On Amazon’s award-winning series “Transparent,” Alexandra Billings played Davinia, best friend to Jeffrey Tambor’s transitioning Maura. As an openly transgender actress playing a transgender role on television, Billings was part of the infancy of Hollywood’s trans revolution. Hers wasn’t an easy path. Her frank memoir, “This Time for Me,” shines light both on a remarkable personal journey and a painful time in transgender history.(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
It shouldn’t be so hard to simply exist. But in suburban Chicago in the 1960s, a 6-year-old boy who found joy in wearing sparkly dresses was not accepted. “Every time I had on a new outfit,” she writes, “something somewhere would light up in me.” When Billings’s mother, the person she most loved in the world, told her that what she was wearing was not for boys, the foundational lesson she learned was that to exist, she needed to lie about the person she really was.
The following years were tumultuous, filled with self-hatred and suicidal ideations compounded by relentless bullying in plain sight of adults who never helped. Discovering theater in high school was her salvation. Onstage, singing and performing, was the place she felt happiest. Having no better language to express who she was, she came out to her mother as gay, although that label felt “incomplete, untrue.” When she was 17, while swallowing the contents of a bottle of Tylenol in a serious but unsuccessful attempt to end her pain, an episode of “The Phil Donahue Show” caught her attention. It featured three sparkly, beautiful “women [who] were not women, and yet they were,” and for the first time, she saw herself in someone else.
Recognition was progress, but navigating a life in the queer community of the 1980s was still fraught. Billings spent the next decade making a name for herself in Chicago as a drag performer called Shanté. It was a time when violent hate crimes against queer people were rampant, same-sex encounters were illegal, and men could be jailed for wearing “female attire without the presence of two articles of male clothing.” She spent four years as a sex worker to make a living (one of her clients was a United States senator, she writes) and started a long dance with drug addiction to escape her pain and rage.
The person from her early life with whom she stayed in regular contact was her best friend from high school, fellow thespian Chrisanne, who eventually became her wife. Billings found kinship with fellow performers, who sheltered, instructed and encouraged her, acting as her surrogate family. The devastation from the AIDS epidemic was immense. While her friends were dying, she recounts, she asked her mother whether she could go home if she got sick. “I don’t think so,” was her mother’s reply. They never spoke again.
It took rehab, then a slow process of understanding and accepting herself to realize that she wasn’t a gay man dressing in drag; she was a woman. She stopped performing as Shanté and began a new journey as Alexandra, learning how to become an actress in mainstream theater. Her journey took her from the 1990s world of Chicago theater — most reviews, she writes, “focused on my ability to portray a female rather than addressing my acting” — to Hollywood and Broadway, where she recently starred as Madame Morrible in “Wicked.”
When “Transparent” first appeared on television, the ground was beginning to shift in Hollywood’s representation of the LGBTQIA community. While the popular show was lauded with awards, Tambor faced allegations of workplace sexual misconduct. Billings weighs in here on Tambor’s behavior, detailing episodes of “harassment and rage-filled outbursts,” and she is also brutally honest about her own failings. After witnessing unwanted verbal and physical encounters between Tambor and others on the set, including herself, she needed to believe that everything was fine, so she “stood by and did absolutely nothing.”
Such blunt truthfulness is a hallmark of her writing, despite the first sentence in Chapter 1: “I lie.” Her sense of humor radiates from the pages. Though she has been mistreated by society over most of her lifetime, her memoir is a model of grace and compassion, showing the world what it means to be misunderstood, and how we can do better to welcome humans of every stripe.
Becky Meloan writes a monthly column about new and notable books.
This Time for Me
A Memoir
By Alexandra Billings
Topple Books & Little A. 446 pp. $24.95
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