Alexandra Billings: Redefining What Is Possible for Trans People in Hollywood

Alexandra Billings is redefining what is possible for trans people in Hollywood.

Before making a name for herself in the Chicago theatre scene and landing her breakout role in the TV show, Transparent, Alexandra was a showgirl who struggled with addiction. “I ate, I breathed oxygen, I had sex, and I did drugs, all with great, reckless abandon,” she says. The transgender actress is also living with HIV and experienced homelessness for a time.

Historically, society has not embraced someone with Alexandra’s history, but she’s establishing a new precedent, proof that a career in Hollywood and on Broadway is possible.

Having just completed a run as Madame Morrible in Wicked, Billings can currently be seen in The Conners on ABC and has released a memoir, This Time For Me.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

JM: You started performing in the early ’80s in Chicago, and that’s when you found this community of trans women and showgirls. Back then, was femininity something you were only performing on stage, or were you also going home and going about your daily life?

AB: Well, when I was 15 or 16, I had been dressing in my mother’s clothes for years, ever since I can remember, literally ever since I can remember. And everything was sort of going great for the longest time, until I started to go to school, and people started to tell me how wrong that was. I actually didn’t know I was doing anything wrong until someone told me. And then I went, “Oh, I guess I should stop doing that.” And then came the shame and the public humiliation and all of that trauma. So by the time I was a teenager, I had been doing this secretly for a long time, because I knew it was a terrible thing to do. I didn’t know why, but I knew it was terrible.

So I decided that I should probably leave the planet, it’s probably a good idea, because I was causing so much harm—everyone was so upset, my mother was upset, and my father was upset, and my friends were leaving me, and the bullies were just attacking me daily. It was just terrible. So I thought, “It’s probably best if I’m not here.” So I cooked up a plan to take a whole bunch of pills from my mother’s medicine cabinet and go in my bedroom, swallow all the pills, and die. When you’re a teenager, everything is Valley of the Dolls, so I just thought I would die. I would just expire, which is not true. However, I got the pills, and it was 3:00. There’s a reason I know this is true still. It was 3:00 on Friday, my parents were at work, and I went into my bedroom and I closed the door. And I turn on the TV, because I’m a TV baby, and there’s the Phil Donahue Show. He was Oprah Winfrey before Oprah Winfrey was Oprah Winfrey. And they had these three hookers on stage, and they were talking to these female prostitutes, but these women looked gorgeous. They were so beautiful, I couldn’t believe how beautiful they were, they were so shiny and sparkly, and their earrings were fabulous, and they just looked amazing.

Phil and their audience started to ask them questions, and part of me was like, “Well, I don’t think they’re hookers, I actually think they’re strippers, maybe they’re strippers, maybe they’re just really fabulous, funny, smart stripper ladies.” And I’m sitting there—this is absolutely true—sitting there on the edge of my bed, holding these pills, watching this TV show…so weird, my life is. And then they ask more questions, and one woman in the back, I’ll never forget this, and mind you, this was 1978 or ’79, some woman in the back stands up and goes, “What bathroom do you use?” And I thought, “Strippers have their own bathroom? I did not know that, I was not aware of that.” And something hit me, and I don’t know what it was, but I stood there looking at these three women, and I said out loud, “Oh, there I am, there I am.”

And these three women were trans women, they worked at the Baton. And strangely, years later, those three women became part of my chosen family. I worked with all three of them. One of them was Chili Pepper, who’s very, very famous in the Chicago drag scene, still to this day, sort of a legend, really. And one of the women in the audience asked Chili, “What are you, a man or a woman?” And Chili said, “Mary, I’m a showgirl.” And I went, “Oh, that’s it, that’s what I wanna be when I grow up.”

And I did.

JM: These showgirls that we’re talking about, you describe them in the book as your first great teachers. Were they teaching you things about gender or about life in general?

