Trump's Deathbed Confession Era is in Full-Swing, He Let's the Truth Slip

0:00This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. So much of the anger we see, especially in, I mean, how many closet Republicans are there? A lot. A lot. You know, I'm an actor. I don't talk about my parents and therapy. I talk about my agent. You know what I mean? Like all the success I've had, you can trace it all back to my parents just loving the hell out of me.

0:39Did you come out to them or did they always know? I literally said, dad, come on. All those Madonna concerts, the Barbra Streisand concerts you took me to, the Broadway shows. I said to them, you guys had to know. And my dad looked at me and said, we discussed the possibilities. All right. Joining us today on iHip News is Billy Eichner. So let's take a break from all the fuckery. And he is an actor, comedian, writer, producer, and author of a new fantastic audio book called Billy on Billy, an audio memoir. Billy Eichner, how are you? Hi, I'm great. Thanks for having me back. Yes. Yes. I want to show a video in case by chance, any of my viewers or listeners live under a rock.

1:22Sure. And they don't know what Billy on the street is. Okay. So Kylie, will you play the clip? What? Who are you? I'm Billy Eichner. And okay. All right. So, and is this like TV or? Yeah. This is like television. Yeah. What television? Like Billy on the street. Oh, okay. So are you an internet thing? No, it's actually a TV thing and an internet thing. I don't like your attitude. Okay. I don't like yours. I'm on TV. Who gives a shit? Who gives a shit about you, bitch. You know, that was shot right downstairs. I love that. How much fun did you have doing that? Um, a lot. I mean, it required a lot of energy and a lot of commitment.

1:57You can't really half ass Billy on the street. Um, but it's also fun and I love how much people love it. The people that love it really love it. Um, and, uh, yeah, it's really unlike anything else one could possibly do. It's such a unique experience. And you were born and raised in New York city. That's right. And if one were to watch Fox News, they would think that this is like a socialist, crime-ridden hellscape. Right. So how did you turn out so well? I know. It's a miracle. And I grew up in Queens. I went to high school in Manhattan, in lower Manhattan, which means I took an hour and 15-minute subway ride each way.

2:32By yourself? Back and forth from school by myself every day. Well, sometimes with friends, sometimes by myself. Yeah. From what age would you do that so long? I was high school. So I don't know. How old was I? 14, 15, 16, around there. and um but i loved it i mean new york really informed like everything about who i am and so much of my work obviously and um it's a huge part of my existence and a lot of the book is about you know how much growing up in new york city really shaped me and i think a pretty wonderful way and in a very unique way you know um i grew up i was born in dallas but grew up in oklahoma city and you always hear people say you know it's a great place to raise a family and i was raised there and I raised my kids there.

3:14However, it's void of a lot of multiculturalism and culture. And they're very car-centric towns, which you miss out on so much cooperating and compromising with other human beings. I've recently moved to New York. Right. I know. Welcome. Thank you. And I think it's better for your happy factor to have to every day... New York is an equalizer. Like if you're rich, if you're poor, if you're black, if you're white, if you're gay, if you're straight, if you're trans, if you're wearing panties or you're naked, you have to walk on the streets. Nobody can avoid it. And it's a complete equalizer. Is that what your experience has been here your whole life?

3:52Yes. And I think that's why it influenced me so much because you do not have an isolated existence. A lot of people grow up in the suburbs and they're pretty isolated. They live around like-minded people, people who look pretty much exactly the same way they do. I don't want to make generalizations, but if we're going to make one, that tends to be true from what I've heard from people who grew up in the suburbs or, you know, smaller towns. And I grew up surrounded by everyone, everyone. Like I said, I took the subway to high school every day. If you're on the subway, you're seeing every type of person in the world, people from all over the world that are visiting or who have moved here, immigrants from all over.

4:29It's a city of immigrants. You know, I grew up in the borough of Queens, which is, I think, one of the most diverse places in the world. Is Donald Trump from Queens? Yes, he is. Like I said, it's very diverse. Did you ever bump into him? I did not know, never bumped into Donald Trump. But my parents were not wealthy like his parents were. But so you're just exposed to so much from the time you're a very young person. And so I'm not saying New Yorkers don't have their biases like every other human. We're still human. You know, we're not perfect. But we're a lot more open, you know, and a lot more, I would say it's beyond tolerance.

