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Still, Bill: Gay Adventures From Cowboyland to Broadway is a new memoir from two-time Tony Award-nominee, Bill Russell (Side Show, elegies for angels, punks and raging queens, and Pageant). The book will be officially released Tuesday, October 27, 2026. Learn more here.
How does an effeminate boy–raised in Cowboyland with cattle and guns, hunting and trucks, sports and church, jocks and jerks, cruelty and small-mindedness–get from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the thrills and heartbreak of the white-hot lights of Broadway and the West End? The answer can be found in this memoir by the author of Side Show, elegies for angels, punks and raging queens, and Pageant, among other musicals. This frequently amusing, sometimes wild, often moving ride proceeds from creating grade school productions of fairy tales to writing the books and lyrics for internationally produced musicals and collaborating with the super-smart, uber-talented, and sometimes famous. Along the way, the author provides a ringside seat for viewing the huge cultural changes from the 1950s to the 2020s: hippies and flower power, women’s and gay liberation, civil rights and wrongs, AIDS and covid, and the softening of hardened attitudes offset by alarming pushbacks against justice and democracy.
“Where I started is a long way from where I am now – both physically and especially psychologically,” says Russell. “Though my home town was Spearfish, South Dakota, I spent a fair amount of time at my paternal grandparents’ cattle ranch just over the border in Wyoming. Everyone knew my dad as “Cowboy Russell” and he lived up to the name. I had no interest in macho stuff and felt completely at sea where there were no seas (“come look at the freak!”) My journey as a gay man and becoming a member of the New York theater community is quite the saga and it’s now all in this book, complete with sex and drugs and musical theater!”
Russell will celebrate the release of his new memoir at a special book signing and interview event, hosted by Sirius XM Radio’s Seth Rudetsky, at the Drama Book Shop (266 W 39th Street, NYC) on Thursday, October 29 at 7:30PM.
Bill Russell is an internationally produced author and director of musicals for the stage. He received Tony Award nominations for the book and lyrics of Side Show (music by Henry Krieger). A critically praised Broadway revival of that show in 2014 was directed by Oscar-winner, Bill Condon. Mr. Russell penned book and lyrics for elegies for angels, punks and raging queens and has directed it frequently around America as well as the Fringe and West End of London. In December of 2020, he and Justin Ross Cohen directed a streamed version of the show as a benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, featuring 51 stars of stage, film and television including Nathan Lane, Cynthia Nixon, Fran Drescher, JK Simmons, Norm Lewis, Cherry Jones, Joaquina Kalukango, J Harrison Ghee, Francis Jue, Seth Rudetsky and many others. Pageant (co-author, book and lyrics) ran for a year off-Broadway, was revived there in 2014 and Mr. Russell directed productions around the country and in the Fringe and West End of London. Other off-Broadway book and lyric credits include Unexpected Joy (also London), Lucky Duck, The Last Smoker in America, Fourtune and The Texas Chainsaw Musical. His musicals have been seen in the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, Sweden, Germany, Brazil, Finland and Belgium to name a few. His latest show, has anyone seen my mind? is his 16th full-length musical, all of which have been produced. He received Honorary Doctorates from the Boston Conservatory and Morningside College and was inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame in 2016.
