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“We fell in love the minute we saw each other, and as we became more and more obsessively in love, we had that whole feeling of ‘I wish I could eat you up. I wish I could just take you, and I become you and you become me,’ ” he says.
So as a tenth-anniversary present to each other, they began to do just that. They called the project “Pandrogeny.” On Valentine’s Day 2003, the two received matching sets of breast implants from Dr. Daniel Baker, a well-known Upper East Side cosmetic surgeon. Eye and nose jobs followed, and in subsequent years the two would receive, altogether, $200,000 worth of cheek and chin implants, lip plumping, liposuction, a tattooed beauty mark, and hormone therapy. They dressed in identical outfits. Each mimicked the other’s mannerisms.
And then in 2007, after returning from a tour with Psychic TV’s spinoff, PTV3, they lost half of their unified whole: Breyer died at 38, of stomach cancer. She’d been about to get a set of gold teeth, to match his.
“We were getting there, weren’t we?” Sitting in their apartment nearly two years later, P-Orridge refers to himself in the plural: “we,” “us,” “our.” Not on occasion, or when he remembers, but resolutely: in conversation, in e-mail exchanges. (I’m sticking with “he” and “him” here, for clarity’s sake.) He believes that his wife still exists within him. The project, P-Orridge says, has little to do with sex or vanity, and more to do with behavioral science—testing the boundaries of identity, redirecting the way “other people encode their expectations and their needs on you.” It’s like his collage work in that “we’ve always been interested in falling out of the frame.”
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