PRIVATE WORLDS: Growing Up Gay in Post-War Britain, elegy for a life spent without

PRIVATE WORLDS: Growing Up Gay in Post-War Britain
JEREMY SEABROOK
Pluto Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1950s suburban England, a friendship bloomed between Jeremy Seabrook and Michael O’Neill—two gay men coming of age at a time when homosexuality was still a crime. Their relationship was inflected by secrecy and fear; the shadows that had distorted their adolescent years were never wholly dispelled, long into their adult life. Lyrical, candid and poignant, this is a tale of sexual identity, working-class history and family drama. A memoir of unparalleled authenticity, Private Worlds is an elegy for a doomed friendship.

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My Review: The US class system impacted me far less than the UK version did young Seabrook, thank all the nonexistent gods. The possession or absence of a "posh" accent is greatly deterministic of one's future; the comparable thing here is the Southern twang, which (no matter where the business is centered) will keep one in the lower ranks. I, being gay and really unwilling to pretend otherwise, felt the sting of exclusion, so that reality was shared by the author and me. His eventual success has been built on being a self not supported by the world he came from; escape by jettisoning the weight of his class identity. Seabrook and O'Neill each accomplished this by being bolshie leftists in an England that was convulsing from the wounds of Empire, birthing today's hideous US-style fascist plutocratic class system.

That doomed, deep love, found and lost early, was part of my life as well. The friendship blighted by the need to dissemble; the deeper connection denied by the caustic effects of powerlessness, of the absence of role models for doing the open and honest thing by each other, was all too painfully relatable to me. It's shocking to me, looking back, that my life was not more blighted by this distorting pressure to be someone I was not and, moreover, did not ever want to be...his life, from my outsider point of view, was more so than mine.

That story is not mine to tell. Author Seabrook and O'Neill have a longstanding public connection, and have each analyzed the way their milieu had them jointly "fail{ing} to grow up together"...a phrase, and an idea behind it, I'd like to pay honor to by saying I wish to hell I'd said that first. The class system's role in this failure was, probably because I'm from the US, not as real as was the way the precocious thwarted-single-mother-raised boy was forced to dissemble. His friendship with O'Neill, ostensibly the focus of this book, feels more like a well-polished lens for him to examine himself and his failed world-beating dreams.

Seabrook and O'Neill (born and raised a Londoner, a key component of his identity as an outsider in the English North) affected a caustic ironical distance from their neighbors. An intellectual pose of studying these Others, who in their turn Othered these bumptious boys for being queer, froze into an outsider identity, an observer stance, that would enable them to "overcome" their background only by treating it as fodder, material for their real life's work in sociological study. Dealing with this really unappealing trait now, Author Seabrook seems paralyzed by his recognition of its cruelty. That this is cruelty returned for cruelty given is not, to my surprise, part of his path to self-forgviness. The ironic separation has an inevitable distancing effect between the friends...how could it not...and that gets his focus. I was surprised by how bitterly he seems to regret the dark space left by O'Neill's separate personhood, and how little kindness he seems to extend to that early Seabrook boy. Judging one's earlier self is easy. Forgiving them is, apparently, not.

A fascinating dive into an intelligent man's past love for his intellectual equal and emotional opposite. I'm sure anyone who's read and liked Édouard Louis or Jon Fosse as tellers of personal and immutable truth will batten on this book.

NONBINARY, being a memoir via call-to-arms of Genesis P-Orridge...famous if you know who they are

NONBINARY: A Memoir
GENESIS P-ORRIDGE
Abrams Press
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: ?? five, three, sixteen? how does one rate this sort of story?

A 2021 NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR!

The Publisher Says: A revealing and beautifully open memoir from pioneering industrial music artist, visual artist, and transgender icon Genesis P-Orridge

In this groundbreaking book spanning decades of artistic risk-taking, the inventor of “industrial music,” founder of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and world-renowned fine artist with COUM Transmissions Genesis P-Orridge (1950–2020) takes us on a journey searching for identity and their true self. It is the story of a life of creation and destruction, where Genesis P-Orridge reveals their unwillingness to be stuck—stuck in one place, in one genre, or in one gender. Nonbinary is Genesis’s final work and is shared with hopes of being an inspiration to the newest generation of trailblazers and nonconformists.

