Catching Up With . . .
Catching Up With . . . Leslie Jordan 2008
By Scott Lewis

May 24, 2008

Leslie Jordan

I love talking to Leslie Jordan.  He is by far the easiest and most fun interview I have done.  I say hello and don’t even have to ask a question and he is off and running.  For the next thirty-five minutes I feel as if I am getting my own private performance of My Trip Down the Pink Carpet the title of both his new autobiography and one man show, both coming to Texas in the next few weeks.  I have seen his two previous solo outings on the stage, and if you have not, you do not know what you are missing.  Like Del Shore’s plays that have risen to cult status within the Lesbigay community Jordan makes sure you hear the many messages that are important to him, but makes you remember them through the hysterical stories of his past that you will find yourself repeating for weeks.  I caught up with Leslie on the streets of L. A.  and spoke to him about his life, his friendship with Tammy Faye and his upcoming appearances in Texas, including one at The Cathedral of Hope.

SL:  The Last time we spoke you were an Emmy Nominee; you are now an Emmy winner.  Tell me about that night.

LJ:  Well, you know they present the best guest actor at the creative arts Emmy’s they do not present it at the real Emmy’s.  I flew my mother out, I bought her a new dress, we had a limousine pick us up.  We got there and there wasn’t a star in sight.  It was so depressing.  But of course I won and it was good to have mama there when I won.  

I was the only nominee from my category that was there.  I think that’s why they gave it to me.  It was Ben Stiller and Martin Sheen, and Alec Baldwin and Patrick Stuart who were nominated.  Because I won, they thought it would be cute to have me present with the winner of the best guest actress which was crazy old Cloris Leachman, who had won for playing the Grandmother on Malcolm in the Middle. So she and I got to become presenters at the big Emmy’s so mother got to go after all.

The Emmy ceremony was pretty amazing.  You know when you are a presenter is when you get the swag Bag, if you win, you just get the statue.  I got a $51,000. gift bag.  You would not have believed it.  Trips to New Zealand, every kind of beauty treatment and $5,000 worth of pearls, It just went on and on and on.  It was just a wonderful experience.  After I won I thought I should rite my journey from stepping off that bus in 1982.  A bus honey, that I took from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Hollywood.  Took a bus and couldn’t even afford Greyhound, took Trailways.  I had $1200.  that I had saved waiting tables down at the Vine Street Market, a little restaurant right near the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where I had gone to school and all I had was a suitcase, $1200. and dreams.  

Here it was 26 years later and I had won the Emmy, so I wrote my trip down the pink carpet, my journey.  It started out just funny, funny, funny, but what I started to remember was just how riddled with internal homophobia, how uncomfortable I was in the 80’s with being a gay actor, what if people found out.  It is also kind of my journey into acceptance.  

SL:  You grew up in the South in a religious home.  How did that play into your homophobia?

LJ:  Oh honey, I remember that I told my mother when I was twelve years old that I was Homosexual.  I didn’t have a name for it, but I knew that I was different.  They sent me to this Christian therapist and he told me, he said “Now listen, when you have these feelings, these unchristian feelings for members of your own sex that is the prince of darkness that you are hearing.”  Well my God!  It is a wonder that we are sane; telling a little horny kid that everytime he gets horny it’s the Devil.  I have wrestled with the Devil for over half my life and I just think that is terrible.  I don’t think for one minute that there is a fallen angel called Lucifer tending a lake of fire for sinners.  I think that is a wonderful allegorical metaphor.  But do I believe it?  Not a word of it.

That is what my book is about, my journey, my journey away from that.  You know I’ve been baptized fourteen times.  It never did take.  Every time that preacher would holler “Come forward lost sinner.”  I’d go.  My poor mother, she’d say “Son, you are already saved.  Remain seated.”  I attended every bible meeting, every revival.  I went out to this ranch called the Reach Out Ranch.  Honey, they dunked me in the creek.  Still couldn’t wash me clean.  

