Final paper for my special reading course on Aleister Crowley. Enjoy!

GENDER APOCALYPSE NOW! TRANSCENDENTALISM, TRANSHUMANISM, & TRANSGENDERISM IN THE AEON OF HORUS

In 1964, artist/occultist Marjorie Cameron and filmmaker/occultist Kenneth Anger were cohabitating in Los Angeles, California. Marjorie Cameron was a bisexual female; Kenneth Anger was a gay male. The pair decided to embark on a new magical and artistic project: becoming each other. Cameron started taking testosterone, Kenneth got on estrogen, and despite their seemingly incompatible genders and sexualities, they began a sexual relationship. The experiment was short-lived and soon abandoned. Kenneth left for New York, leaving Cameron to mourn by wearing his leather pants, as if still trying to meld with him.[1]

Decades later, another pair of strange soulmates, musician/magician Genesis P. Orridge and dominatrix Lady Jaye, would attempt and complete the same project, using hormones and surgeries to become as nearly identical as possible. This endeavor was inspired by both their transcendent love for one another—their desire to become one being—and by their shared vision of new kinds of gender. “Some people feel they’re a woman trapped in a man’s body,” Genesis said. “We just feel trapped in a body. What we’re talking about is an idealized future where male and female become irrelevant.”[2]

What these two couples had in common was a post-Crowleyan approach to gender, sexuality, art, and occultism that has at its heart the veneration of the divine androgyne as the harbinger and archetype of a radical new era.

This paper will explore the signs of Crowley’s androgynous and cataclysmic Aeon of Horus. I write this more as an organic intellectual than as a traditional scholar, although the mask of the academic is one that I often wear well. This paper needs to be more personal and authentic. Here is a meditation on gender, transcendence, love, and apocalypse as manifest in occultism, science fiction, rock n’ roll, and society.

It is also a litany to my magickal ancestors and the gender outlaws whose lives and adventures inform mine. In Thelemic terms, one might call these saints, who poured out their life’s blood into the cup of Babalon, from which I drink to become myself.

This is the chronicle of the transhumanist and gender-transcending magickal current that Aleister Crowley unleashed on the earth. What started as a whisper, heard by only a few, has multiplied by its echoes to turn into a deafening roar.

THE BEAST AND THE WHORE: CROWLEY’S INNOVATIONS

More than a century has passed since Aiwass proclaimed “Do what thou wilt” through the lips and pen of Aleister Crowley.[3] The legacy that Crowley left behind is rich, complex and often problematic; but as multiple generations of magicians have plundered his writings, taking what they like and leaving the rest, it is they, not he, who have molded his true legacy. His impact has been determined by what his heirs have taken from him, not by what he left to them. This legacy, after all the picking and choosing, has proven to be primarily one of sexual magick and gender liberation.

Aleister Crowley made many magickal innovations during his time—blending the esotericism of the East with that of the West, introducing sex magick—but his master stroke was taking the queer implications of symbolism already present in Western Esotericism and making them explicit. For many centuries, alchemists had described the hermaphroditic “Rebis” as the result of the Great Work.[4] Eliphas Levi had introduced the image of Baphomet as divine androgyne,[5] the figure Crowley would later call “the hieroglyph of arcane perfection.”[6] For these pre-Crowley esotericists, the divine androgyne was an abstract symbol of spiritual harmony and balance, of the union of opposites, much like the Yin Yang. This androgynous principle was not intended to be embodied in any material sense.