AB: Yes and yes. If you talk to trans women who have transitioned later in their life, the one thing they miss is having other trans women around go, “Ooh, don’t do that,” or, “Here’s how you get, listen, we’re gonna go to the 7-Eleven all together in a big trans group, so nobody gets hit.” So you miss all that, and I found them in my 20s. I grew up, I really was raised by drag queens and trans women, that’s who raised me. My parents gave me a couple of things, but I got all of my survival skills from my trans family, all of them. To this day, I still use them.

JM: What were some of those skills?

AB: I know exactly where my line is, meaning I know exactly how much you can say to me, how you can treat me, and how you will speak to me before I will stop you, and I will stop you. And I don’t have to put my hands on you, I know how to stop you. I was also taught by these women mindfulness, meaning I know how to assimilate in any situation, really, there really isn’t a situation where I can’t, even if it means shut up and listen, where I can’t go, “Oh, I can survive this.” I may not like it, but I know I can survive it.

JM: You write that being trans in the ’80s, you had two choices for your life. You could lip-sync and perform in a club, or you could fuck. And you say you did both really well. With sex work you write, “Before it fell apart and became an awful, degrading, and insidious nightmare, it was actually kind of funny.” What was funny about sex work?

AB: Well, first of all, I didn’t have a lot of sex.

And that’s true of most sex workers, strangely. They think that when you see us on L.A. Law, or whatever all those shows that have hookers on them, whatever those crime shows are, it’s not like that. It’s kind of like that, but it’s not like that at all. I used to have a guy that used to come to my house and clean my bathroom on his hands and knees, dressed as a French maid holding a toothbrush, and the only thing I had to do was come in occasionally and berate him with foul language. He paid me $2,000 to clean my bathroom. So I used to think to myself, “This can’t be that easy, it can’t possibly.”

JM: Wait, so a man cleaning your bathroom, we’re classifying that under the sex work umbrella because, to him, was that sexually satisfying?

AB: Yes, apparently. And the thing about being a sex worker, it was fabulous until it wasn’t anymore. I think these men, because we have all agreed as a country that white men are supposed to save the world, they have all the answers, they run the country, they’re still the president. We still don’t have a female president, it’s just not, that’s crazy, we can’t do that yet, we’re not ready. So because that’s true, they look for any outlet where they can just be either soft or frail or weak, or not have to make any decisions or be told what to do. And so when you pay somebody for their time, you can do anything you want. And I think, a lot of them, that’s what they did.

JM: I think there’s a way in which we talk about sex work today, there’s this implication that it’s only acceptable for survival only. I think it’s necessary to say that you can choose sex work not for survival, and that’s also okay. And it seemed like you were in more of that category.

AB: Absolutely, I was. I always had another job, but I did it because I really liked it. I really liked it. Also, as I got to make more money, I had clients that took me to the most fabulous places. We went to the Playboy Club, we went to The Drake, we went to really fabulous places. They bought me incredible meals, they were really good conversationalists. I had politicians for clients, I had writers, I had all different kinds of people, and so their friends were eclectic as well. So a lot of these dinner parties that I would go to, there were some pretty fancy people there, and so it was fun sometimes.

JM: During this time you were going by the name Shanté. When did that name stop feeling like a fit?

AB: When I got cast in Vampire Lesbians, as soon as I got cast in Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, I knew that I didn’t want to have that name, it sounded like a stripper, and that’s not what I wanted to do. I considered myself a very serious artist, and I said, “That’s not gonna, I don’t wanna see that on The Glass Menagerie starring Shanté.” Like, what, are you out of your tree?

JM: This was Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, by Charles Busch, that was the first professional theater gig that you did. And from there, you went on to work all over Chicago, including at the Steppenwolf. That’s one of the most respected theaters in the country. Can you talk about how your gender was treated? Because it seems like you being trans ended up being the focus of every show you were in.

