When Alexandra Billings was born in 1962, simply existing as her authentic self was considered a crime. In her haunting, hilarious, and unflinchingly honest memoir This Time for Me, Billings takes us on a journey that spans five turbulent decades, from the illegalization of her identity to her rise as one of America’s most beloved transgender actresses and activists. What unfolds is not just one woman’s life story but a rare and radical act of truth-telling that challenges the reader to rethink survival, artistry, gender, and power.
Before the word “transgender” had even entered the mainstream lexicon, Alexandra began her transition in 1980. There were no hashtags, no trans influencers, no roadmaps, only the raw determination of a woman who had been told by almost everyone she loved that her dreams were impossible. And yet she moved forward, often at tremendous personal cost. She did it because she had to. Because, as she puts it, “I was told there was no place for me. So I built one.” Raised in Illinois in a multiracial family, Alexandra was exposed to the world of music and theater early. Her father, a music director, gave her backstage access to legends like Carol Burnett and Yul Brynner. Those early memories offered a kind of magic, a place where she could become anyone, even if she didn’t yet have permission to be herself.
The memoir is brutally honest about the years that followed: homelessness, addiction, sex work, and an HIV diagnosis in 1985. But this is not a story of victimhood. It’s a story of fight. Of what it means to live not in spite of pain but because of it. In prose that’s both poetic and piercing, Alexandra writes with the unapologetic flair of someone who has nothing left to prove, except, perhaps, that she is still standing. By the 1990s, Alexandra was lighting up stages across Chicago, performing under the name Shanté, impersonating Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli at the Baton Show Lounge. She racked up titles like Miss Chicago, Miss New York, and Miss Florida, and began winning critical acclaim in Chicago theater. Her one-woman autobiographical show traveled across the country, eventually landing her a role in the 2005 TV film Romy and Michele: In the Beginning, one of the first times an openly trans actress played a trans character on screen.
But Alexandra wasn’t just making art, she was making history. Her performance as Davina in Transparent brought nuanced trans representation into millions of homes. Her turn as Madame Morrible in Broadway’s Wicked shattered barriers as the first openly trans actor in the role. Her recurring roles in ER, Grey’s Anatomy, The Conners, and The Peripheral cemented her legacy as one of television’s most visible transgender talents.
In one of the interviews she gave, featured in The Heroines blog back in 2014, Alexandra shared a glimpse of this resilient spirit. There, she spoke of love, art, and legacy in ways that echo throughout This Time for Me. “I was never trying to be brave,” she said. “I was just trying to stay alive.” It’s that ethos that pulses through every page of her memoir.
What makes This Time for Me so compelling is not just what happened to Alexandra, but how she tells it. She writes like she performs, fearless, irreverent, and deeply human. The book swerves from heartbreaking to hilarious in a single sentence, capturing not just the arc of a life, but the breath of it. She is at once philosopher and showgirl, sage and spitfire. Her voice is singular.
The memoir is also a living document of queer history, charting the evolution of LGBTQ identity from the Stonewall riots to the contemporary fight for trans rights.
Alexandra doesn’t just survive history, she critiques it, reshapes it, and dances right through it in high heels and rhinestones. Her story reminds us that the personal is always political, and that laughter, especially in the face of cruelty, is a kind of resistance.
This Time for Me is more than a memoir. It’s a declaration. A celebration of becoming. A reclamation of space. It is for anyone who has ever been told to sit down, shut up, or fade away. Alexandra Billings stood up instead, and then took center stage.
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Photo via Heroines of My Life.
and “Never Have I Ever" an American comedy-drama television series starring Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, created by Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher.
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