3, was about to release its first record in 12 years, Hell Is Invisible ... Heaven Is Her/E. The album, which features contributions by the Butthole Surfers' Gibby Haynes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, marked a turn from experimental dance and electronica toward a more raw, hard-rocking style.

Gen, who now prefers to be referred to as s/he, told me that most strangers—including doctors, members of his yoga class, and local residents in his working-class Latino neighborhood—tend to assume he is female. But pandrogeny isn't about the pain of being a man trapped in a woman's body, he explained; it's about the pain of being trapped in any body at all.
"The key element in so much of what I've done is investigating the nature of identity," Gen said, as we sat in his basement studio on matching hand-shaped chairs. He was wearing a brown blouse, purple tights, a denim skirt, and a pair of elf boots. His fingers were covered with rings, and his décolletage set off with an array of chains and charms. His voice was soft and feminine, occasionally childish, with a gentle English lilt. "We're not trying to look like identical twins," he added. "It's symbolic. But we do want to make it clear that we are willing to devote our bodies and our finances and our minds to an idea. We really think it's essential to the dialogue about the human species and what it might become."

I asked Genesis if he was planning on getting a sex change. "It's not about that," he insisted. "Pandrogeny liberates us from this binary conception of reality. Instead of everything being male/female, black/white, good/bad, it all becomes a malleable, flexible material. It's about eradicating difference altogether."

Just then, Jaye arrived carrying a tray of lemonade sweetened with organic honey, and eyed me warily before heading back upstairs. Genesis added that the whole idea was precipitated by his first conversation with William S. Burroughs in 1971.

"He asked me, 'How do you short-circuit control?'" Gen remembered. "And we eventually realized that the program that's really in control is our DNA. It determines so many areas of life, biologically as well as culturally. So in that sense, DNA is the enemy of our freedom. We have to fight it." From the moment a baby comes into the world, he went on, he or she is under pressure to meet other people's expectations. "From the very beginning, you're manipulated and directed and pressured into other people's ideas of what they would like you to be. The person that you are is a fictional narrative written by other people. And at some point in your life, you feel a need to be the author of your own story. So we're taking charge of the narrative of identity. This is a declaration of control over our own evolution."

Naturally, he and his "other half" both understand that no amount of cosmetic surgery can actually alter one's genetic makeup; the project is symbolic, he said, a declaration of intent. Gen expressed the hope that someday others would adopt pandrogeny as well, and that little by little, the human race would begin to shape its own evolution. Which all seems a bit unlikely, until you consider that body piercing seemed pretty out there too, back when he had his penis done and videotaped the procedure, inaugurating the whole "modern primitives" movement. Now you can get your belly button, nose, or tongue pierced, right at your local mall.

Gen credited Lady Jaye, who, when not working as a pediatric nurse, played samples in the band, with inspiring Psychic TV's new direction, which they dubbed "hyperdelia": a dancier, speedier take on mid-'60s garage rock. "She's a huge fan of psychedelia, and she has a collection of really obscure '60s records with that weird wah-wah guitar. I've always liked the way the music of that era took really simple structures and made them sound eclectic and strange—I grew up listening to the Stones and Syd Barrett—but it's only recently that I've come to terms with my love for it. I've found that it actually lets you say whatever you want and make it warm and inviting rather than angry and difficult. And with the world being in this state of fragmentation, it becomes really powerful and radical to make music or art that takes a position for pleasure and joy."
As a result, of all the albums he's put out (and for a time, Psychic TV released most of its live performances on vinyl, earning an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most releases in a single year), Hell Is Invisible ... Heaven Is Her/E is his favorite. "It's remarkable that after 200 or 300 albums, I've finally made one I actually like." The couple's dog, a small Jack Russell terrier-mix named Big Boy, pawed his knees, and Genesis fed him a fistful of Cheez-Its. "You're such a good boy, aren't you?" he cooed, scratching the dog's ears.

