In his own quietly reverent way, Antony Hegarty is a subcultural superhero. At another time, he could’ve been cast as some sort of sideshow freak, a towering soft-spoken fellow with a penchant for fuzzy sweaters and gender fluidity, a gentle giant who sings with a quivering, androgynous bray. But somehow, the music he makes with his Antony and the Johnsons ensemble — heart-on-sleeve sentimentality delivered in a wash of unapologetically ornate orchestral pop — has been widely embraced.

Their last album, 2005’s I Am A Bird Now, won Britain’s illustrious Mercury Prize; since then, Hegarty has collaborated with everyone from Bjork to wunderkind composer Nico Muhly. His recent follow-up, The Crying Light, finds the singer exploring his chief fascinations (death, disease, darkness, the loneliness of the perpetual outsider) using themes of nature and environmental chaos, within musical arrangements that can be painfully intimate. Hegarty took a brief time out in between epic rehearsals for his international tour to open up to EYE WEEKLY about transgenderism, freak-folk freedom and why being queer is about so much more than pink dollars and cents.

Your Mercury win exposed you to a much wider audience, including people whose awareness of trans issues might’ve been limited to campy drag queens before hearing a song like, say, "For Today I Am A Boy." Do you feel like your music has become a tool to educate listeners?
I think of them as two different issues. One of my values as an artist is that the work can be open or elliptical enough that it can hold a lot of people’s dreams in it. Not because I want to be elusive, or because I don’t want to talk about those issues, but I hope that people get more than just a perception of my own experience out of a song. But I can see that I’ve been given a platform from which to present my work and be an educator, which is so rare. I feel like it’s not just about me, but about a particular moment in culture, and a window opening. And if it does open, then it’s my job to show up.

OK, so after you show up, what’s your chief priority as an educator?
On this press trip it’s been about really clarifying with people what transgender means, not just on a personal level but in terms of clarifying… to make the distinction between gender variance and sexual orientation. I want to help people grasp our burgeoning visibility and to direct them to think in subtler ways. Something I’m so proud of is to be able to focus that dialogue on transgender kids. I mean, they’re on Oprah now! Transgender kids have a particular value and can be such an asset to a family.

Why kids?
When I was a child, a teenager, the issue of these alternative identities was always about adult deviations. Yet that doesn’t explain all the gender variance that exists in every classroom in America — the girls who are playing like boys and the boys who are playing like girls. And even within the gay community, people have shortchanged [trans people] by insisting that the issue revolves around sexual orientation. Ninety per cent of the time, sexual orientation is often an aftereffect of gender variation. Is wanting to bump uglies with a member of the same sex really the primary thing that differentiates us from the hetero-normative community? Most gay boys grow up wanting to be Wonder Woman. Gay people often start identifying themselves through gender confusion; we’re really in the infancy of understanding and identifying what makes a gay person a gay person.

You’ve talked about how transgendered kids can have huge effects on broader culture. Can you unpack that a bit?
I think we have to ask why nature is pouring out all these beings who don’t conform to binary genders. And I think transgender kids can see through patriarchal hierarchies. They suffer on both ends, and they see the brokenness of it. They can be the foot soldiers of a feminist revolution and can bring about a spiritual shift in our collective consciousness. In general, gay and transgender people have so much to offer, but we’re just sold the next pink dollar by the same corporations who are manufacturing medications and manufacturing the media.

Do you feel like gay culture has become something very different than it was when you were first coming out? When you initially moved to Manhattan from California, you were really immersed in the queer arts scene of the early '90s, and you did a lot of drag-based performance art…
Oh! [laughs] There’s a huge separation generationally, in terms of what it means to come out now. The kids who are between 20 and 30 now do things so differently from the way gay kids did it before. Gay males in particular operate in two different ways… There was a period where everyone was almost segregated. The '90s was when the lesbians all stepped forward, even in the clubs. There was this huge changing of the guard, with the gays trying to catch up. Originally, it was the faggots and the queens, and when that empire crumbled, the lesbians were at the forefront of the fashion and the clubs. Now it seems like [queer culture] is integrated in a way it’s never been before, with the new young gays and new young women and trans kids too all huddled together.

It also seems like queer underground culture has been gradually woven into other forms of mainstream-alt culture, especially in the last few years. What is it about this moment in time that’s led to your success outside of subcultural communities?
 My generation, we were like deer in the headlights. We were lost at sea, broken, animals in traps, and we couldn’t imagine the steps it would take to make change happen. The ‘90s were a dead zone. It was the generation underneath me, the Obama generation, that hit the ground running. Those kids, the kids who were 20-30 in the last eight years, they were so much freer than my generation. They didn’t have to deal with AIDS in the same way; they accepted that cell phones and the internet were tools to be taken advantage of. Those kids, people like Devendra [Banhart], Joanna Newsom, Bianca and Sierra [the Casady sisters, of CocoRosie], ushered in this revolution. They knew how to create a space for otherness in an aggressively homogenized landscape and a garden within themselves. They knew how to block out the things that weren’t working and how to nurture those gardens and souls so they could survive.