Crowley’s courageous genius was to declare himself an androgyne, physically as well as spiritually. In his “Confessions,” he remarks on his own girlish figure and unusually pronounced breast development[7]. He followed through on this declaration of embodied gender-variance by embracing its sexual implications, primarily through his bisexuality and his willingness to take a “passive” sexual role. When initiated into sodomy by drag queen Herbert Jerome Pollitt, Crowley saw himself as the female of the equation, despite Jerome’s gowns, wigs, and rouge. “I lived with Pollitt as his wife for some six months and he made a poet out of me,”[8] Crowley later remembered. “A strong man’s love is my delight,” he rhapsodizes in his “Ballad of Passive Paederasty,” wherein he also addresses Pollitt as “husband” and expresses his rapturous desire to “feel him force me like a maid.”[9]

Reading Crowley’s later writings on the Scarlet Woman in light of these verses, one might begin to think that Crowley identified not only with The Great Beast but with The Great Whore as well. Decoding his magical name further, we realize that Baphomet is the sum of woman and beast, Babalon and Antichrist combined.

Further deconstructing this formula, we find two methods of physically embodying the divine androgyne:

1. By uniting masculine and feminine traits in a single individual, and
2. Via heterosexual intercourse, in which a masculine individual and a feminine individual temporarily join bodies.

Method B. is the formula of heterosexual sex magick, and queers cisgender heterosexual intercourse by suggesting that its product is an androgyne. For Crowley, this is true even of reproductive sex. The child becomes the androgynous Rebis, the product of the alchemical Great Work. The male and female parents are thesis and antithesis, resulting in synthesis.

Furthermore, by combining method A with method B, method C can be generated:

3. Two (or more) androgynous individuals in sexual union with each other.

This third method is potentially the most powerful, since it combines inner work with outer work, self-transformation with relational intimacy. Throughout this paper, we will see many individuals experiment with variations on these three methods.

Crowley was, of course, far from being post-gender. His misogyny and British colonialist entitlement limited his progress towards the androgynous ideal trumpeted by his magical name. He did, however, lay the groundwork for those who came after him. This was intentional. Crowley’s interest in gender transcendence was not limited to himself. He was concerned with a type of Nietzschean transhumanism, desiring that humanity become something better and greater. He predicted the shape of this evolution as the prophet of the Aeon of Horus, proclaiming an androgynous age produced by the synthesis of the Aeon of Isis (matriarchal) and the Aeon of Osiris (patriarchal). This androgynous Aeon would be characterized by war, fire, and upheaval, but also by unprecedented freedom and new ways of loving. Sexuality would become fluid, liberated, non-monogamous and pansexual.[10] Crowley imagined new people and a new way of life, one infused with magick, wherein all human beings would become self-actualized through the Law of Thelema.[11]

Crowley did not live to see this era come to fruition. It would be pushed forward by his successors—but rarely by his legitimate heirs. While the Ordo Templi Orientis quickly ossified into institutional inertia, its heretics and apostates would carry the torch into the mid and late 20^th century.

ANTICHRIST AND BABALON: JACK AND CAMERON

Californian rocket scientist Jack Parsons was the first of Crowley’s heirs to make a major impact. Rakish, bisexual and totally lacking in formal scientific training, Jack Parsons pioneered rocketry back when it was considered less science than science fiction,[12] launching his risky experiments skyward in the desert outside Pasadena and financing them out of his own pocket.[13] He and his cohort of rocketeer cronies at Caltech became known as “The Suicide Squad” for their hair-raising work.[14] A magician as well as a scientist, Jack approached occultism with the same daredevil spirit. In both fields he was an innovator, and was dismissed as a crackpot by his fellow scientists[15] and his peers in the O.T.O. alike[16]. Jack had the last laugh—he invented the stable fuel that allowed rockets to become viable technology for transportation rather than mere weapons of destruction.[17] Though he would not live to see it, his work was crucial to putting man on the moon. In magick, too, he may have succeeded beyond what his fellow Thelemites gave him credit for. His most notorious ritual, “The Babalon Working,” undertaken with a pre-scientology L. Ron Hubbard, was intended to bring the goddess Babalon to earthly incarnation.[18] At the end of the working, the redheaded Marjorie Cameron appeared on Jack Parson’s doorstep as if summoned.[19] She would become his second wife. Jack proclaimed success and declared himself the Antichrist.[20]

