[ad_1]
Alexandra Billings remembers meeting a handsome man who took her out for a pricey steak dinner in Chicago. Later, at her apartment, her date went into the bathroom and returned in full drag.
“Then he opened his blood-red-lipsticked mouth, and in his best Bea Arthur contralto he warbled, ‘Call me Helga,’ ” she recalls. “He was a United States senator. Still is, I think.”
Before actress Billings became a star appearing on shows like “Transparent,” she made ends meet as a sex worker.
The Illinois native writes about her experiences, which were “on and off for almost four years” in the 1980s, in her memoir “This Time For Me” (Topple Books), out April 1. Before it became “an insidious nightmare,” she writes. “it was actually kind of funny.”
The trans actress, 59, writes of one regular who would dress up as a clown and speak in a very high-pitched voice.
“If you can imagine a beloved cartoon rodent on pounds of helium begging you to f–k him in the ass, that gives you an idea of my challenges,” Billings writes. And that wasn’t all. He “also had a horn that he’d beep when he was climaxing.” It was like being with, she writes, “Harpo Marx.”
But not all her customers wanted sex.
“There was a guy who used to pay me a thousand dollars to clean his house with a toothbrush,” she writes. “All I had to do was curse at him and occasionally call him names.”
The man did this while wearing a diaper and a horse head.
For all the bizarre hilarity, it could also be incredibly dangerous. Billings writes of being picked up by a carload of teen boys who brutally raped, beat her and held a blade against her penis, threatening to cut it off.
The “Never Have I Ever” and “Goliath” star writes that she didn’t do this line of work because she was forced to but because she wanted to, enjoying the control and power she had over men.
“I never enjoyed the sex,” she writes. “Not once. Not with any of them. It was automatic, like turning on an appliance. But I did it. No one made me do it.”
The Chicago theater stalwart also battled drug addiction for many years, including a dalliance with heroin, before getting sober in 1988.
Billings married wife Chrisanne Blankenship for the first time in 1996 — the two met when in high school and co-starred in “Twelfth Night” — and she credits Blankenship for supporting her, especially when she was diagnosed with AIDS in 1995. After gay marriage was legalized in California, the couple tied the knot there in 2008.
She is also honest about her time playing Davina, the trans best friend of Maura Pfefferman, played by Jeffrey Tambor. Billings writes that when she and the actor first met, they had a playful relationship “finding each other mutually hilarious.”
But one day, she writes, while they were on set and chatting, a young crew member asked to adjust Tambor’s wig and he exploded. Billings chalked it up to exhaustion and never said anything.
But shooting another scene with Tambor, now 77, and trans actress Trace Lysette, she saw the Emmy-winning actor get up, allegedly pat Lisette’s behind and make an “offhanded remark about my breasts. I watched. And I said nothing. I did nothing.”
Over time, she writes, Tambor’s outbursts became more frequent and “grew more dangerous.” She claims that there were rumblings on set from several trans people that “Jeffrey would react in a way that would traumatize them.”
Billings was exhausted and wanted out. After the show’s fourth season, she was ready to quit but was beaten to the punch: Tambor announced he was leaving the show amid allegations that he sexually harassed an actress between scenes.
He has since apologized for his behavior on set.
Billings writes that initially, she wanted to write the book to “leave behind a trail of queer history” but gradually grasped that it was in fact a love letter to her wife.
“And I realized that all along it was for you,” she writes to her. “I was writing to say thank you.”
[ad_2]