NONBINARY

A posthumous memoir from the multimedia artist, a "transgender icon” who transcended more than mere gender categories.

P-Orridge, who died from leukemia in 2020, was born Neil Andrew Megson in Manchester, England, in 1950. Considering their birth name a "temporary tag," P-Orridge believed that a name change was "a really potent form of magic.” Their overriding goal in a lifetime of art- and music-making was to "short-circuit control," a directive given to them by William Burroughs. The author’s early years in British schools, where they suffered from verbal and physical abuse from classmates and authority figures alike, "taught me who my enemy was." Their early experiments in performance art and street theater set the tone for their career: “Does anything have to exist just because it did before?...Who does it serve?” Throbbing Gristle, the seminal industrial band P-Orridge co-founded, used "the tools and the toys of the military-industrial complex" as musical instruments to subvert “their original intent, which was, of course, control.” Confounding expectations, the author’s next band, Psychic TV, aimed to “seduce the audience rather than alienate them.” Using esoteric rituals, fetish objects, sacred figures, and shamanic tools, their music conjured spiritual states and aimed to "make the occult trendy again.” For another conceptual art project, P-Orridge served as one half—with dominatrix and partner Lady Jaye Breyer—of a "pandrogyne" fusing male and female beings into a "third being,” a further breakdown of the binary model. They erased differences between them with body modifications and medical techniques, applying cut-up methods to "our problematic bodies.” They considered this project the "egalitarian integration of two artist explorers, this third being Breyer P-Orridge," a proposed "end of either/or" that is "essential to the survival of the species." As much a manifesto as a memoir, this wild life story is dedicated to the breakdown of categories: "End gender. Break sex. Destroy the control of DNA and the expected. Every man and woman is a man and woman.”

An entertaining and thoughtful book about a remarkable life that consistently embraced transformation.