Billy Eichner

He was coming off of American Beauty and The Usual Suspects.

And also...

I grew up in New York City.

And what so much of the book is about is about how much theater my parents took me to see.

We were middle-class people.

We were not rich.

But what we had, we spent on entertainment.

And especially, we loved the theater.

Broadway, off-off-Broadway, from the time I was a young kid, they treated me like an adult, right?

And I was so passionate about it.

And the more passionate I got about it, they got about it.

And so I was exposed to very sophisticated things for a kid.

And that's what made me want to be an actor.

It was seeing those plays.

There was a whole wave of gay male playwrights in the late 80s and 90s in New York who were

Sadly, using their work to respond to AIDS for the most part.

But a side effect of that is that I went as a kid and saw lots of gay male characters on stage in a way that you would not have on TV or in mainstream films at the time.

And I could rattle off all those playwrights that inspired me, you know.

And so that's who I am underneath the persona.

And like I said, I think you just get to a point.