The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
A film as unconventional as its subjects
By Wesley Morris
Globe Staff / March 23, 2012
http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2012/03/23/two_lovers_a_third_gender/There are the gender explorations of Eddie Izzard, Barry Humphries, Martin Lawrence, and Tyler Perry. Then there's Neil Megson, whose ideas of gender go far beyond garden-variety drag. He's in his 60s now, and in the early 1970s, Megson began practicing performance art under the nom d'avant garde Genesis P-Orridge. His art collective, COUM Transmissions, took off and he founded the proto-industrial band Throbbing Gristle, then another outfit called Psychic TV.
But I imagine he'd say his masterpiece was the project he started with his younger, late second wife, Jacqueline Breyer, who played in a revamped Psychic TV and took the name Lady Jaye P-Orridge. Together, they pursued corporeal sameness by surgically altering their very different appearances until they appeared to be radically less different. Their goal was the creation of a new, third gender - the pandrogyne, which, according to the narration Megson provides for Marie Losier's documentary, "The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye,'' is a "cry for survival,'' a damnation of our tired old two-gender system. The body, Breyer has said, is a flesh suitcase.