5:07It's we really pride ourselves on the diversity in the city and on being exposed to culture from all over the world. And, you know, my parents took me to see plays when I was a kid and plays sometimes that were really meant for a more sophisticated audience than children, but they didn't care. They knew I could handle it, that I loved it. You know, they took, I talk about this a lot, but I think the fact that I grew up in New York in the 80s and 90s, long before social media and the internet could expose you to all these different things, no matter where you were. I was exposed to things just by the nature of living here.

5:42And my parents also being native New Yorkers were not scared, not scared to take me to a play about gay men, not scared to support my interest in culture, things that were associated with gay men, even from a young age. And that made me confident. You know, this is my whole book is a love letter to my parents. And the fact there that their default mode was always to love me and, and, and encourage me to pursue my dreams and encourage me to be me, they let me be me. And I think a lot of the reason they were not scared to do that is because they themselves were native New Yorkers, and had also grown up like I grew up exposed to everything and anything in the world.

6:26And so they weren't scared of things they didn't know. You know, I think New York is a place that breaks your give a shit meter. And I think that's healthy. When you give a shit about petty things, it makes you toxic and unhealthy. And when I, since moving here last fall, and I think about what's going on politically, nationally right now. And, you know, there's Stephen Miller, who, I mean, clearly has like white nationalist ambitions. And it seems like your childhood in this city is the antidote, is the answer, is the solution to that. It is a breathing, movable, main character in everybody's life, this city.

7:06That's right. It shows you that cooperation and compromise and multiculturalism really works. And your parents loving you through all that. You wrote this amazing part of your memoir. And I wanted you to read it to my listeners and viewers to kind of get them into what your memoir is about. Because I feel like we're entering this era right now where everything is toxic, like toxic masculinity. Now there's like the toxic femininity with Erica Kirk and that shit show, you know, there's women that are running around trying to be ready to breed and all this stuff. Yeah, now I can't. I know. And they are trying to take ownership in parenting that somehow they do it better or they're better breeders.

7:50And this is something that's been around forever. And people that have gay kids understand a type of radical love that I equally think is the antidote to the toxic government and all of the stuff they're pushing. So will you read this for my listeners? Sure. And I will say, I don't think it's so radical. I don't either. I don't think it's radical. This radical love, this radical acceptance, I know what people mean by that, and I appreciate it, of course. But I don't think it's so radical to just love your kid, to love your trans kid, to love your non-binary kid, or to love your kid who's still figuring it out.

8:26You know, to love your kid that's interested or passionate about something that you weren't prepared to have to know about. Do you know what I mean? Right. So I don't think that's radical. And so, again, so much of my parents, so much of my book is literally about this. I was not the child, I don't think. My parents both passed away. I should say that. My father died 15 years ago right before Billy on the Street became a TV show. My mother died when I was 20 years old when I was in college. And so she missed my whole adult life. And yet, and that part's sad, of course, but while they were around, they really nurtured me and let me be me and never tried to get me to be anything other than who I was and never tried to get me to be passionate or interested about something I wasn't interested in.

9:14And so this is an example of that. This is from chapter five in my book. This chapter is focused primarily on my dad and it's called my dad. And it's about something that happened when I was in fourth grade, which was a long time ago for me. Okay. When I was in fourth grade, I took up a new extracurricular activity. Was it soccer? You ask perhaps the spelling bee? No, it was something even gayer and nerdier than spelling bee, if you can imagine. I participated in my school storytelling contest. Except for one other boy, the other competitive storytellers were all girls. Being the little performer I always was, it suited me well to stand on a stage and dramatically tell a short story.

10:01And it really rang my bell to figure out how to do this better than everyone else. I performed the Nightingale, a classic children's story by Hans Christian Andersen. I won the first contest at my own school, which allowed me to advance to the district level competition. It was there on a Saturday morning that I stood on the stage in a very large, mostly empty school auditorium in front of the dozen or so parents and three judges who were the only ones to show up to watch us. And I killed. And when the judges got up to announce the winner and they said, the winner is Billy Eichner. Jay Eichner, my father, usually a stoic man of few words and never that visibly emotional one way or the other, immediately leapt to his feet, threw his fist up in the air triumphantly, and in this mostly empty, cavernous school auditorium shouted out very loudly, Way to go!

