The unconventional love story of musician Genesis P-Orridge and his band mate, artistic partner and muse is hitting the big screen in the form of the documentary “The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye. ”
Over the last 30 years, Genesis has been one of the most innovative figures in post-punk, industrial and electronic music, having founded influential groups such as Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV.
In the 1990s, Genesis married fellow Psychic TV member Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge and together the two explored their ideas of gender, which they named “pandrogyny” or the Pandrogyne project, the concept of both sexes merging into one as the next step in human evolution. To that end, both underwent a series of surgical procedures to look like each other, which included breast implants and cosmetic surgery.
“As far as we knew, we came up with pandrogyny by thinking about positive androgyny as an alternative to hermaphroditic because hermaphroditic has the baggage of biological strangeness or even freakishness,” Genesis said about the origins of the concept. “We wanted it to be very positive. ‘Pan,’ which is also a sort of pagan word also means drowning. There a lot of connotations that we felt were appropriate. Drowning in each other. We thought that we had come up with it together in the late 1990s, but just recently we were looking through a diary from 1984 and in one of the essays to myself, we’d used the word pandrogyny and I have no recollection of that at all. So the word had slipped into my unconscious long before the project began. The actual development of it as a concept and exploration was still completely new for both of us.”
Shortly before Psychic TV was to embark on a tour in October 2007, Lady Jaye collapsed and died at home in the arms of Genesis from a previously undiagnosed heart condition connected with her long-term battle with stomach cancer.
“The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye,” directed by Marie Losier, is a complex portrait of two lives that pushed the boundaries of love and art. It is being screened in independent movie theaters and film festivals all over the world.
Genesis said the international acclaim that the film has garnered so far was a surprise to him.
“We assumed it was going to be an independent movie that’s a home movie but longer than normal and only people that knew about it would find it interesting,” he said. “But it has turned out not to be the case. This film was in a festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There were 500 different films in the festival. There was a special prize, the public prize, where all the people who go to all the films vote for their favorite and our film won. So that’s somewhere where they know nothing about us and they don’t speak the same language. But they loved it. That’s one of the most shocking things for us, how much it is touching people who don’t have any idea who we are. But they are intrigued by the trailer and it seems like a film that arrived at the right time in the right place with ay message that is about love. It’s a 21st-century love story, but it’s still about anybody having unconditional and total love and surrendering to it. It’s working on that level, which is a primal and human emotion.”
When asked how the idea of pandrogyny is related to the LGBT community, Genesis said it was a “ticklish area.”
“Some people in the LGBT community feel a little bit uncomfortable with our approach because there’s been so much suffering and prejudice and even violence toward those communities and, to this day, very strongly toward trans people,” he said. “Although, through TV documentaries and empathetic films, people all over the United States and Western culture are becoming more familiar with that as a choice and option. Of course if you go to somewhere like Thailand, there have been three genders for a long time with the ladyboys. So a lot of other cultures have a niche for people who are trans in one way or another. We’re sort of lagging behind as a culture, or have been. Some people really do just see it as a gender issue and that is absolutely valid.
“But for us there was more to it than that. One way we used to explain it was some people see themselves as a man trapped in a woman’s body, some people see themselves as a woman trapped in a man’s body, but the Pandrogyne, we see ourselves just trapped by the body. It’s much more about identity and evolution of the being than it is about gender per se. If we could choose, we’d have male and female genitals and have all the options. But we would always support the LGBT community. We’ve always been allied to and sympathetic to that culture. In fact, when Lady Jaye dropped her body, it was the LGBT community in New York that were the only people that would give me grief counseling. That was really important to me and helped me a lot.”
Sometimes the subjects of documentaries can see things in hindsight on film that they didn’t notice the first time around. In the case of Genesis, he said the film made him more aware of his sillier moments.
“Some of my behaviors and silly voices somewhat irritate me,” he said. “But I guess that’s OK. Why should we be serious all the time? It’s a film of how we are. One part of our life most people don’t consider is the silly domestic tranquil parts. They’re used to seeing things about me being weird or evil or strange or whatever. So to have people see me in an empathetic way is quite interesting. We wish we could still have Lady Jaye here rather than the film, but it keeps her alive in a way that is helpful to me.”
Genesis also endeavors to keep Lady Jaye’s memory and ideas alive through art. He continues to perform with Psychic TV and also recently launched a new art exhibition.
“The exhibition is called ‘I’m Mortality,’ which is also immortality,” he said. “It deals with birth and death and reincarnation. A glassblower is making these beautiful spheres of glass and in one will be Lady Jaye’s hair, fingernails and even skin. In another will be my hair, fingernails and skin. The one in the center will be a mixture of the two. So it’s the Pandrogyne in the center. And there’s a lot of work with blood, but not in a gruesome way. The first gift I got from Lady Jaye was a Chanel No. 5 scent bottle and she changed the label to her face and it was filled with her blood. So a year later we trumped it by sending a double-sized Chanel No. 5 scent bottle with my face on it and filled with my blood. We put them in the fridge but by chance we put mine in the freezer, and so it expanded and cracked and shattered the bottle. But it didn’t collapse. So we made a video called ‘Blood Sacrifice’ and we put her bottle next to mine on a Tibetan prayer scarf and, as it warmed up, my bottle melted and moved toward her scent bottle and surrounded it. It’s a very mystical interpretation of immortality.
“So she is still collaborating with me. We were in love with each other to the point where, if we could have, we would have eaten each other. We wanted to literally merge completely, mentally, physically and emotionally and become one being. It’s about consciousness and possible reincarnation and what comes after death. Is the male/female paradigm a finished thing or are we a new larval stage species? The Pandrogyne to us is the clarion call to change the species in a positive way so that there is no ‘other’ to be afraid of, victimize or intimidate.”
“The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye” is screened March 23-29 at Landmark Ritz at the Bourse, 400 Ranstead St. Psychic TV performs 9 p.m. March 24 at Johnny Brenda’s, 1201 N. Frankford Ave. For more information or tickets, visit www.balladofgenesisandladyjaye.com or www.genesisbreyerporridge.com, or call 215-739-9684.