How music legend, performance artist, and notorious "wrecker of civilization" Genesis P-Orridge met dominatrix/performer Jacqueline Breyer and fell madly, deliriously in love; how cosmetic surgery helped them become one; and how their romance was interrupted by a temporary setback called death

This article is from the July/August issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here.

It wasn't simply a matter of love at first sight for Genesis P-Orridge that morning in 1993, when he lay on the floor of a dungeon in New York's Chelsea neighborhood belonging to author and dominatrix Terence Sellers, though that was certainly a factor.

As he would later discover, the impossibly tall, angelic woman who materialized in the next room as he awoke, bleary-eyed from the unwholesome activities of the night before, was the same woman his 11-year-old daughter had personally picked out for him a few months before.

As he watched, the woman paced back and forth, slowly removing her street clothes. By the time she'd slipped on her silk stockings, wriggled into her black rubber peekaboo miniskirt, and donned her leather motorcycle cap, a prayer was forming in Gen's mind.

If we can be with this woman as lovers, as partners, for the rest of our lives, thought the front man of the legendary bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, who'd easily piled up enough experiences and enough identities to justify that royal "we"—it's all we'll ever want in the universe.

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.