10:58As if I had just thrown a buzzer beater in the last seconds of a championship basketball game. or scored a winning touchdown, when all I had done is won the fourth grade storytelling contest. His big, bellowing, Bronx-born voice bounced off the walls and echoed off the vast, dark span of empty seats in the school auditorium on a Saturday morning in Queens, and he stayed on his feet, beaming. This was when I was in fourth grade in 1986. I'm 47 years old now, but I can still hear him saying those words. There's a Stephen Sondheim song, Children Will Listen, in the finale of the musical Into the Woods, a show about parents and children, about how adults have to remember that children listen more than you think.

11:43They listen and learn and remember everything you say and do. They retain everything. And that way to go, I have retained for the rest of my life.

11:59now sometimes my parents took their love and encouragement a step too far because i won the district storytelling competition i advanced to the next level to perform my story in the queensborough wide storytelling contest and yet again my father attended with the pride of someone who was watching his son play quarterback at the super bowl except this time i fumbled the football by stumbling over a few words in my story, and you cannot stumble over your words in a storytelling contest. I ended up coming in fifth place, losing out to a girl named Jenny Pethkonkathon, that was her name, I still remember it, who at one point in her performance paused for a suspiciously long time while staring hard at her mother in the audience.

12:46She had clearly forgotten her next line. There was some speculation among the other contestants that her mother had mouthed the words she was forgetting, which was of course considered cheating. And yet she was given second place anyway. And the girl who took first prize happened to be from that same district where the competition was held. Well, my father thought this was very suspicious. I was just mad at myself for stumbling over the words and I stormed out of the auditorium telling my parents to start the car so we could just get out of there. I blamed myself. but not my father. He ranted all the way home in the car about the travesty that these girls had beaten me, that they had cheated, that the competition was rigged to favor the girl from her own district.

13:34My dad was like one of those stop the steal guys, but about the 1988 Queensborough storytelling contest. It was fixed, he shouted. And I finally had to shout from the back seat to quiet him. You don't have to make excuses for me. I just lost. I was disappointed in myself, but I wasn't about to blame the other contestants, even if they had cheated. Plus, to be honest, I really didn't care. I just wanted to go home and eat a bagel and watch TV. But Jay Eichner had accepted enough defeat in his own life, so when it came to me, he refused to accept defeat and was particularly sensitive about me not having the same opportunities and advantages that a kid from a richer, more powerful, more well-connected family might have.

14:22That is really, really beautiful. Thank you. And funny. Thank you. And what stuck with me about this is that even though your parents left you early, that their love was so robust and so unconditional that it still sustains you so much and defines so much of who you are. Yes, it really does. And it's, you know, I'm in show business. It's a hard business. It's especially hard if you're gay, but it's hard for everyone. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's very cutthroat. There's a lot of competition. It's a constant, you know, like a battle against your own ego and, you know, your own sense of self-worth and all of that stuff.

15:02But this resilience that I've had, when I sat down to write the book, I thought, where did it come from? Where did the confidence to be Billy on the Street come from? to pursue my dreams, to always be out. I was always out from the time I started 25 years ago, right? In comedy. And there weren't a lot about gay men in comedy at the time. Now things have evolved, but it was more unique at that time. And when I sat down, I realized, I thought about my childhood. I thought about the love they gave me, the self-respect they instilled in me by taking my passion for performing and for entertainment and for the art seriously.

15:40And all the success I've had, you can trace it all back to my parents just loving the hell out of me and letting me be gay and taking me to the gay Olympics when I was, you know, in 1994 and just taking me to see Madonna concerts when I was 12 years old and like taking me to see plays, like I said, about gay men or just about adults in general, people in general, you know, they respected me. Even as a kid, they knew that I must care about these things deeply for a reason, that it meant a lot to me, that it wasn't just a hobby to watch Madonna. You know, it was like, it was nurturing something in my little like, you know, performing arts, creative brain, you know, and everything I've had, like you said, even in their absence, their love anchors me.