AB: Well, yes, it certainly was. This was a long time ago, this was 30-years ago, so it was a long time ago. And the fact that I was on the Steppenwolf stage, I was the first trans person ever on that stage, so the fact that that was happening was not lost on me, it’s never lost on me. So I knew that I only had so much power. The first show I did was called Time to Burn. It was by Charles Mee, it was a great show, it was about a group of homeless people living underneath a city, and one of them was a transvestite. So I auditioned for it, and at the audition, with Tina Landau directing, I said to myself, because I wasn’t a transvestite, but I said, “Okay, don’t say anything because you may not get it, and then they’ll hire some man who will dress up as…” But I said, “Go after the role, do your work and go after the role.” So I did, and I got it. And when I got it, now, that wouldn’t happen now, even before I get something like that I would say either yes or no. But back then I didn’t have a choice because we weren’t seen anywhere, we weren’t represented anywhere. So I just wanted to get the gig.

So I got the gig, and then I turned to Chuck Mee, and I said, “We have to change this.” And he went, “What?” I said, “We have to change this. You have a shower scene where I get naked.” I literally took a shower on stage every night, by the way, which I was fine to do, but I said, “You have a transgender body,” at the time we were called transsexuals, “but you have a trans body on stage that you are calling a transvestite, and that’s, first of all, incorrect, and second of all, I can’t stand behind that politically, we’re in enough trouble, and there’s nothing wrong with being a transvestite, that’s just not what I am, and I want to send a correct message.” And immediately, without hesitation, he went, “Oh, great,” and fixed the script, changed words, changed dialogue, rewrote stuff. So that’s when I said to myself, “Okay, Alex, before you can change the game, you have to play it.”

JM: Was that a common response for you, or did that prove to be an outlier experience?

AB: It really was common. There were a few instances where that was not common, but strangely, once I got in the room, I felt like as long as I do things from this place I’m at right now, and I don’t come in like, “You know what, you’re a big jerk, and you’re stupid,” as long as I don’t start there, that never gets anything accomplished, I don’t think, doesn’t work with me. I feel like if you have something to say, if you say it from a place of kindness or education, I absolutely want to hear what you have to say, and most people were receptive, and still are.

JM: You also write that during this time all of the reviews of your shows and your work, it all focused on your transness.

AB: Yeah. They didn’t care if I was good or bad, that didn’t matter to them. But one of the reviews I got, I played Madame Rose in Gypsy 100 years ago, I was way too young, but 100 years ago I played Rose, I’d like to do it again now that I’m older. But the review said, I’m paraphrasing, “One of the main problems is Alexandra Billings’ manly gait.” So they commented on this idea they had, I mean, they never would have said that if I was a cis actress, no matter how I walked, they never would have said, it wouldn’t have come up, it wouldn’t have been an issue. But because they knew I was trans, I had a reputation in Chicago, I was out, I was taking up an enormous amount of space, they got triggered.

So even when they were commenting on my acting, like, “Here’s the problem with her acting,” it was about my gender expression. In Chicago there wasn’t another, that I knew of anyway, out trans actress. I didn’t know not one. It’s not like I could even call, it’s not like I knew Candis [Cayne] at the time and I could call her, like nobody. And Trace Lysette and I talk about this all the time, because she was actually starting around the same time I was, and I think Laverne [Cox] was too, actually. But we all, around the same time, started and all three of us felt exactly the same because we didn’t know each other, so we all felt completely isolated and completely alone. So I didn’t have any comparison, I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

JM: Doing these shows in Chicago, had you gotten sober by that point?

AB: Yes, I was.

JM: You write a lot about your drinking and you do more drugs than I knew existed, frankly. Can I say that? Is that offensive?

AB: No, are you kidding? It takes a lot to offend me.

JM: At what point did your drinking and drugs become more than just recreation?

AB: My drinking and drug use was never recreation, that was never true. I didn’t go to parties and do a line of cocaine, that didn’t happen to me, I wasn’t one of those drug addicts. My addiction was a necessity, it was part of me. I ate, I breathed oxygen, I had sex, and I did drugs, all with great reckless abandon.

There was nothing casual, I wasn’t one of those partygoers, I didn’t do that. I went home, I had a group of friends, and we did drugs for like days, and then I would work and do my thing, and then we’d do that again. It was very serious, my drug taking.