I tell you what prompted me to write my book.  I got very involved about ten years ago with an organization called The Trever Project.  It is a National suicide hotline for Gay, Lesbian, Transgendered, Bisexual and questioning youth.  They can call in if they have feelings of suicide and talk to someone.  Do you know when they plugged in ten years ago they got almost 15,000 calls from young Gay men and young Gay women that had no one to talk to.  Do you know where most of those calls came from?  The Bible belt; I thought we have got to get to those kids.  We have got to let them know that there is a God that loves them unconditionally.  That is why I wrote my book.  

The way I see it, all over the world there are big groups of people and they all have a book.  Each group firmly believes that their God is the creator of the Universe.  Well, I tell you what my journey has led me to a God that doesn’t write books.  I never believed it anyway.  I never believed Jonah in the belly of the whale, I thought that was very suspicious to me and that woman that turned to salt, that’s impossible.  People don’t turn into salt.  I want a spiritual path where I don’t have to leave logic and reason at the door.    I love what the guru Majah says.  This wonderful speaker that I go hear a lot, she said that I honor the sanctity of all religions but the only religion that I embrace is the religion of Kindness.  I thought that is it.  

You know Tammy Faye Bakker taught me about love and tolerance.  Here is a Christian woman that believes her Bible but she said “Honey, Jesus never even mentioned Homosexuality, so who am I to judge.”  You know I opened for her when she did her secular one woman tour.  I would come out dressed as Brother Boy and we would do “Singing in the Rain” the place would go ape shit.  I’d come out as Brother Boy and we are the same height in our high heels.  You know she’s only about 4’ 10” she’s like Dolly Parton, she’s tiny.  But she said when she did The Surreal Life with porn stars and all that riffraff, she just loved them and embraced them.  She got over 10,000 e-mails from all over the country telling her this is the way a Christian woman should act.

SL:  I was blessed to have counted Tammy Faye as a Friend; she was the most amazing, caring, genuine person I have ever known.

LJ:  You know when I first met her and she’s got that baby voice and seems kind of naïve about things.  I thought well this is a scam honey, she’s just trying to act like this so people won’t think she knew Jim was bilking the congregation, but you know, I don’t think she did know.  She’s got the trusting nature of a child.  And the sweetest thing, and all sorts of riffraff and shenanigans would be going on around her and all she wanted to do was love.

SL:  I heard your first exposure to the Gay community was in 1972 when Bette Midler came to your college to perform the Homecoming concert.

LJ:  Where’d you hear that?  Wow!  Yea, that is true.  I was at the University at Tennessee at Knoxville.  I had decided that I was going to go up there and come out.  I was going to try to meet some gay people.  I had graduated High School a year early so I was only seventeen years old sneakin’ in those gay bars.  I was living in what was called the presidential complex it was very run down and I was living a double life I would run out to the gay bars at night and then try to act straight around school because I was so scared.  Well, I kept running into people from my church, everywhere I would go, every time I would walk out of a gay bar, there was someone from my church.  I thought lord this is just awful.  

Well, all the gay boys decided that we were going to dress up and go see Bette Midler.  We were going to wear platform shoes and glitter socks and roll our blue jeans up to our knees and wear glitter shirts.  I had never taken a Quaalude and someone said “Here take you a Quaalude and you will have so much fun.”  I took that Quaalude and then I was going to go over to my friend’s house and dress up and then we were going to sneak down to where Bette Midler was going to be.  I took that Quaalude and got high and I thought “Fuck ‘em, Honey!”  I put on my outfit and paraded right through the lobby of the Military Hall.  Well, some cheerleader of my High School her brother was my Resident Assistant well they called me in and set me down and asked me what was going on.  On one hand I just wanted to say I am gay and I’m proud and then all that had to happen was one little thing and they made you so ashamed of yourself.    

SL:  You are best known as Beverly Leslie on Will & Grace but you have acted in so many other projects and there are some great stories in your book.  Tell me about working with the delicious Dean Cain on Lois and Clark.

