There doesn’t seem to be a ton to see in Tacoma, aside from a museum of contemporary glass art, a couple of gay bars, and a spattering of strip malls. On a drive through Point Defiance, a park along the coast from which you can see barges sailing by and Mount Rainier looming hard and white like a ’50s movie backdrop, Alan points out the so-called Tacoma Aroma, a sulfurous stench that lingers in the city, attributed to a variety of sources, including a nearby paper mill, a rendering plant, and an oil refinery. “The smell can be strangely comforting,” says Alan.

Mike has been trying to take care of himself by hunting down healthy Ayurvedic vitamins and tinctures, and one evening, we head to a brightly lit organic market to pick up herbs like boswellia and ashwagandha. He glides through the aisles on the back of a cart, unable to explain exactly what these medicines do for his wellbeing; he just seems to like saying the names out loud. He worries, over the course of our time together, about a breakout of acne, so the next day, after a lunch of burgers and chicken teriyaki sandwiches at Red Robin, we go to a mall Sephora to find tinted moisturizer. A woman who works there says the right shade for him is “Porcelain,” then sells him on a lip balm, too.

Mostly though, Mike seems to prefer hanging around his home. He ambles around in a comfy oversized turtleneck, no manicure or visible makeup, and holds court on the couch under as many blankets as he can find. He has a stock of Diet Coke in the fridge (he says he drinks six cans a day, but I swear I see him drink more) and likes to watch reality TV competitions, like Survivor and The Great British Bake Off. He quit smoking cigarettes two years ago, but keeps a vape close by. He updates his famously hilarious Twitter account; he suspects that some of its more than 200,000 followers think he’s an internet comedian and don’t know that he’s a musician. He says humor comes from the same place as sadness for him — just two different ways of looking at the truth. “If I curated a festival it would be an 8 hour long buffet and then Bonnie Raitt rides in on a motorcycle with dessert in the sidecar,” goes one tweet.

The couple has settled into a nice rhythm. In the morning, Alan will wake up for his job teaching piano and give Mike a massage to ease pain in his joints caused by Crohn’s Disease, a chronic disorder that Mike has suffered from since he was a kid. “It’s not a cute disease. I’m essentially just bleeding. I have lots of open wounds in my intestines. It’s just your body betraying you,” he says. “I really do not like it.” They have worked on making life around the house as comfortable as possible, and Mike says his most profound obsession is coziness; the couple’s biggest splurge has been a Tempurpedic mattress, which they are paying off in installments. Mike works on music while Alan is at work, and then often cooks up a hearty “Honey, I’m home!” meal for dinner. On one night of my visit, he serves a perfectly tangy orange fish curry. Afterwards, Alan does the dishes.

Mike and Alan both tell me repeatedly that they take care of each other in equal measure, but Alan does seem to offer up a certain dependability. Mike can’t drive, and so Alan zips them around. His more formal music training has been integral to Perfume Genius’s career, too. “I’m honest,” Alan says. “I will tell him, ‘I think this sucks.’” When I ask Alan if it’s tough to always be a supporting player, he is genuinely starry-eyed about just being on the team. “I’m grateful to be a part of it,” he says. He also seems like Mike’s proudest fan. “He wants to be the musician he would’ve [needed] as a teenager,” he says. “And I think he’s doing that. He’s singing about things that no other gay male singer is singing about. About his pain, about his experiences.”