Genesis may be one of the most widely copied musicians of the past 50 years, but his output remains obscure, in part because much of it made for such challenging listening. Reportedly, some performances featured frequencies so low they induced vomiting. "You're not going to put it on at a brunch," notes Douglas Rushkoff, "but talk to any rock critic, and they'll say Throbbing Gristle was doing cut-and-paste with music, doing samples and mash-ups, before anyone." Rushkoff compares the band's influence to that of the Velvet Underground. "[Genesis is] a lot like a teacher in that people went to his classroom and got inspired and went off and did these different things. A lot of what we hear now can be traced back to him."

As for where Gen himself came from, the singer eagerly credits such influences as Sufi musician Bachir Attar; Burroughs, an occasional collaborator; and especially Brian Jones, the Rolling Stones guitarist who died in 1969 and was the subject of Psychic TV's one hit, 1986's "Godstar." But when it came to shaping his peculiar sensibility, there was a lot more to it than that.
The Solihull School is a top-flight English independent school (what we call a private school) set on 50 acres in West Midlands, not far from Birmingham. Established in 1560, it's a longtime proving ground for the children of the upper classes, and in the mid-'60s, when P-Orridge, then known as Neil Andrew Megson, matriculated, it was a lot like Hogwarts—except it lacked girls or magic of any kind, and had a considerably more banal brand of evil stalking its chilly corridors. Megson was 14 when he was admitted, though he looked much younger. A delicate working-class day boy whose fees were covered by a government program for gifted children of limited means, he was marked from the get-go. And the thick accent he'd acquired growing up amid the postwar squalor of Manchester didn't help.

The torment began immediately. Megson didn't know the schedule and wound up wandering the halls on his first day while the rest of the school was at prayer. Spotting an instructor, he asked where everyone was. Big mistake. Suddenly he found himself being dragged by the hair to the chapel, thrust through the doors into the hushed hall, and marched down the central aisle to the altar. Who are you? he was asked. Neil Megson. What? I can't understand you with that stupid accent. Speak properly. What class are you in? Lower 52. You're too small and pathetic. You can't possibly be in any class over the age of six. Uproarious laughter erupted from the pews as Megson was dragged to a seat among the six-year-olds.

English schoolboys are nothing if not obedient. They do what they're taught, and what they were taught that morning—some 600 of them, ages four to 18—was Megson has to suffer.
The so-called Benchers were the worst. They were the older kids who'd been granted the authority to cane their peers for the slightest infraction: cap askew, jacket unbuttoned, anything, or sometimes nothing. The Benchers did their duty. Megson was not spoken to by another student for two years, save for the routine insult. Every day he was beaten, kicked, abused, and humiliated. It wasn't personal. He figured that out soon enough. The cruelty was institutional, ritualized—a sickness in the society. Eventually, he'd have his chance to be a Bencher, and would become the first student ever to decline the honor.

Years later, when he was publicly branded a "wrecker of civilization" by a minister of parliament, he'd remember his teenage years and think, Well, someone had to wreck it.

And years after he left the UK amid a tabloid frenzy and moved into a modest railroad apartment in Queens, he'd rent a DVD of If...., Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film about a cadre of English schoolboys who stage a bloody insurrection against school authorities and their fellow students, and sit Jaye down to watch it with him. "That's it, that's what it was like," he'd say, trembling, his eyes wet.

The same week Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool, Jacqueline Breyer was born, and Neil Megson reborn. In the summer of 1969, he was a student in the north of England, majoring in the social sciences and going by the name Genesis P-Orridge, when he decided to hitch to London. He had a busy weekend planned: seeing Pink Floyd at the Royal Albert Hall, catching the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park, and taking in the René Magritte show at the Tate, all of which he accomplished despite being stoned out of his mind. He also managed to hold onto a small slip of paper upon which someone had jotted the address of a Georgian Terrace row house in North London where he'd been invited to crash, the headquarters of an art collective called the Exploding Galaxy.

At the end of the weekend, he turned up on the doorstep and was told he could stay, so long as he obeyed several ground rules laid down by the group's leader, a charismatic, lunatic Irish artist named Gerald Fitzgerald, or "Fitz." For instance, no one was permitted to lay his sleeping bag in the same spot twice, or to use the bathroom in private.

Members took turns cooking, but were forbidden to ever repeat a recipe. Everyone's clothes were placed in a big box each night and distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis each morning. And so on ... the idea being to gradually break down one's habits and socially prescribed codes of behavior—and ultimately, to liberate the self.