Cameron was an artist. She was not initially interested in occultism and did not see herself as Babalon,[21] but Jack had predicted that Babalon would not fully incarnate until his own death.[22] He spent the last few years of his life hymning Babalon and developing an earnest, naïve form of Thelemic feminism. For Jack, androgyny was not as necessary to express in the body of the individual as in the body of society. He saw church, state, and the other institutions of patriarchy as fundamentally unbalanced, writing:

The secret and the shame of Christianity is known when it is realized that the holy ghost is feminine, the Sophia… The very name of god, Yod He Vau He, father, mother, son, daughter, when properly pronounced, asserts the splendor of the biological order. How could life proceed from a strictly masculine creation?[23]

Here Jack insists, using Kabbalistic and Gnostic arguments, that the body of God must be understood as androgynous. The female must be restored to her place in religion and society in order to overcome “the psychosis rampant in the modern world.”[24] Jack concludes his treatise with a metaphysical ‘call to arms’ for women to claim their equality:

Draw the sword, the two-edged sword of freedom, and call for a man to meet you in fair combat… Call upon him, test him by the sword and he will be worthy of you. For you two are the archetypes of the new race. Somewhere in the world today there is a woman for whom the sword is forged… and she will be called BABALON, the scarlet woman[25].

Thus Jack’s Babalon prophecy is explicitly linked not only to female liberation, but to a transhuman promise of a “new race” of men and women who are equal and free.

When Jack was killed in an explosion only a few years later, Cameron’s grief finally drove her to explore magick for herself.[26] As if to fulfill her late husband’s prophecy, she embraced the Babalon role. She appeared in this persona in Kenneth Anger’s film The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.[27] (The aforementioned experiment in gender and identity blending between the artists and the filmmaker would take place later.)

Cameron was bisexual and gender-ambivalent. She bore an eerie coincidental resemblance to fellow natural redhead and avatar of the Aeon, David Bowie, especially once she cut her hair short. She preferred to be known by her androgynous last name, Cameron, and hated being called Marjorie[28]. She spent her relatively long post-Jack life embracing her identity as Babalon, immersing herself in magick, and languishing in undeserved artistic obscurity despite her striking paintings. In her relationships with men, Cameron seemed to have a desire to meld identities with her lovers. She and Jack had seen themselves as parts of one another, and Cameron spent a lot of time trying to make up for the lack of that lost other half. She was mainly attracted to men who were gay or bisexual, and seemed to have a fondness of wearing their clothes.

Cameron’s ambiguous gender is most on display in Curtis Harrison’s short film, The Wormwood Star, which showcases her art and magic. Cameron appears with cropped red hair, her face aging towards androgyny. To further emphasize her dual nature, she has one foot bare, the other shod in a shiny black slipper and a red stocking. Similarly mismatched are her pantlegs, one of which is pale purple, the other black. A shroud of pink taffeta trails along the ground behind her, draped over just one of her shoulders. Surrounded by her magical accoutrements, she appears otherworldly, alien. The film then shifts focus to her artwork, particularly a painting showing a gaudy procession of animal/humanoid hybrid creatures. The final shots return the camera to Cameron, swathed in a gold body suit that seems to prefigure Ziggy Stardust. Her bare shoulders appear wiry and masculine, and as the camera zooms in to focus only on her face and neck, she could be any gender.[29]

As Babalon, Cameron’s task was to usher in an era of sexual liberation and free love. How much she succeeded is hard to say. She was certainly present and involved in the dawning of the hippy era, but was lurking in the background, rarely exerting an overt influence. Indeed, if she had influence at all, one would have to suppose it was of a clandestine and occult kind. Her greatest impact during her life was probably converting Kenneth Anger to Thelema.[30] Her art has only begun to be appreciated posthumously.

Perhaps Jack prophesied this seeming lack of success. In the Book of Babalon, which he ‘channeled,’ the Goddess says: “One came as a man, and was weak and failed. One came as a woman, and was foolish, and failed. But thou art beyond man and woman, my star is in thee, and thou shalt avail.”[31]

Who might this other have been? Maybe none other than Marjorie Cameron’s flame-haired doppelganger… David Bowie.

