The Future is Dorian Electra

“Basically, I’m Einstein,” Dorian Electra quips. “Like, hello, I’m a genius.”

The pop artist, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, is recounting the time they traced the mathematical steps in Albert Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence formula, E=mc , in front of fellow students at a Chicago liberal arts college. How fulfilling it was at the time to understand, at least tangentially, the thought processes of the famed physicist. The particulars of the calculations are now a bit foggy. “I swear to God, I don’t have a good memory for details like that,” Electra says. “But I don’t think it was a waste of time. It gives me a boost. My ego is like, Yeah, one time I understood that.”

Electra often performs such mental gymnastics, attempting to dissect complexities in music, gender expression and personal history. The 27-year-old can analyze memes and philosophical theories, or gender stereotypes and choreography, while playing their own devil’s advocate. They possess a mental stamina that never seems to wane. Frankly, being Dorian Electra is exhausting.

To be in their presence is anything but. Striking in an aquamarine blouse with a freshly dyed mullet to match, the artist brings a palpable vibrance to any room, both in this midtown Manhattan restaurant and, the following week, in the small East Williamsburg, Brooklyn venue where they’ll perform for two sold-out nights. In rapid-fire staccato sentences, Electra speaks on the intersection of entertainment and education, the entrepreneurial nature of working at a strip club and how they avoid the guilt that can accompany the choice to embody traditional elements of both masculinity and femininity. That last pairing is what the gender-fluid artist (their gender identity continually changes: “I’m masculine and feminine, I’m both, I’m neither, I don’t give a fuck”) celebrates on Flamboyant, their debut album.

Over a tight 31 minutes, Flamboyant wastes no time setting scenes. The listener is catapulted into Electra’s futuristic pop universe, where a vocalist can employ both falsetto and gritty chest belts, where hip-hop lives alongside baroque and heavy metal—often in the same song—and where a performer can wear suits and glitter, a penciled-on mustache and leather shorts. Without a road map, Electra acted on instinct and created music where there was none before. Now living in Los Angeles, they released Flamboyant independently this past summer. They also booked their own headlining tour last fall, had a run of dates opening for Charli XCX and handle most of their own press. Dorian Electra has always done things their own way.

“Dorian is so true to their self-expression, and that’s really rare in pop,” says queer artist and activist Mykki Blanco, who is featured alongside Electra on the Charli XCX track “Femmebot.” “Their creative control is admirable, and they’re really handling themselves well as far as controlling their narrative and creating original work for all of us to discover their world.”

Electra—born Dorian Electra Fridkin Gomberg—was raised in a liberal bubble in Houston by parents Paul, who works in real estate and performs in a cover band, and Paula, a musician, entrepreneur and jewelry maker. The couple bestowed a gender-neutral name on their only child, who wore it with pride. Electra didn’t play with dolls but wasn’t into sports either. Instead, they experimented with performance, dressing up in drag and idolizing Austin Powers. “Part of the humor comes from the fact that he thinks he’s really sexy, but he’s gross,” Electra says. “That masculine ideal definitely shaped my personal sexual orientation or idea of gender. It’s way more on the Austin Powers side of the spectrum in terms of outlandish, ridiculous, kind of borderline grotesque.”

After Paul and Paula divorced when Electra was five, Paula dated women. Paul remarried, and Electra went to live with him and his new wife. Although Electra’s parents were open-minded—“We always had gay family friends, and someone in our family is trans; these things were just a normal part of our family life”—their conservative stepmother disapproved. She criticized Electra’s decision to eschew church, conduct a research project on HIV/AIDS and more.

In fourth grade, Electra tried theater. Hardly athletic, not quite skilled at drawing and stifled academically by attention deficit disorder, Electra found in musical theater a space in which they were praised for their talent. But telling other people’s stories has its limits: The look, feel, tone and narrative arc are already determined. At 14, Electra discovered they could craft their own stories. Along with a friend, they created a fan video for the English band the Horrors, filmed on the friend’s MacBook webcam. Electra then began to use digital storytelling for school, writing songs and making videos for book reports and, eventually, research projects at Shimer College in Chicago. Without realizing it, they were carving a niche as an academic performance artist.

“It started as the perfect synthesis of all my interests. I love all this academic stuff,” Electra says. “It’s also a good mental exercise for me to break down these complex things in a way that can be accessible to many people in more casual, layperson terms.”

