Los Angeles Times

Randy Rainbow reveals the man behind the glitter — and how his father was like Trump

"Playing With Myself," by Randy Rainbow.

"Playing With Myself" by Randy Rainbow; St. Martin’s (256 pages, $29)

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NEW YORK — Randy Rainbow, the social media sensation who rode to the rescue like a one-man musical theater cavalry during the dark days of Donald Trump’s presidency, drops two bombshells early on in his new memoir, “Playing With Myself.”

The first is that Randy Rainbow is not a gay stage name. Randy, not Randall or Randolph, appears on his birth certificate. And Regenbogen, the German surname of his great-great-grandparents, was translated to Rainbow when they immigrated to England. (He assumes he’d now be Randy Rabinowitz had those ancestors sailed instead to Ellis Island.)

The second piece of startling news is that Donald Trump is his father. Well, not genetically. But the former president, Rainbow explains, is cut from the same mold as his actual father, Gerry Rainbow, a Long Island bandleader who under shady circumstances relocated the family to South Florida, where he became an entertainment agent on the condo circuit.

As Rainbow writes about his Bronx-born dad, who died in 2017:

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