STARMAN

If the task of Babalon is to serve as an icon of sexual liberation, inspiring the masses to cast off the constraints of outdated mores, then David Bowie was a more successful Scarlet Woman than Cameron ever was. Few figures in history have done more to explode sexual taboos and push the boundaries of gender. Bowie also did his part to propagate the space age for which Jack Parsons had so longed, via his cosmonaut personae Major Tom and Ziggy Stardust. Bowie embodied both the Scarlet Woman archetype, and also that of the Beast—false prophet, antichrist, alien visitor, fallen angel. For the first time, these two Thelemic poles of gender were truly united in a single body.

Famously, Bowie had his period of fascination with Aleister Crowley. He was also influenced directly by one of Crowley’s intellectual forebears: Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was known for pronouncing that “man is something that is to be surpassed,”[32] i.e. that humans as they were in his lifetime were not the final stage of evolution. Bowie seems to have agreed— “Homo sapiens have outgrown their use,” he sings on ‘Oh! You Pretty Things.’[33]

Like Crowley, Bowie seems to have equated this Nietzschean transhumanism, at least partially, with radical new expressions of gender. Peter Bebergal writes:

Bowie used glamour—both in the fashion and magical senses—to convert rock audiences into accepting a bisexual and binary sense of self… Bowie’s sexual self is a method of transgression illuminating something universally and perhaps subconsciously human.[34]

This was Bowie’s genius (aside from his astonishing ability to crank out catchy pop songs and to shapeshift, chameleonlike, to suit the sensibilities of each decade). Bowie made men want to wear makeup—and he made women want to kiss those men. He gave young androgynous queers a vision of something beyond male and female, and it was a vision of power and beauty. He opened up space for such people to exist. Of course, he did not do this alone—Bowie’s androgynous personae blossomed in the wake of the Stonewall riots and probably could not have done so before them. But he brought his seductive, sexualized androgyny to a mainstream audience, and reached them in a way that no one had before.

THE PANDROGYNE

Genesis P-Orridge formed the band Psychic TV after watching a documentary about David Bowie.[35] This trouble-starting iconoclast and gender outlaw had already raised hell with their former projects COUM and Throbbing Gristle. Now they wanted to form a new kind of rock band with a new kind of fan base. To worship this new band, Psychic TV, Genesis founded The Temple ov Psychick Youth, which was part fan club, part occult order. Like Bowie, Genesis was influenced by Crowley.[36] Unlike Bowie, they did far more than dabble in magick. Genesis’ Thelemic connections were of the highest order—William Breeze, better known as Hymenaeus Beta and as outer head of the O.T.O., used to play music with Psychic TV.

The magical/spiritual project that was to dominate Genesis’ life more than any other was their attempt at physical and spiritual melding with their beloved, Lady Jaye. The project was called the Pandrogyne, the goal: to “to break down the limitations of biological sex and express their unconditional love for each other.”[37] “For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union,”[38] Crowley’s goddess Nuit proclaims. This pronouncement echoes Aristophanes’ myth about the beginning of gender and of love[39] (most famously retold by another rock n’ roll androgyne, Hedwig of the Angry Inch[40]). It also harks back to the Kabbalistic notion that Adam and Eve were once a single androgynous being before being split into two individuals.[41] Genesis and Jaye were trying to reunite.

The project was not only romantic, but also political and transhumanist. “The body has to be perfected in really traditional ways, which is very oppressive and is not the way to evolve change and grow as a species,” Genesis said in one interview. “It’s regressive, it’s traveling back in times almost to medieval days, when women were just decorative property.”[42]

Tragically, Jaye died in 2007. This could have ended the project in heartbreaking failure, with death being the ultimate separation between the lovers. Instead, Genesis spent the rest of their life as the earthly representative of Lady Jaye, having absorbed her spirit into their body:

When Lady Jaye, as we say, dropped her body, as a matter of principle, we wanted to maintain what we believe is the state of things, which is that she’s still as much a part of me as before, so now my body represents us both in this material world, and she represents us both elsewhere. And then, hopefully, one day we will be we again, somewhere else.[43]

Genesis themself passed from the physical plane in March of 2020, presumably rejoining Jaye in another realm.

