“It’s my belief that one of the problems of the world so far, or one of its evolutionary states that is coming to an end, is the binary system. The either/or system. The good/bad, black/white way of perceiving everything. That’s not the way the universe is built. That’s not how matter is. That’s not now the brain is. Nothing is like that. It’s a fallacy.”

—Genesis on audio cassette, sometime in the mid-’90s.

I first met Genesis back in February of 1993. I had been in San Francisco working on my book Media Virus!, and I got a call from Timothy Leary asking if I would bring Gen with me when I returned to Los Angeles. Gen had been chased out of the UK for that art video depicting a mock satanic ritual and was hoping to learn some strategies for a life in exile from Tim, who had spent years in Europe as a fugitive himself.

Of course, I was delighted at the prospect of spending five hours with one of my cultural heroes, a cut-and-paste artist who approached the body and gender with the same appropriative remix ethos that he (Gen identified male at the time) approached civilization itself. But I was also a little frightened. I knew Genesis P-Orridge, the pioneer of industrial music, the front man for Throbbing Gristle, and the instigator of mail-in-semen-and-pubic-hair cult: Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. TOPY members I had encountered in America were still quite binary, with militant garb and rigid gender roles and hierarchies. If the coyote boys were modeling themselves after him, I could only imagine how fierce the original coyote might be.

But as I pulled my Ford Escort into a parking complex, I came upon the real Gen—along with reluctant travel companions Caresse and Genesse—waiting with their luggage. They piled in, and I got to know this strange and wonderful human in a different context. A host of contexts, in fact: psychedelic adventurer; rock musician; cut-up artist; conspiracy theorist; beat, cultural philosopher; and, thanks to the occasional sister brawl in the back seat, typical father. All at the same time. But there was nothing scary or over-determined about Gen. This was not the hard-core, macho TOPY leader I expected, but a soft, squishy, open, and endearing partner in thought-crime.

Yes, Gen could talk for hours on end. But they were never egotistical. Gen didn’t speak about Gen, but about influences and collaborators, friends and lovers. Their diatribes were about Burroughs and Gysin, Kenneth Anger and Derek Jarman, Cosey and Alaura, and later, of course, Lady Jaye. To the extent that Gen did have an ego and persona, well, the object was to kill it and reassemble the parts into something else.

Gen and I bonded and remained close friends and confidantes until they passed. We recorded hours and hours of our conversations over the years, with the intent of collecting them into some sort of book. These encounters were intimate and intense. Challenging, but not in the way that engaging with a strong personality like Leary challenged one’s ego and assumptions with the power of his own. It was more a feeling of being taken in and invaded at the same time, where the boundary of my own individually was immediately suspect. It was like making love or, better, being possessed. It was a nondual way of relating to people. There was no other. It was like becoming one shared consciousness.

What I always really wanted Gen to do was write a book of their own. Not a TOPY scripture or collection of Thee Majesty poems, but a real chronicle of Gen’s experience of life and art and power and people since the 1960s. This was history they had lived. I started nagging Gen in the late ’90s and kept at it when we played together in PTV3. I saw every van ride was another chance to push the idea forward. “Would people really be interested?” they’d ask, as if their adventures applying the techniques of cut-and-paste to human flesh were already going out of style.

“People are going to want to know where all this came from,” I’d reassure them. “The origin story of the counterculture, told through the eyes of someone who was everywhere that mattered.”

It was only after Gen developed leukemia that they considered this option seriously. Initially, and with great cost to their health, Gen kept traveling and performing, finally canceling gigs when they lacked the oxygen to speak. Eventually I had to set up a GoFundMe for Gen to make ends meet, and they accepted that a book would allow them to maintain creative output without leaving the apartment.

Gen didn’t know if they could afford to work without some income, and I had to explain that real books get real advances. From publishers. “You think I could get a publisher? Do you know one?” Again, they had no confidence that anyone would even read their book, much less pay for one. I helped Gen put together a simple proposal, introduced them to the perfect agent in Peter McGuigan, who connected Gen with brilliant co-writer Tim Mohr. And you’ve just read the result.

What helped me get Gen to turn the corner was when I suggested they not write their autobiography, but rather their experiences with others. Gen’s eyes would light up at the thought of sharing their adventures transitioning from man to medium, as they themself transitioned from life to—well, whatever is next.

Predictably, then, this volume may seem just a bit mosaic to some readers. Well, what would you expect from a cut-and-paste artist who was no more dedicated to crashing civilization than crashing their own identity? The reading experience you just had was to my mind a bit like experiencing Genesis the person. Fluid. Changing. Self-annihilating. Nonbinary in the sense that subject and object, figure and ground merge and intertwine.

For Gen only truly existed in relationship with other people. The nonbinary ethos was about so much more than sex or gender—it was about the dissolution of individuality. Of self and other. And given that Gen lived this way, their life defied the traditional narrative structure of a protagonist moving through the world. That’s why this is a book about relationships and impressions, unions and dissolutions—where the thing we call Gen serves less as the leading man or woman and more as an environment or medium through which various collective experiences could take place. Not a protagonist but a pan-tagonist. They’d have liked that word.

Nonbinary is less an autobiography than an antibiography. A dissolution. Gen annihilated the self—first himself, then themself, but also everyone else in the field, forcing us all to wake up. Resistance was futile. Still is.

I’m sorry Gen is gone. They didn’t live an easy life, or leave us with instructions for how to live an easy one ourselves. Quite the contrary. It’s to be deliciously and delightfully challenging. Embracing our nonbinary nature means we straddle the abyss. As Gen once told me during a particularly harrowing psychedelic journey together, “Come, Douglas. You know that the only good trip is a bad trip.” One and the same.

Douglas Rushkoff

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

January 2021