Nonbinary is the intimate story of Genesis’s life, weaving the narrative of their history in COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, and Psychic TV. It also covers growing up in World War II’s fallout in Britain, contributing to the explosion of new music and radical art in the 1960s, and destroying visual and artistic norms throughout their entire life.

In addition to being a captivating memoir of a singular artist and musician, Nonbinary is also an inside look at one of our most remarkable cultural lives that will be an inspiration to fans of industrial music, performance art, the occult, and a life in the arts.

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My Review: There are no words for Genesis P-Orridge. Trans, genderqueer, non-binary; artist, musician, creator...or Creator. Not one of them can hope to do more than capture a slice of this astonishing being's self.

William S. Burroughs met them when they were twenty...he immediately posed them a life-long quest in a question:

"How do we short-circuit control?"

When William S. Burroughs asks you to solve a problem the first day you meet him, all of 20 to his rising-60, you have to know you are Someone. And Someone Genesis was, and became, and remained until their death from leukemia at seventy. Central to their identity was re-making a world in their irreplaceable self-image. From childhood, they found no pleasure in eating:

This struggle with food and eating has never ended. Even now, if I could absorb enough nourishment and vitamins by simply swallowing one pill with some water, I'd be thrilled. I have never been able to muster even the slightest interest in tastes, flavours, textures, or combinations of food. It has always struck me as a demeaning and primitive requirement of my body. A necessity that I totally resent.

It seems to me that, from a parenting perspective, this person would've been a bloody nightmare. And that was then, at the time and in a place where invasions of home life were significantly fewer and milder than they are now. Raising Genesis if born in 2000? Ye gawds, the spirit shies from such a travail.

Though Genesis born now would've found their QUILTBAGgery much less troublesome. Their life in a British "public school" (that's "expensive private school for the Ruling Class" to us in the US, think Choate or Boston Latin School) was a litany of torture and torment, unsurprisingly. These breeding grounds for Tory Government flunkies (Skull and Bones, to us in the US, breeding CIA and IMF fascists) were never going to be a congenial environment for a complete wanker like Genesis.

I think the problems of being Other, truly and genuinely Other, are never more clear than when Genesis tells (in clear and well-written English, when one expects something that sounds like their lyrics from Throbbing Gristle...translations from a future language via Akkadian texts) of their journey to the truly bizarre fame they found in the 1970s and 1980s. It reads a bit like a daVinci notebook does when one doesn't know that the writing's meant to be read in a mirror. The concepts are all there...the sheer panicky "what is happening to me" sense of it all, suavely undersold, makes the story into a truly unsettling read.

I think, in fact, that there is no better way to sum up Genesis P-Orridge's life's affect and effect than that: a lifelong sense of "what is happening to me," from birth to death; a need to surf on the curls of waves that one knows with great certainty are killers ready to end one's thin thread of a life.

Genesis discusses the sense they have always had of a non-linear self. An early description of their memories as glittering shards without connection or organizing principle explains everything, I think. How else but in those terms could a person sing so eerily about the awfulness...rape, cannibalism...that they did? When nothing connects to anything else, when experience and memory are frag-bombs of disorganized imagery, it is impossible to see the world as anything but sensory shrapnel as ready to rend and pierce as to please.

Don't pick this up as a celebrity bio; don't think the artsy-fartsy bits are going to be posh and the livin' be easy. No indeed. There's total hand-to-mouthery from beginning to end. The struggle that is their life could, in retrospect, never have been otherwise if they were to come out of it themself. For example, the name "Genesis P-Orridge" came out of their deep need to say "FUCK YOU" to bureaucrats at the dole office. And their mother was more upset about that than their decision to leave uni! So, of course, it was made legal and remained the cornerstone of their identity for their next fifty years.

I said before: Parenting this person *had* to be a seriously difficult and stressful experience.

I do not know if this reading experience will be for everyone; like Genesis, the audience is really down to self-selection. Their co-author on this extraordinary journey of a read said it best, I think:

These encounters were intimate and intense. Challenging, but not in the way that engaging with a strong personality like {Timothy} 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 individuality was immediately suspect. It was like making love or, better, being possessed. It was a nondual way of relating to people.

Does this give you the heebie-jeebies? Horseman, pass by. Does it give you a frisson? Buy, read, experience a corner of the strange, glorious, unique Other that was Genesis P-Orridge.