It was Electra’s video projects that caught the attention of the creative team at Refinery29. The women’s website commissioned the artist to make a sex-education video in 2015, granting them the freedom to create however they pleased. The result was a bubble-gum song and a video that sees Electra dressed in a clitoris costume, accompanied by backup dancers in vulva attire. The video was a hit—it won a Webby Award in 2017—so Refinery29 sent them off to make more. Electra returned with campy visual essays on the history of vibrators, drag, high heels and the marginalization of women, people of color and the trans and immigrant communities. In an age when memes proliferate at lightning speed on TikTok and editorial spaces have largely pivoted to video, Electra’s mastery of the medium proved to be vital to their career. It still is: The videos for “Flamboyant,” “Daddy Like,” “Man to Man” and “Career Boy” use storytelling to upend gender stereotypes.

While the video projects allowed Electra to explore the queer and feminist movements, they also led the artist to explore their own gender identity. During the 2016 production of a video on the history of drag, Electra befriended queer and trans people in Chicago, some of whom used they/them pronouns. Electra never identified with the term nonbinary, but gender fluid, with the way it paints gender as constantly morphing, felt right: “When I finally switched to they/them, it was really hard for me to ask people who had known me from before to use them,” Electra says. “And then everyone questions your authenticity, like ‘You’re just doing this for marketing purposes. You just feel like you want to be special.’ It happens to trans people too. They’re questioned: ‘Is this a passing phase?’ But for me, everything is a passing phase. Everything is always evolving and changing.”

Remaining in Chicago after college, Electra discovered how to use their body—for performance, for pleasure—as a server and topless dancer at a strip club. After answering a Craigslist ad for what they assumed was a catering gig, they were ushered onto a club floor wearing two layers of thongs, a skimpy fishnet dress and high heels, and carrying a handful of alcohol-filled test tubes. The tips from $5 boob shots weren’t enough to pay the bills, so they opted for higher-paying private topless dances. One shift paid out more than Electra had ever earned before. “I never felt that confident in my body, because I was not this feminine-ideal type,” Electra says. “But these people are literally paying money to see me and my body and feel me grinding on them.”

It could have been an opportunity to rebel against traditional femininity, to shelve the attributes that appealed to the club’s clientele, but Electra took to the role. Dancing for strangers felt sexy; it was a turn-on.

“I’ve actually embraced those gendered ideas,” they say. “I spent so many years in college and after trying to socialize myself into those things that now I’ve accepted them, and I’m learning to be okay with enjoying them too. There’s nothing wrong with me wanting to feel really feminine or submissive, or the opposite—because I also felt a lot of guilt about that once I started getting into feminism and then discovered my own gender identity. I’m like, Wait, is this at odds with my gender identity?”

Electra took their own feminine parts, as well as the camp and garishness of male idols David Bowie and Austin Powers, to create a new kind of pop star—one who cheekily insists on being called “Mister” and subverts the accepted meaning of flamboyance into an on-the-nose personal treatise. “It’s this idea of whimsical self-awareness,” they say. While many artists (Lady Gaga, Björk) use grandeur as a means of expression, Electra uses humor and rebellion as a guide to usher in what Blanco describes as “a new generation of queer talent who will be judged not on the politics of their identity but hopefully on the quality and awesomeness of their music and creative merits.”

This is the Dorian Electra who lives on Flamboyant, unbounded by genre or gender. In the early months of 2019, the artist and six producers crafted the majority of the album. Some of that time was spent in a Las Vegas Airbnb where Electra would bounce from room to room, going to each collaborator whenever the session’s energy dulled. Full of outrageously glossy club music that uses gender as performance, Flamboyant challenges the confines of conventional pop. On stage the songs come to life through choreography, Electra’s chameleonic vocal stylings and smoldering glances to the audience, and two bearded backup dancers, all three performers dressed in intergalactic-gladiator bondage gear.

Whether blending harpsichord and dubstep beats—and somehow managing to make the result sound cohesive—or taping their breasts in photo shoots, Electra wants to challenge audiences. “I know my voice is really annoying and off-putting,” they say. “But I’d rather risk alienating people because of that than not excite them because my voice was forgettable.”

You would be remiss to forget Electra. In fact, it might be impossible. You can hear their mind racing in real time, witness them stumbling onto a theoretical discovery they hadn’t before considered. You can see their past and future painted in the details of their words.

Electra has an afternoon of unscheduled nothingness following our interview, though I suspect they don’t need a plan to know where they’re going, in the moment or in general. “The thesis of what I believe is everything’s way more complex than people want to make it,” they say. “Things change and evolve, and that’s why fluidity in all areas seems to make the most sense to me as my life philosophy.”

There’s nothing concrete in the world of Dorian Electra. There never was, and if we’re lucky, there never will be.