16:31I say that in the book and helps me get over disappointments even in middle age, right? And it helps me to persevere and to keep going and to trust my instincts and to know that I belong and that I am worthy of success if I'm lucky enough to get it. Did you come out to them or did they always know? Well, I think they always knew. And I tell the coming out story in the book. I did come out to them. I finally officially came out to them when I was 20, when I was in college. But I said to my dad, I said, dad, because he did, in spite of the fact that he absolutely knew who I was, he did the typical parent thing, you know, it was still the late 90s too.

17:12And he said, like, are you sure it's not a phase or any, I was like, dad, I literally said, dad, come on, all those Madonna concerts, the Barbra Streisand concerts, you took me to the Broadway shows. I said to them, you guys had to know. And my dad looked at me and said, we discussed the possibility. And it's like Bronx voice, you know, he was an older guy too. He was already in his late sixties at this point. Um, and, and that's what he said. So they absolutely knew and they never ever made me feel uncomfortable about it. You know, my therapist said to me recently, we were talking about the show Heated Rivalry, right?

17:49And Heated Rivalry, which is about two closeted, very masculine hockey players, closet professional hockey players. I'm sure you've heard about it. And it's a great show. I loved it. It's very sexy and it's, you know, intriguing and romantic and all these great things. But I was talking to my therapist about how much the idea of the closet, being in the closet, still after all these decades, still resonates with people. You know, that it's still a very effective storytelling device to keep your characters closeted. And then hopefully they come out of the closet. Right. And I found that very fascinating because in a way I've never been closeted, you know, and a big part of that is that I got to grow up with Jay and Debbie Eichner as my parents and that I got to grow up in New York City.

18:35Right. Which taught me to that there was a place in the world for me from a young age. Right. And to not be scared. And my therapist said to me, you know, you underestimate the amount of shame that gay men walk around with, even gay adults who maybe have been out of the closet for a long time. And she said to me, you had a very unique childhood, she said. And, you know, not that I don't have any shame about anything, but I've never really had shame about being gay. And I've always thought it was a very exciting thing to be. And a very I always thought gay men were at especially back in the 80s and 90s.

19:10I don't know if this is so true anymore. The more we've been kind of assimilated into society. But like we were at the forefront of culture, of fashion and of theater and of music. And even if we weren't on camera at the time, we were behind the scenes. And I followed all of that like a hawk when I was a kid. I loved it. And I just I couldn't wait to like, you know, when you're when you grew up in Queens or outside of Manhattan, you're so close yet so far. Yeah, big city. And I just couldn't wait. I always knew I was like, I'm going to be a gay man in the arts, in the city. And that's what I always wanted to be.

19:44And my parents always wanted that for me too. So obviously now we have multiple, I mean, I think it's, we're into a thousand pieces of legislation, anti-LGBTQ plus pieces of legislation. And ironically, President Trump, I say is in his deathbed confession era. So, you know, like if you went to go see your grandma or something in the nursing home and she's old, She'd be like, Billy, I always liked you a lot better than your little sister. I always thought she was a bitch. Right, right, right. Well, much to my surprise, Trump is saying all this bisexual slash gay stuff. Every single time Billy, he's on TV lately, he cannot quit talking about how hot he thinks men are.

20:28Yes, I've seen this. We have a clip here that I want to play for you. Play this, Kylie. He was in a hotel, and I met him. And we fell in love, deeply in love. We didn't know each other before that. We had great chemistry. And I stayed twice as long as I was supposed to.

20:52He's the most beautiful looking man. He looks so nice. He's like an angel. Somebody I've gotten to know very well. And he is a handsome sucker. I could come down and start kissing everybody. I'll kiss every guy. Okay, so you brought up that the gay people in the 80s and 90s were aspirational to you. And I would say that even me growing up in the Bible Belt, because I grew up as an atheist in the Bible Belt, a lot of my gay friends had to grow up with really crazy Christian people. And so the people that didn't like me for being an atheist and the people that didn't like the gay guys were the same people.