THE AGE OF MEN IS OVER: THE WRAETHTHU SAGA

Author Storm Constantine shares her birthday with Aleister Crowley.[44] She also shares in his vision of androgyny and apocalyptic change. Though her occult influences are many, she acknowledged Crowley’s importance to her in an email exchange, stating that for a long time “Crowley’s books and [tarot] deck were the nearest I got to having a magical teacher.”[45] Interestingly, she denied that Crowley directly influenced the portrayal of gender and sexuality in her Wraeththu novels, since she wrote them before becoming familiar with his work. She quickly gave this caveat: “Then again, there was a resonance, a connection without realising it, people working towards the same end – the hope of evolution within humanity to become something better.”[46] She also agreed that the Wraeththu novels are connected to the Aeon of Horus, though perhaps not intentionally.[47] A mystic and magician to the bone, Storm Constantine seemingly has no problem with the notion that Crowley’s work affected her magically even before it reached her intellectually.

The Wraeththu novels are not as well-known as some of the other cultural phenomena discussed in this paper. In fact, I have chosen to include them not for the influence they have had on society, which is minimal, but rather for the influences they condense in their pages. The Wraeththu mythos brings together transgenderism, transhumanism and transcendentalism more explicitly than any other material I have studied.

The novels describe a post-apocalyptic world wherein humanity has been largely replaced by Wraeththu (also called hara, singular: har), a race of physically androgynous mutants who evolved from homo sapiens. Thiede, the first har and progenitor of all Wraeththu, is explicitly modeled on David Bowie. Hara are healthier, longer lived, and far more spiritually attuned than their human counterparts. They are also all achingly beautiful, in a manner reminiscent of the goth and hair-metal pretty boys of the 80’s. They are highly sexual, generally polyamorous, and capable of solving most of their problems with sex magick—anything from healing disability to winning a world war can be done with grissecon (the Wraeththu term for sex magick). But all is not flowing tresses and steamy assignations in Wraeththu land. The newly mutated beings struggle to come to terms with their new bodies and with the abolition of gender. Some hara actually attempt to reinstate gender, dividing Wraeththu into active and passive sexual roles. These regressive hara are invariably villains in the series.

At first glance, the books are campy, almost trashy. It would be easy to dismiss them as ‘just fantasy novels.’ However, their relevance has increased eerily over time. In a 2019 interview, Storm Constantine acknowledged that her novels read differently in the light of both current global ecological disaster and the gender revolution taking place amongst today’s transgender and non-binary youth.[48] Much of the action of the novels takes place in desert wastelands reminiscent of Mad Max, landscapes that resonate with of a hotter, drier planet. And much like queer and transgender youth, Wraeththu began as hated and feared minorities who gradually gained in numbers—perhaps eventually becoming the majority.  

THE DEVIL, THE TOWER, THE STAR: ANDROGYNY IN THE WORLD TODAY

Recent studies have shown that the percentage of people who identify as cisgender and heterosexual is rapidly decreasing with each generation. Only 65 percent of millennials identified as exclusively heterosexual; generation Z is majority queer with only 48 percent describing themselves as straight.[49] 35 percent of gen Z respondents said they personally knew someone who used nonbinary pronouns, compared to 25 percent of millennial respondents and only 16 percent of generation X respondents[50]. The trend here is clear: humanity is moving towards a queer and non-binary future.

Millennials and generation Z are also noticeably more favorable towards polyamory[51] and kink.[52] Combine this with the fact that witchcraft and magic are on the rise[53] [54], and the world is looking a lot more Crowleyan than it did in 1909, when the Aeon of Horus was declared. The fiery, apocalyptic and gender-neutral future that was prophesied by mystics, artists, science-fiction writers and rock n’ rollers seems to have arrived. 