JM: I think you wrote that by 14 or 15, your drinking would qualify you for the Olympic Games.

AB: Oh God, I loved it, are you kidding? I miss it, I really do. I don’t miss it to the point of distraction, it doesn’t hold me prisoner anymore, but I do miss it. I was driving home tonight thinking about it, today, from class, just thinking about it. It’s not like, “Oh my God, I wish I could stick a needle in my arm.” I think if you handed me a needle I’d probably go, “Oh my God,” I’d probably freak out. Or if there was cocaine in front of me, I literally wouldn’t know what to do, I would just go, “That’s hilarious, are you out of your tree?” But I do think about it, yeah, I absolutely do.

JM: I know that sobriety is not easy, but does it now feel easier?

AB: It feels…well, remember, I got sober, and then I relapsed for almost a decade on pills, which I had never taken before. I’d done all these drugs, but I’d never taken pills, and I wrenched my back in Chicago, because everything’s made of ice in Chicago, everything, all the time, constantly. And I slipped and wrenched my back. I was in terrible pain, and I went to the doctor, and I said, “I’m in terrible pain.” And he said, “Here,” back in the day when you could write a prescription for 90 Vicodin or something, he’d say, “Here, take these and you’ll feel fine.” And I was like, “Well, okay, I really don’t want to swallow pills, but okay.” So I went home, and I took one. It said take one or two every blah blah hours for pain. I took one, and in about 10 minutes I was like, “I feel great.” And then I looked at the bottle, and I went, “Well, it does say take one or two, so I’ll just take another one.” And by the time I was done, I was up to between 10 to 14 pills a day, and I had two doctors going at the same time simultaneously. And I had a map, this is not a joke, a map of every 24-hour Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid in the Chicago area. So I didn’t mess around is what I’m telling you.

And so that happened. Then I got sober the second time, and this second time is very different than the first time. The first time I was like, “I’m sober, this is so amazing, and the sky is so beautiful.” That was the first time. This time I’m like, “I feel everything.” I am enraged, I am fearful, I am curious, I have no idea what I’m doing. I feel everything intensely all the time.

JM: You performed for so long while using. Did performing feel different than sober?

AB: Yeah, well, yes, yes, yes, it felt different, it felt very different, it’s much more scary. Elaine Stritch has a great joke in her show where she finally gets sober. She’s backstage getting ready to go on for some play, and one of her friends, Ben Gazzara, good old Ben Gazzara, turns to her, they were in the same play, as she’s getting ready to go on stage, and he says, “You wanna belt before you go on?” She goes, “No, no, Ben, I gave it up, I’m sober.” And he goes, “My God, are you crazy? You mean you’re going out there alone?” And that’s what it feels like. It feels like you’re on your own, kid.

JM: You lived really hard, with all the drugs we’re talking about. You lived on the street for a year. You’ve had some really scary complications from AIDS. Has all of that affected your singing voice at all?

AB: You know, probably, but I have such a lack of training as far as being a singer is concerned. Most all of my training is as an actor, I have never had a singing lesson, I don’t really know what I’m doing. I just really love to sing. It also gets stuff out of me, because when I sing, I just go, and I don’t think about it. So I really don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t warm up, I don’t know how to.

JM: Because seeing you on stage, I would think, “Oh my God, that is a woman with masterful control of her instrument.”

AB: Bless your heart. I don’t have a clue as to what the hell I’m doing, not a clue, no, not a clue, so I don’t know, I have no idea. I’m doing a gig at Ravinia, which is a big thing in Chicago, with Brian Stokes Mitchell, we’re doing a concert, a Sondheim concert, at Ravinia. And I haven’t sung, I mean, I was in Wicked, but that’s not really singing, that’s sort of like talk-singing, I was just sort of going, “I’m saying words from my face.” It’s not like singing Sondheim is what I’m saying. I haven’t done that in a really long time, like months probably, and I have this big concert to do in like two months, and I called my accompanist and I said, “I have to come over to your house and sing. I don’t remember how it goes, I don’t remember how it feels.” Because I’m not a trained singer, I don’t even know if I can do it anymore, so I have to practice it. But I feel like I like to do what I like to do, and I feel like when I’m telling the truth, which is not all the time, but when I’m telling the truth in the middle of a song, there is a dialogue between you and I.