Fitz's rule was absolute. Why are you using a knife and fork? he bellowed at one newcomer, reducing the poor girl to tears. Can you fucking be original? Where's your imagination? Genesis thrived, though; he was used to following absurd rules, disenchanted with British society, and more than ready to dismantle the self. Though he left the group within months, he knew Fitz was on to something, that the experiments had actually liberated him.

This became clear shortly after Gen's return to his parents' home, when the family took a day trip to Wales to visit a castle. As he sat there in the back seat of the car, face pressed against the glass, sunlight strobing through the trees, he heard a voice that outlined for him, in vivid detail, a new collective art project, complete with a logo, a philosophical program, and a name: COUM Transmissions, for Cosmic Organicism of the Universal Molecular. Like a punk-rock prophet, he wrote it all down in a fever, filling a pair of thick spiral notebooks.

COUM was based on the notion that all things are interconnected and fluid; that all realities, past and future, exist simultaneously; and that identity, gender, and even matter itself are just illusions. COUM borrowed the Exploding Galaxy's communal vision, its spirit of experimentation and play, its focus on physical and mental challenges—but made it all fun. Instead of a clothes box, there was a costume room filled with accessories, handbags, gold-painted gas masks, and other accoutrements.

Once a week, everyone would select a getup representing one of a rotating cast of characters: Harriet Straightlace, a prim old matron; Mr. Alien Brain, a transistor-bedecked oracle; Fizzy Pete the Clown; the Baby, with his giant wooden pram; and so on. Then they'd walk around town in character for 24 hours. Sometimes they'd set up a podium in front of the local art center and harass passersby with absurdist harangues.

Since they had little money, Gen and his friends—including his then-girlfriend, Christine Newby, who went by the name Cosey Fanni Tutti—helped themselves to local dumpsters. They even recycled the charcoal discarded each night by the local fish-and-chips shop, drying it out on newspapers. Eventually, though, the art world took notice, and grant money began to materialize.
COUM staged crazy events—psychedelic banquets, mock-wedding parades—silly stuff, for the most part. Things didn't get really twisted until a few years in. Being wheeled around town in a baby carriage got Gen thinking about societal norms: the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior, who draws it, and why. Loads of questions suddenly seemed to demand answers: Why are some things considered embarrassing? Are all taboos culturally determined, or are some universal? Why is it okay to be nude in private, but not in the middle of the street? Is reality even real?

Gen would do just about anything to find out. What he really meant to do was touch the divine, though his route was a bit circuitous. On occasion, he'd take razor blades to his own flesh, stab himself with rusty nails, and eat poisonous plants. He'd set up a ferocious squall of feedback in his house and listen for hours. He'd have sex with Cosey onstage, ingest every bodily excretion one could care to name, then throw up and do it again.
To the public, this was shocking stuff—though Gen's intention was less to shock than to figure out why certain things were so shocking in the first place. It was a fine distinction, but one that made perfect sense to certain members of the art world, who viewed COUM as the British answer to Fluxus and the Vienna Actionist school, with clear links to Dada and the French Situationists. In the fall of 1976, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London—a museum situated within spitting distance of Buckingham Palace—invited COUM to stage an exhibition. They called it Prostitution, a comment on art-world commercialism. Visitors were required to sign a waiver and offer proof of age. Cosey, who'd done a bit of work posing for porn magazines, displayed some of her oeuvre. There were sculptures made of bloody tampons and transvestite security guards prowling the galleries. A wall was devoted to incendiary press clippings about the show, updated daily. And several bands played at the opening night party, one of which was a COUM side project called Throbbing Gristle. The band, which included Gen and Cosey, Chris Carter, and Peter Christopherson, was the first group ever to describe its output as "industrial music." Influenced by Burroughs and poet Brion Gysin, who'd invented the "cut-up"—dismantling and reassembling texts to uncover their supposed hidden meanings—Throbbing Gristle did the same with audiotape, and so wound up conducting some of the earliest experiments in sampling. (Eventually they even learned to play their instruments.)