21:26So when I went to college, I found out with gay people. And having gay friends back in the early 90s in the Bible Belt was almost like being friends with a celebrity. There was this aura about it, this liberation that gay people experience. So you grew up in Queens. He grew up in a far more closeted era. But his mentor, Roy Cohn, gay. Deeply self-loathing gay man. Self-loathing gay man. And now that the dementia and his give-a-fuck meter is just completely broken, he knows he avoided prison. I just think for the movement that is so wrapped up into all of this toxic masculinity, we've got this old queen running from the White House.

22:10It's unbelievable. Trump grew up, I mean, maybe not when he was a child, but Trump went to Studio 54. He loved Broadway. She talks about how much he loved the musical Cats and how much he loved Phantom of the Opera. You know, he has the cultural tastes of a New Yorker who loves going to the theater. I mean, that means you're going to be around a lot of gay men. Right. And I don't, you know, he has, I mean, he's disgusting. He has weaponized, you know, hatred or a lack of compassion or understanding about LGBTQ people. And let's be honest, specifically trans people more than anyone. He has weaponized that in order to make money, you know, remain in power and just scare people, scare his base.

23:02Right. So that he can secretly be, you know, you know, making deals that are illegal and, you know, exploiting the presidency for all you can exploit it for, obviously, for wealth and for power and real estate and all of that. And so, but yeah, this group, I mean, whatever, this guy, I don't even know. It's hard to even know what to say about him at this point. He's obviously just, he's just a pathological liar. He is. But why I'm bringing this up with what you wrote in your book is I think about the symptoms of all of the stuff they're doing. And I think about the antidote. I think about this juxtaposition all the time.

23:41And those moments with your dad, to me, I don't ever think about gender in terms of, oh, that's so masculine or, oh, that's so feminine. But MAGA does all the time. To me, this is a beautiful traditional family by their definition who radically and unconditionally love their son. By the way, my dad was much older than my mom. My dad was in the Korean War. He was a veteran. Yeah. You know, he was from the Bronx. You know, he loved the Yankees. He loved sports. He also loved entertainment and Broadway, you know, because we were like a New York family, you know. But he was a very, you know, on the face of it, conventional straight man, like older straight man, who I think was probably not planning to have a gay son, especially a gay son who ran around belting out, you know, Whitney Houston and Barbra Streisand songs from the time I could breathe, essentially.

24:31And he was the first one applauding, you know, would sit in the living room. And because I was a really good singer as a kid, you know, maybe if I wasn't a good singer, he would have been like, shut the fuck up. But like I was good and he took me to voice lessons. And when I said I wanted to be a child actor, it wasn't him dragging me there. It was me dragging him to take me to the auditions. But he did. And like I said, you know, he would applaud when I sang in the living room. You know, he would take me to every movie that I wanted to see that probably maybe wasn't appropriate for me because he knew how much it meant to me as a young artist who was just trying to be exposed to like different ideas and different.

25:05actors. And so, but like I said, on the face of it, a very conventional, straight old white man, right? You know, and, and like I said, the fact that he loved me as much as he did, it explains all of my success. And even when I get into my 20s and early 30s, and my career still isn't taking off. And he does start to get worried for me just from a financial basis, like, what are you going to do? What's going to happen with your life? Like, you know, And I was a little worried too. He's still, he knew how much it meant to me to like keep going and keep trying to like make this dream happen. And he kept saying, you got to stick with it.

25:44You got to stick with it. And by the way, he was coming to see in my live shows, my live comedy shows in the early 2000s. I am on stage shouting about how much I love anal sex. I mean, I was outrageous. It would be outrageous now. And it was particularly loud and outrageous and gay. so bluntly, matter-of-factly gay. And he, as long as the audience was laughing, he was laughing. You know, he would have had a problem with it if I wasn't funny, because he would have been like, you're in the wrong business and you're delusional. Yeah. But I was funny, the audience laughed, and he would sit there cracking up.

26:19I'm on stage going on and on about anal sex, and he, before the show, would walk around in the audience and show people my baby picture. and go up to complete strangers, not people that knew me, strangers who were coming to see me as fans. And he would go up to them and say, you see this? This is Billy. I'm the father. Right? And then they watch the show and I'm like ranting and raving about Broadway and celebrities and gay culture and gay life. There used to be a clip in my show where I would show gay porn clips on a screen and then in front of it talk about how we were like everyone else and deserve marriage equality before we had marriage equality.