JM: I want to talk about the TV show, Transparent, which you co-starred in. And it, unfortunately, has to be said that the star of that show, Jeffrey Tambor, has had multiple allegations of sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior, some of which you corroborate in the book. One of the unfortunate aspects is that the actions of this one man has tarnished what should be a momentous legacy for a show. Transparent was a game-changer for trans storytelling in Hollywood and we acknowledge that because of its association with Jeffrey Tambor. Just speaking personally, are you able to separate him out from the show and its legacy, or does that tarnish the entire experience for you?

AB: I am able, finally, to be able to separate the two, I can do that easily. Jeffrey’s behavior is abominable and was abominable, and Trace Lysette and Van Barnes, who initiated these accusations, are absolutely right and correct, and I stand behind them 110%. But the show, if you take it away from Jeffrey’s shadow, is quite brilliant. And strangely, conversely, his performance is exquisite, it’s extraordinary, I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, it’s now considered transphobic, but, and that’s the other problem with the show.

JM: Well, I’m sorry, transphobic because we cast a cis person in that role?

AB: Because he’s a cis, exactly, that’s correct, because he’s a cis man, and nowadays we would say, “Well, you should have said no.” But everything is time-specific.

JM: It was different back then, yeah.

AB: Very, and I feel like if you’re going to watch Transparent, the thing to do is to have a conversation. You have a conversation about what representation means, even if it’s to yourself, what it means, what it means now, what it meant back then, what is cis power. I haven’t watched Transparent in years, but I can look at it and go, this changed the trajectory. You and I wouldn’t be talking right now if it weren’t for Transparent. It literally changed the trajectory of my career.

JM: Your career, but also the history of trans representation in Hollywood. That show made us fast-forward.

AB: I think that’s right, and to be honest with you, I don’t know that this is true, but I think Pose would not have happened without Transparent. I really think that, and we have to be really clear, Pose was very specifically about the trans experience. Transparent was not, Transparent was about the Pfeffermans, it was not about the trans people. It sort of parted this little, it opened the door like that much, and Pose busted down the walls. But you’ll notice, here’s the thing, how many TV shows right now are running that are trans-centric? Not that have trans people in them, but trans, how many?

JM: I think zero.

AB: That’s right, not one.

JM: Not one. I would also say, How many shows you name where you see a trans person on screen? We can name many. How many can you name where two trans people are on screen in the same scene? I think that list is almost nonexistent. I’m sure there are outliers, of course. But for me watching Transparent, I was like, oh my God, there’s three or four trans people on screen. We’ve never seen this before.

AB: And once Trace Lysette entered the picture, everything changed, it was just a game-changer. We still should be filming that show, we should still be filming that show. It’s heartbreaking.

JM: When I first brought up Transparent, your face dropped. Is it uncomfortable to talk about?

AB: No, no, oh God, no, no, it’s sad, it makes me sad, it’s upsetting, because like I said, we should still be filming it. We really should still, not that I wanna go back, I don’t, I have an amazing career, I mean, if we were still filming Transparent, I wouldn’t have been on Broadway. So I’m very grateful things worked out the way they did. But it’s sad, it makes me very sad. What I do when I talk about Transparent is I go to so many places, I go to so many emotional places. And one of the great places for me, and this is where I like to live, is the fact that I met the greatest people in my life. With the exception of the women, trans women I met at The Baton, these people became my family. Kathryn Hahn, Amy Landecker, Judith Light, the Duplasses, Trace, Our Lady J, these people, this is not a joke, are part of my family. We still talk, we still see each other. And Joey [Soloway] and I are like one person. So a lot of stuff happens to me when this subject comes up.

