When Tim Leary called and asked if I’d pick up Genesis P‑Orridge on my way down from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I knew enough to be afraid—but not a hell of a lot more. As founder of industrial music pioneer Throbbing Gristle and cult-inspiring acid-house follow-up Psychic TV, P‑Orridge was known for soliciting mail-in pubic hair and semen samples from his fans, tattooing his wife’s labia, and staging mock abortions on video. When those tapes were interpreted by clueless police as real satanic murder rituals, it became impossible for Genesis and his family to return to England without danger of imprisonment.

The near-universal notoriety he received in the U.K. was even more than Genesis had bargained for, and his marriage didn’t survive in exile. Sensing a kindred spirit, Leary—who had once lived in exile as an escaped convict—invited Gen to decompress at his Beverly Hills home, just one cliff down from the Sharon Tate house, which was then being occupied by Trent Reznor.

When I found Gen at the designated coordinates—an underground shopping-mall parking lot—I was surprised to find him with his two daughters, then about seven and ten. They spent the entire six-hour drive fighting in the backseat as Gen tried every threat and bribe he could think of to quiet them. Over the next decade, it was the challenges of the mundane that we bonded over more than any artistic or cultural ideals.

Sometimes he’d come stay at my apartment when he’d get in a fight with his second wife, Lady Jaye (Jackie Breyer P‑Orridge). Meanwhile, I’d come to Gen for encouragement whenever my personal courage didn’t quite match the temerity of my ideas—or if I was getting pounded on a bit too hard by a critic or online forum. Gen’s the one who convinced me to get married (“See what’s behind door number two”). Yes, we contributed to one another’s projects and conceptual framework, we worked on a few book projects together, and for a year or so I even played keyboards for the newly reformed Psychic TV (PTV3) and experienced Genesis from the other side of the stage and recording booth. But our real value and connection to one another always concerned navigating or, in his case, erasing the boundary between our personal and creative lives. For while my life might be dedicated to understanding and exploiting media, his life and body became the medium itself.

Gen’s most recent project is a cutup experiment called Pandrogeny for which s/he and Lady Jaye underwent gender-challenging plastic surgeries to look more like one another. Jaye’s sudden and unexpected death left Genesis Breyer P‑Orridge as not just one half of a couple but one half of a real-life...