I have explored only some of the ways that this magickal current of transhuman, occult androgyny has been transmitted. However, as we have seen, a direct line of influence can be drawn from Crowley to Parsons to Cameron, and from Crowley to Bowie to Genesis P. Orridge and Storm Constantine. I have left out many steps in this lineage. For instance, I did not take time to discuss the Crowleyan influences on The Beatles or Jimmy Page, both of which probably did much to increase Bowie’s interest in Thelema. Neither did I explore the work of Kenneth Anger, because I consider that, despite his gestures towards androgyny, his true interest was in reifying specific visions of gay masculinity. Neither have secular gender activists like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson received their due here—this is not the place. This has been a chronical of the inner realms, and the media whereby these realms can be penetrated: spirituality, art, music, fiction.

I feel now that this messy, sincere and loving essay can only be ended with another quote from Storm Constantine. When asked if most of her readers were male or female, Storm gave this seemingly mystifying answer:

‘I don’t know if you’re familiar with Tarot symbolism? I’ve been a Tarot-reader for a number of years. And I see it as being like ‘The Tower’. You know what the Tower represents? – it’s the razing of the ground. It’s the bolt out of heaven that completely KER-RRRRR-RASHES – and unsettles everything… You HAVE to do that before the new shoots can come through. When people are taking steps towards emancipation or equality, or whatever, they need that sort of Tower-card to get things moving. If you look at the totality of society as a single organism – as I do—it shocks that organism into taking notice. It’s a real shock to the whole social organism.’[55]

The interviewer seems not to have understood her words. He asked a question from a binary perspective. Storm declined to answer within that framework, and instead asserted the need to smash it all.

In the sequence of the Tarot, the Devil, shown as the androgynous Baphomet, is the fifteenth card, signifying perhaps the genderqueer challenge to society. The Tower, card sixteen, represents the effects of that disruption. And what follows The Tower? The Star, card of healing, self-actualization, and highest aspiration. We are living in a Tower moment. We can only hope The Star will follow.

---

[1] Spencer Kansa, Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, 3rd ed. (publication place: Mandrake; 2020) location 2640 of 4011.

[2] Glynn Washington, “Genesis, Lady Jaye and the Pandrogyne,” NPR.org, accessed August 27, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2014/06/20/323955434/genesis-lady-jaye-and-the-pandrogyne.

[3] Richard Kaczynski, Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010), location 1342 of 7560, Kindle.

[4] Catherine Beyer, “Rebis: The Result of the Great Work in Alchemy,” learnreligions.com, accessed August 27, 2020, https://www.learnreligions.com/rebis-from-theoria-philosophiae-hermeticae-95751.

[5] Ruben Van Luijk, Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), 136-37.

[6] Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice (New York: Dover, 1976), 193.

[7] Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (Ordo Templi Orientis, 1971), 44.

[8] Kaczynski, location 463 of 7560.

[9] Aleister Crowley, White Stains (Enhanced Books, 2014), 43.

[10] Confessions, 555-563.

[11] Magick, xi-xxv.

[12] George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (New York, NY: Harcourt, 2006), 13-14, Kindle.

[13] Pendle, 46.

[14] Pendle, 110.

[15] Pendle, 108, 224.

[16] Kaczynski, location 5539 of 7560.

[17] Pendle, 15.

[18] Pendle, 264.

[19]Kaczynski, loc. 5532-7560.

[20] Pendle, 285.

[21] Kansa, location 556 of 4011.

[22] Kansa, location 711 of 4011.

[23] Jack Parsons, Freedom Is a Two-Edged Sword (Pasadena: 1946), 8, PDF.

[24] Parsons, 8.

[25] Parsons, 16-17. 

[26] Kansa, location 993 of 4011.

[27] Kansa, location 1527 of 4011.

[28] Kansa, location 1719 of 4011.

[29] Curtis Harrington, The Wormwood Star (1956).