None of which especially impressed Tory MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, who demanded an investigation into why taxpayer money was subsidizing Prostitution, which he described to a newspaper reporter as "a sickening outrage," "obscene," and "evil." Parliament took up the issue, which quickly blossomed into a national controversy with Gen eagerly fanning the flames. Before long, the museum's director stepped down, and COUM, having accomplished its mission, disbanded, leaving Throbbing Gristle to carry on the good work until breaking up in 1981. (They recently reunited and last year released a new album, Part Two: The Endless Not.)

In the 1980s, Genesis married a woman named Paula (now a New Age healer living in California), with whom he had two daughters; they separated shortly before his meeting with Jacqueline Breyer in Terence Sellers' dungeon. Unexpectedly, he and Jackie turned out to be poster children for celibacy. The notorious rocker and the downtown dominatrix, who was also a regular performer in New York cabarets, courted for a full year before they slept together. Eventually she mentioned, as if in passing, that she'd received numerous proposals of marriage—all declined—but had never once been presented with a ring. Upon which Gen, displaying a heretofore unknown conformist bent, somehow scraped together $4,000 for a diamond solitaire.

By this time, of course, Jackie had heard all about his past, knew the story of how he started Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, an organization of tattooed, black-clad misfits that, if not quite a cult per se, was well on its way to becoming one when Gen freaked out and shut the whole thing down by mass-mailing a postcard quoting an English road sign: "Changed Priorities Ahead." She knew about his predilection for orgies and sex rituals. She knew he'd been labeled "the sickest man in Britain," a "greedy gutter guru," and an "evil monster" by the papers, and had heard the story of how Scotland Yard took the opportunity (while Genesis, Paula, and their two daughters were summering in Nepal, running a soup kitchen for lepers) to ransack his house and cart away all of his art pieces, videos, notebooks, everything.

And she knew he'd come to the States—where he wound up crashing, oddly, with a young Winona Ryder and her parents—because the authorities back home, while declining to charge him with a crime, had warned that they couldn't guarantee his safety or that of his family if he returned to London. Knowing all that, she said yes.
A few weeks later, they drove to Bodega Bay to watch the seals mating and, on Jackie's insistence, to appease the Yoruban mother goddess, Yemaya, the jealousy-prone matron of lovers. Around 1 a.m., Jackie stripped naked, and Gen did the same, except for a giant cast he'd been wearing on his arm since having to jump out of a window to escape a fire. (The accident, which occurred in the Los Angeles home of producer Rick Rubin, eventually won him a large settlement.) They walked into the surf, where Jackie poured a bottle of champagne over Gen's head as a public declaration of her love. Apparently, Yemaya wanted Gen to herself, because suddenly a freak wave came along and swept him under. The heavy cast made swimming difficult, and he felt himself being sucked away by the undertow. Jackie fumbled for him, and locked her fingers around his good wrist, dragging him onto the sand.
"You're mine!" she yelled, so the goddess could hear. "No one else will ever have you! You're mine!"

Jaye first discovered she had stomach cancer two years ago, during a checkup at a holistic-health clinic. She treated herself with diet and meditation, and last year, just before PTV3 was to go on tour, it seemed that she'd licked the disease. The tumors, her healer told her, had been reduced to tiny specks. But after the band's trip to Europe, which turned into a costly fiasco due to some poor planning by a freelance booking agent, there was a scare. Gen was asleep in their bedroom when he heard a crash. He found Jaye on the floor of the kitchen having a seizure. He tried CPR, splashed her face with water, and struggled desperately to stand her up and walk her around.

Suddenly, Jaye came to. "What's wrong, baby?" she asked, smiling.
Gen urged her to see a doctor, but Jaye refused. She'd been watching doctors in action for years at the hospital where she worked and didn't want any part of it. Besides, she seemed fine—better than fine. She was full of life, invigorated, cheerful. The next few days were a whirlwind as she dragged Gen out shopping, cooked him special meals, ravished him. On October 8, after one especially passionate encounter, Gen dozed off, waking up to find Jaye slumped on the floor of the bathroom. He shouted to their handyman to call 911, and began giving her CPR. She breathed her last breath, he says, right into his lungs.