LJ:  Well, (chuckles) I was just panic stricken.  I was hired to play Resplendentman, who was this little super hero who would steal Superman’s powers.  I was twenty three pounds heavier then, it was before I got sober so I was bloated from all that alcohol.  They called me over to Warner Brother’s wardrobe department and shoehorned me into purple and orange tights.  I was standing there in front of this three way mirror and I could have sworn, I can’t be sure, but I could have sworn that one of those girls looked right at my crotch and said “Do you think he’ll need what Dean needs?”  So I said “Excuse me?”  She said, “Nothing.” I thought she said to that girl “Do you think he’ll need what Dean needs?”  My mind starts going ninety miles an hour and I start thinking well what does Dean need?  Is he so tiny down there they’ve got to pad him?  Then I thought no that’s not it.  Maybe he’s so big down there that they have to strap him in.  

So I thought when they introduce me to him my eyes are going to wonder.  I better not peter gaze, I’ll get caught.  He’s a Princeton graduate, he’s no dummy.  So every time he’d come around I’d look at the ceiling.  One time I almost lost my balance.  You know I’m an old size queen and all it took was one little old comment by somebody.  Now it is in the New York paper that I was obsessed with Dean Cain’s manhood.  My poor mother, she’s just going to die.  

SL:  I heard you were also obsessed with Billy Bob Thornton after John Ritter told you a story about his manhood.

LJ:  We had a scene on Hearts Afire where we all three had to stand at a urinal. My character had been allowed to join the Rotary Club, an all male club and he was so excited that I came skipping into the bathroom and I said “Ya’ll, I feel like Cinderella at the ball!” then I went to pee.  Billy Bob Thornton played this character who was this weary Vietnam vet and gonzo journalist.  He moves down two urinals and says “I don’t pee next to men who say they feel like Cinderella, it’s just this little rule I have.”  Anyway, we are standing there at the urinals and Billy Bob started this really funny thing where he would pretend to unzip his pants, he would step up to the urinal where you couldn’t see and then he would act like he was pulling his dick out and he would thump the urinal with his fingers where it sounded like “THUMP!”  We were just laughing and carrying on.  

John Ritter you know was the straightest man, there is not a gay bone in his body but he’s the kind of straight guy that is so comfortable with his sexuality it (being with gays) doesn’t bother him. He was always teasing me and he said, “You know if Billy Bob really pulled it out Leslie, I think you’d probably fall in love!”  I said, “What?  Why?”  He said, “Well, it’s real big” I said, “How do you know?”  He said “We went surfing at his house on Malibu and I saw it.”  I said, “Well how big is it?  Are we talking girth or length?  Is it cut? Is it uncut?”  Well John just laughed and wouldn’t tell me anymore.  So I just became obsessed with it.  That was all I could think about every time I got around Billy Bob.  

SL:  You have a greatly anticipated project that will hit TV screens this summer Sordid Lives.  I heard you always knew that this would be huge.

LJ:  Well we did it first as a play, and I wasn’t sober, I’ve been ten years sober now.  The last year that we did the show as a play I went to jail five times, FIVE TIMES!  It got to the point where Del Shores wouldn’t come get me anymore.  I’d call him and say “Del, you gotta come get me I’m in jail.”  He’s say “No.” Beth Grant, she’s a recovering alcoholic. “She told me not to come get you.”  I wouldn’t speak to them for a long time.  But anyway, we would just have crowds when it was just a play.  You know people would just line up and I thought this is gonna go somewhere.  

SL:  You play Peanut in Sordid Lives who hangs out every night at the local piano bar picking up hustlers and his character is based on you…

LJ:  Based on me when I drank.  He based it on two or three people, but I used to tell Del Shores stories about me sitting in those bars, they weren’t really piano bars, he added that.  It was the kind of bars like, you remember across the street from the old Moby Dick’s there were those two scary bars across the street in a little strip mall.  That’s the kind of bar I would hang out in.  Where the hustlers were, you know the young boys that were addicted to rock cocaine and they needed $40 to get their rock cocaine.  I would sit there with a cocktail in one hand and an ATM card in the other.  