JM: There are many ways Transparent was groundbreaking, with how it dealt with HIV, with being trans…and one of those things that always stands out to me is the scene where you are naked and arguing with your boyfriend. We don’t see trans people in relationships, in general, but here we have a naked trans person, and it’s not about her being naked. We’re not over-sexualizing her. What was your reaction when you first found out that that scene was going to happen?

AB: Well, it was my idea. I walked in that season, the writers were very generous, as was Joey, and they asked us every season, “What do you want to do? If you have any ideas, please come and tell us, that’s what we want to know.” And I wanted to be naked, but I didn’t want to have sex. I didn’t want somebody on top of me, I didn’t want to make a bunch of faces, I didn’t want to do any of that. I’m married, and I’m not particularly interested in doing sex scenes, it’s not something I’m interested in doing.

So I walked in, and I said, “I’d like to be naked.” And they went, “Oh, topless.” And I went, “No, no, I’d like to be naked.” And everybody went, “Really?” I said, “Yeah.” I said, “But I don’t want to have sex, I don’t want it to be a sex scene.” And the writers all went, “All right, how’s that going to happen?” So that part was the writers’ genius, and Joey’s genius, of going, let’s just have her be naked, like you would be naked with a partner, and that way when she rolls over or whatever she does, we’re not involved in that, we’re involved in the relationship. It was brilliant.

JM: I think that’s the first time people have seen what a trans body can look like on screen, on their TVs. And there’s another universe where it would’ve been really easy to make that a joke, but the fact that it’s just this woman living her life and arguing with her boyfriend, it was just so normalizing.

AB: Yeah, it was pretty great. I was very excited. It was very difficult for me to shoot, much more difficult than I thought it was going to be. So I surrounded myself with a lot of trans women on set, I asked for that, I asked for very specific things, I asked for a closed set, I made sure that I had someone literally standing there with a robe. I mean, I had people taking care of me. So it was not easy to do, but I’m really glad we did it, and it was a group effort, it was an ensemble effort. Yeah.

JM: Can I ask, you’ve dated all genders throughout your life. Do you label yourself as bi?

AB: Somebody asked me that yesterday, somebody just asked me that.

JM: I have a good reason for asking.

AB: Okay.

JM: I’ll tell you my reason first?

AB: Great, I love it.

JM: My reason is that bi erasure is real. And I think it’s important to shout it a bit louder when someone is bi, if you do identify as that, because I think oftentimes we can, we could have gone through this whole conversation and never labeled your sexuality, and I kind of think, to help combat bi erasure, if Alexandra Billings is bi, I kind of want the world to know.

AB: I feel the same way. I did, like yesterday when they asked me, a student actually asked me this question, which is great, I love when my students talk to me this way. I feel like the weird thing is, it’s never entered my head. It’s never entered any of my conversations, I’ve never thought about it. I wish I could just say yes or no. But the only thing I can tell you is, if you and I were on a date, and you were much older, and that’s really the only prerequisite, age, I would never date anybody as young as you or younger, I would only date people my own age, and that’s been true since I’ve been 20. And it really doesn’t matter who you are, I don’t care what you have or what you don’t have, or what you were or what you’re going to be, it doesn’t matter to me.

JM: And labeling it doesn’t matter to you?

AB: No, no. I mean, Chrisanne is going through her own gender identity things, and I’m just kind of like, “Great.”

JM: That’s her wife, for everybody listening.

AB: Yes. Yes, my wife, and I, because I love her, and I find her attractive, and I find her to be a sexual being that I want to be around. So I can’t think of anybody, any type of person where I would go, “Ugh, I can’t, it doesn’t make any sense to me.”

JM: Thank you for allowing me to ask that.

AB: Yeah, I wish I had a better answer for you, if I could just say yes. But I don’t know, I don’t know, I just feel like bisexual to me feels like a very specific container of which I don’t know much about, that’s why I think I’m hesitating. But I bet if you gave me criteria, I could probably check a couple of boxes.

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