[30] Kansa, location 1542 of 4011.

[31] Jack Parsons, “The Collected Writings of Jack Parsons: The Book of Babalon, the Book of Antichrist, and Other Writings,” Sacred-Texts.com, accessed August 27, 2020, https://www.sacred-texts.com/oto/lib49.htm.

[32] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (Project Gutenberg, 2016), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm#link2H_4_0004.

[33] David Bowie, “Oh! You Pretty Things,” Hunky Dory (RCA, 1971), mp3.

[34] Peter Bebergal, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (New York, NY: Penguin, 2014), 140-41.

[35] Bebergal, 161.

[36] Bebergal, 15.

[37] Hermione Hoby, “The Reinventions of Genesis Breyer P-orridge,” NewYorker.com, June 29, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-reinventions-of-genesis-breyer-p-orridge.

[38] Aleister Crowley, “The Book of the Law,” in Diary of a Drug Fiend: And Other Works by Aleister Crowley (London: Arcturus, 2018), 833.

[39] Plato, The Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill (London: Penguin, 1999), 21-26.

[40] John Cameron Mitchell, “The Origin of Love,” Hedwig and the Angry Inch: Original Cast Recording (Atlantic/WEA: 1999), mp3.

[41] Moses De Leon, “Bereshit A,” in Sepher Ha Zohar (The Kabala Center), https://www.zohar.com/zohar/Bereshit%20A/chapters/45.

[42] Tamara Palmer, “Genesis P-orridge: The Body Politic,” SuicideGirls.com, December 23, 2008, https://www.suicidegirls.com/girls/nicole_powers/blog/2680078/genesis-p-orridge-the-body-politic/.

[43] Glynn Washington, “Genesis, Lady Jaye and the Pandrogyne,” NPR.org, accessed August 27, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2014/06/20/323955434/genesis-lady-jaye-and-the-pandrogyne.

[44] Andrew Darlington, “Storm Constantine: Talking Tender Prey,” Eight Miles Higher, November 27, 2010, http://andrewdarlington.blogspot.com/2010/11/storm-constantine-interview.html.

[45] Storm Constantine, Email to author, August 20, 2020.

[46] Storm Constantine, Email to author, August 20, 2020.

[47] Storm Constantine, Email to author, August 20, 2020.

[48] Storm Constantine, video conference interview with Prometheus Silver, September 24, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBANqS29SEY.

[49] Zing Tsjeng, “Teens These Days Are Queer Af, New Study Says,” Vice, March 10, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kb4dvz/teens-these-days-are-queer-af-new-study-says.

[50] Kim Parker, Nikki Graf, and Ruth Igielnik, “Generation z Looks a Lot Like Millennials On Key Social and Political Issues,” PewSocialTrends.org, January 17, 2019, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/01/17/generation-z-looks-a-lot-like-millennials-on-key-social-and-political-issues/.

[51] Geoffrey Miller, “Polyamory Is Growing — We Need to Get Serious About It,” Real Clear Policy, November 4, 2019, https://www.realclearpolicy.com/2019/11/04/polyamory_is_growing_mdash_we_need_to_get_serious_about_it_43280.html.

[52] Kirsten Fleming, “Millennials Are Actually Having Better Sex Than You,” New York Post, June 11, 2019, https://nypost.com/2019/06/11/millennials-are-actually-having-better-sex-than-you/.

[53] Bianca Bosker, “Why Witchcraft Is On the Rise,” The Atlantic, March 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/witchcraft-juliet-diaz/605518/.

[54] Benjamin Fearnow, “Number of Witches Rises Dramatically Across u.s. As Millennials Reject Christianity,” Newsweek, November 18, 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/witchcraft-wiccans-mysticism-astrology-witches-millennials-pagans-religion-1221019.

[55] Andrew Darlington, “Storm Constantine: Talking Tender Prey,” Eight Miles Higher, November 27, 2010, http://andrewdarlington.blogspot.com/2010/11/storm-constantine-interview.html.