You know in retrospect it wasn’t even about the sex.  I was just so isolated.  You know when you are a drug addict and alcoholic, people can’t put up with you anymore so you start gravitating toward people that drink and drug like you do.  And you end up with all these lower companions.  Well I would get these boys and I would pay them $40 just to come home with me and sit with me ‘til I fell asleep.  Then they would rob me, every one of them.  Then I would take the same one home that had robbed me the week before but I had forgotten and he’d rob me again.  That is how the Peanut character came about.

SL:  Tell me about Twelve Miles of Bad Road ( A new show from the creator of Designing Women in which Jordan stars with Lily Tomlin and Mary Kay Place.  The story revolves around a Dallas Real Estate family).

LJ:  This is just the saddest thing that’s ever happened to me.  I really and truly believed that I had hit the mother load.  I really thought that this was going to take care of me for the next ten years.  We shot six episodes that I thought were just brilliant and out of the blue there was a change in regime at HBO and they brought in these new people.  They thought it was too broad, they thought it was too sitcommy, so they shelved it.  A $25,000,000.00 project, that has never happened in the history of television.  I thought that was so unfair to not even put it on the air and let the people decide.  So, it’s floating around town.  Somebody’s going to pick it up, it’s too good.  The problem is it is too expensive because HBO gave us this huge budget.  Each episode cost $3,600,000.  Who is going to pay that?  So it has been turned down by TNT and FX and some of these smaller cable companies, they just can’t afford it.  I don’t know what is going to happen with it.  

What really pissed me off was that I heard that my character was part of the problem.  They didn’t feel that my character was a good representation of the Gay Community.  Once again I played this kind of Peanut character, a rich older man that likes young hustler boys.  It turns out that the guy that delivered the final blow was homosexual.  I thought you know I have taken shit my whole life, my entire career from straight people, and for that final blow to come from someone within my tribe, just devastated me.  But, it is what it is.  We’ll see what happens.

SL:  Lastly, tell me about what we can expect when you some and perform My Trip Down the Pink Carpet Live.

LJ:  My Trip Down the Pink Carpet Live begins at the 2006 Emmy’s where I am an openly gay very proud man and Cloris Leachman says to me “I have won eight Emmy’s, this is your first, how does it feel?”  I say, “Oh, Miss Leachman, I take it everywhere, I even sleep with it.  It is the only woman I have ever slept with.”  I deliver that line without any hesitation, without one iota of shame or fear.  That is how the show begins.  Then I say how did this young man who got off the bus in ‘82 riddled with beliefs that were handed to me in the Baptist church, beliefs that were impenetrable at that time.  So how did I go from this to winning an Emmy.  Then I say “This is my trip down the pink carpet.  These are my stories, these are my songs.”  

It is wildly funny and I tell a lot of the stories you just heard.  I think it is even better than “Like a Dog on Linoleum” my last show.  

Learn more about the brilliantly funny Leslie Jordan at www.thelesliejordan.com
Learn more about The Trevor Project at www.thetrevorproject.org or call 866-4-U-TREVOR

Leslie will be in Texas signing his new book and performing his one man show, both titled My Trip Down the Pink Carpet on the following dates:  

Dallas/Fort Worth

May 25th Jordan will speak at both the 9 and11am services at Dallas’ Cathedral of Hope and sign copies of his book after both.  Advance book sales and more information at www.cathedralofhope.com

May 28th Jordon performs his new one man show at Dallas’ Majestic Theater
May 31st Jordon performs his new one man show at Fort Worth’s William Edrington Scott Theater.

Austin

June 9th Jordon signs copies of his new book at Borders. 447 South Lamar. 7pm
June 10th Jordon performs his new one man show at the Paramount Theater.

Houston

June 11th Jordan signs copies of his new book at Barnes & Noble.  12850 Memorial Drive.  5pm
June 11th Jordon performs his new one man show at the Cullen Theater.


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