Photo by Chico De Luigi

Antony Hegarty-- the 38-year-old, Britain-born, New York-based leader of Antony and the Johnsons-- reduces easily in print: "A white man who sounds like a black woman," Alexis Petridis wrote for The Guardian in January. "The ethereal torch singer," said The New York Times' Melena Ryzik this spring in the first sentence of the newspaper's second profile of Antony. Three years earlier, The Times' Ben Ratliff described Antony as "a teenager who can communicate only through music," beneath a tawdry headline that alliterated the singer as the "musical manchild." The Sun's Simon Cosyns wrapped all of Antony's defining characteristics-- large, queer, theatric, delicate and beautiful-- inside one platitudinous sentence: "Adopting a pose something like an effeminate Roman emperor, the transgender singer launches into his operatic, beatific falsetto."

But for today, Antony isn't posing. Instead, he's sitting comfortably in a big-armed wooden Adirondack chair in Podunk, a tiny tearoom in Manhattan's Lower East Side. The setting emphasizes Antony's physique, striking as billed: He stands just above six feet tall with wide shoulders, round features, and blue eyes. He wears white cotton pants and scuffed brown leather shoes, topped by a black T-shirt covered with Malcolm X's portrait. Asked about the shirt, he laughs, blushes, and pulls his sweater-- black, buttoning lengthwise, with large silken flowers embroidered around it in camouflaging black thread-- shut: "I'm not supposed to wear this in public."

Antony lives nearby, and he's comfortable here. He greets the owner like an old friend, asking how she's been before introducing his guest. When Elspeth's daughter walks the tea to the table, Antony smiles at her, too, asking about the teas and her life. Convivial and curious, Antony is given to small talk and shared laughter. He listens intently to answers and almost always presents follow-ups. "I want to be in dialogue," he says, the British roots of his voice always apparent when something excites, frightens, or engages him. "I don't want to build a wall around myself and have some fun, like the MGMT song, and try to make it a dream-life that's satisfying. I believe in a dream-life, but I want to be in dialogue. I have to represent."

Yes, Antony's talking about that MGMT song, "Time to Pretend", the kaleidoscopic, booming pop tune that he heard for the first time the day before. By now, he says, he's listened 10 times, studied the video, read the reviews, and scrutinized the lyrics. He's as disturbed by the song's idea-- narcotic and material escapism, where the world collapses as the narrators and their model wives steal away to Paris for coitus, cars, and cocaine-- as he is obsessed with its hook. "I'm the kind of person that wrote a thesis on the political implications of Pink Flamingos for college, like full of bullshit about what it really means," says Antony of the 1972 John Waters film about trying to be the "filthiest person alive." "But a song like that can take you all the way home. It's crazy and so sad, with all of these wasteland scenarios for this imaginary world. There's a powerlessness. 'Give up. Let's live in our imagination.'"

Like a funhouse mirror, one of Antony's own songs, "Another World", unintentionally reflects "Time to Pretend". The title track from a 2008 EP of the same name, "Another World" also sits as the sobering piano-and-voice centerpiece of his third and best album, The Crying Light. "I'll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms," MGMT sings cheerily and confidently, like pioneers of decadence retiring from old comforts and treasures. "I'll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog, and my home."

But Antony strips away the selfishness. He'll miss only those things he cannot possess-- the sea, the snow, the bees, "the things that grow"-- and the chance for the dream-life he mentions. "Another World", says Antony, offers the dirge for a planet he fears is dying but hopes can be saved. "Maybe this is an unprecedented moment in our development, as human beings. We're facing a really wild scenario," he'd said in a Stockholm hotel room a month earlier. "When I think about the environment and think about the future, I shut down emotionally and go into shock and denial. When someone dies, for instance, you have to grieve and move through the feelings once you're in a safe place. It's part of the healing process."

Such ideas unite much of Antony's work over the last decade: Vanishing worlds, blurred lines, and how those concepts work together. Antony, after all, moved to Manhattan in the early 1990s as AIDS plagued the downtown gay community at which he'd marveled from afar in California. In New York, he immediately stepped into that scene, started his own 3 a.m. performance troupe and worked to preserve its history and spirit. And now, after magazine covers, major music awards, and late-night television appearances, he's that scene's popular manifestation.

Built with natural images and a romantic sense of survival, The Crying Light is his attempt to examine the troubles inside himself as they relate to the woebegone world around him. Helping himself, he thinks, might just help the rest of us. But Antony doesn't kid himself: His songs or his visual art, which also often focuses on the environment, can't save the world. But they can help him join the conversation and, in some respects, start it.

"As I was raised Catholic, I was raised with a very rigid sense of what had spiritual content, of what was valuable. Human beings had soul. The Earth didn't. This place was a holding cell for people to figure out their spirit value," says Antony. "There was this whole idea that we had separated from nature. I think that's all fallen down for me. As I've gotten older, I've returned more and more to my environment."

And that's what Antony's albums have always reflected: attempts to reconcile himself with the world around him. On his self-titled 2000 debut, for instance, Antony exposed his internal emotional trauma-- "I always wanted love to be filled with pain"-- alongside his indignation with a world that marginalized any of its people: "For we all know the baby has expired/ Long ago she was pulled from the mire/ And no precious liar or well-wisher/ Can return the love that was stolen," he sings on "River of Sorrow", a song about the unsolved 1992 death of New York drag queen Marsha P. Johnson. He named Antony and the Johnsons in memoriam to her and the New York scene from which she'd sprung.

Similarly, I Am a Bird Now, the 2005 album that broke Antony to a larger audience, explores his struggles with gender identity and his quest for feminine freedom and strength within a man's body: "Forgive me, Let live me/ Set my spirit free/ Weakness sown, Overgrown/ Man is the baby," he cries out on the cascading "Man Is the Baby", a track overshadowed by its more famous surroundings-- the Boy George duet, "You are My Sister", "Fistful of Love", "Hope There's Someone", and Antony's anthem, "For Today I Am a Boy".

But The Crying Light finds Antony stepping beyond those solipsistic conflicts to his-- and, he hopes, our-- biggest concern: the world he sees "rapidly disintegrating" around him. It's his most fully rewarding and subtly shaded album to date because it's as much about mourning as it is about renewal, as much about protesting as it is about acceptance. "It's about the garden inside and its relationship to the world outside. For me, that's been very powerful," says Antony, speaking softly, secreting his thoughts away from the chattering families at nearby tables, as if he realizes how outlandish such metaphors might seem. "I can get really held hostage by my fear and trepidation for the future-- and the present at this point. Yet, I still have to create. Nothing's going to come unless I keep nurturing the inner world and watering all the plants in my heart.

"I know that sounds ridiculous, but I have to keep that garden alive. I see myself as a microcosm-- that's the word-- as one example of humanity and of the brokenness of humanity. I'm interested in exploring that on a very personal level in that it might be useful for my own attempt to evolve."

As an actor, singer, and painter for more than two decades, Antony's lived the battles, obsessions, and joys of his life on tape, stage and canvas. The results-- considered, considerate, wounded, powerful-- offer a fairly exacting a map of the person who made it. Like Antony, his music has long fit those easy descriptors-- large and grandiose, queer, theatric, delicate, and beautiful. Considered with the slow, decades-long ferment that led to The Crying Light, though, Antony's oeuvre blurs far too many lines to reduce so easily.