The cops were terrible. Okay, they wanted to know, who's her next of kin? I am. No, we need someone who's related to her. Me. We're married. Maybe in California, honey, but not in New York.

In the end, they left Jaye wrapped in a white sheet, and assigned a young patrolman to keep an eye on the body. The kid had been a rookie beat cop in the neighborhood, and remembered Genesis as a friendly face. "You always used to say hello and offer me a cup of tea in the winter," he said, repaying the kindness by giving them some space. Gen lay down on the linoleum floor next to Jaye, talked to her for awhile, and finally fell asleep.

Rushkoff has a theory about Jaye's last days. Maybe, he says, she'd actually been dead when she'd had the first seizure. And maybe she'd been allowed to come back—granted a special dispensation—for a few more crazy moments with Gen, like Emily in Our Town. Stranger things have happened.

A few months later, as Gen and I walk beside the elevated subway tracks near his apartment, he suddenly stops, steadies himself with a hand on my elbow, and fumbles in his pocket for an inhaler. He's having a bout of pneumonia, his third in two years. "She used to tell me to take care of myself," he says, tears filling his eyes. "I've lost my nurse. I've lost everything."

We make our way to his favorite local restaurant, a heavily mirrored Dominican diner that's decorated with autographed pictures of local baseball players, and settle into a booth. "Corona?" asks a waitress, who seems to know him well. "Thank you, dear," Gen says.

Pneumonia isn't his only worry. The same healer who first spotted Jaye's cancer has found three tumors in his brain, clinging to his pituitary gland—a diagnosis confirmed by conventional doctors. "They can go in through the roof of your mouth and try to cut them out," he says, sipping his beer, "but that can blind you, which isn't something we particularly fancy." The tumors are presumably benign, but he's planning to go in for a scan to make sure.

"To be honest," he adds, "we're not too concerned with that now. It doesn't bother me at all, the idea of death. The sooner we die, the sooner we're with Jaye in the same dimension."
Gen's royal "we" has taken on an added resonance after Jaye's death, since in a way he's speaking for both of them: The pandrogeny project is still ongoing, but in a different form. Now Gen feels it's his duty to represent both himself and Jaye on this physical plane; as a result, he's planning additional surgeries to more closely resemble her. "I need to balance out my energy," he says. He's been wearing Jaye's clothes almost exclusively—they were the same size, except around the shoulders—and using her cell phone, keeping her outgoing greeting, despite the protests of some of their friends.

Jaye's spirit has contacted him several times, he says, via the usual paranormal routes: pictures flying off walls, strange vibrations. (He notes that a few friends have witnessed these events as well.) Jaye has let him know she's waiting for him, but Gen has decided to stick around for now. Time in the other place moves at a different speed, he says. She'll be patient. In the meantime, she's instructed him to move to Asheville, North Carolina (a place neither one of them ever visited), and build a compound with some friends. The Queens house is on the market.

Gen isn't sleeping well, and he hasn't eaten in three days—partly because he hasn't felt like it, and partly because money is tight. Despite the prominence of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, both of which are often referred to as "seminal," he's hardly made anything from his music. Though Volkswagen used Psychic TV's "Roman P." in a commercial some years back, Genesis, who was never consulted about the deal, earned less than $1,000 once various labels took a cut. For years, he and Jaye lived off the settlement he received after the fire, but that money's pretty much spent.

I offer to buy him lunch, and he orders a bowl of chicken soup. "This place is very authentic," he says. When the soup arrives, though, he eats just half. He has to watch his diet, he explains, because now, in a way, he's eating for two. "My body is now Jaye's portal to the material world," Genesis says.

"For example, she can only experience food or orgasms or films or whatever—anything that's physically based—through my body. So we have to be more aware of the fact that she's sharing my senses and not just choose what I would like." Jaye ate mostly a raw-food diet, so Gen has been trying to do the same.

"Ultimately, this project began because we loved each other so much we wanted to be absorbed by each other, and become just one new blob of stuff," he says. "And when my body finally drops my consciousness, we fully intend to blend into one new psychic consciousness. We took our vows very seriously when we got married."

He leans back in the booth and recites, "In sickness and in health, till death do us join."