Add Gay Spirit to Taste, Then Stir

Add Gay Spirit to Taste, Then Stir
By DAVE ITZKOFF
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/theater/24leslie.html?th&emc=th


How at ease is Leslie Jordan with himself these days? Comfortable enough that when he was hired to perform on a recent Alaska-bound cruise, he invited his mother to take the extra stateroom he was offered.

Mr. Jordan, 55, the flamboyant 4-foot-11 Emmy Award-winning actor and author, did not have to tell his mother explicitly that this was a gay cruise. But she may have gleaned as much when she received its schedule of fetish- and underwear-theme events.

“The phone rang,” he recalled in an interview last week, “and Mother said, ‘I tell you what I’m not going to do.’ ”

Mr. Jordan’s face hung like a hound dog’s jowls in anticipation of her reaction. “I said, ‘Oh, boy.’ She said, ‘I’m not going to go ice fishing.’ ”

This particular episode is not recounted in “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet,” Mr. Jordan’s one-man play about how he learned to embrace his sexuality as a young man in Chattanooga, Tenn., and as a performer striving for success in Hollywood.

The scene could easily fit into Mr. Jordan’s show, which opened Monday at the Westside Theater in Manhattan and is adapted from his book of the same title. But it is simply one more moment from a life that constantly reminds Mr. Jordan how far he has come.

Mr. Jordan expects his tale to be familiar to some theatergoers. “Gay people are like, ‘Oh, yeah, her,’ ” he said, his voice soaked in Tennessee twang. “ ‘There’s no new news here. How many coming-out stories can you have?’ ”

“But,” he added, “it is my story. And it’s entertaining.”

It is hard to imagine people being uncertain about Mr. Jordan’s sexual identity if they are familiar with the showy, self-obsessed Southerners Mr. Jordan has made a career of playing: a cross-dressing country music fan in the independent film “Sordid Lives”; the tart-tongued socialite Beverley Leslie on the comedy “Will & Grace,” for which he won an Emmy Award in 2006.

Nor has his being gay ever been a question in his own mind. As Mr. Jordan likes to say, he went directly from his mother’s womb into her high heels, and has been “on the prance ever since.”

But as an adolescent, Mr. Jordan was at odds with his Southern Baptist upbringing and the therapists and psychiatrists who told him his urges were “the voice of the Prince of Darkness.” That conflict was compounded in 1982, when Mr. Jordan arrived in Hollywood, where homosexuality was not much tolerated, on screen or off.

“The fact that I had a gay agent was good,” Mr. Jordan said, “because he could say: ‘Honey, you’ve got an audition today. Keep your feet on the ground, O.K.?’ ” The bit parts he was up for were usually coded with terms like nebbishy, “minty” or fey. “You could take it to a point,” Mr. Jordan said, “but you couldn’t take it any further.”

His ascent through minor roles in short-lived television series, opposite sympathetic future stars like Mark Harmon and George Clooney, makes up one strain of Mr. Jordan’s show. Another is his quest, begun in 1997, to kick his addictions to alcohol and crystal methamphetamine and learn how to be a gay man while sober.

“Here was somebody who was the life of the party for 33 years,” Mr. Jordan said. “All of a sudden I was 42, and all my medicine was taken away.”

Friends and colleagues say Mr. Jordan gives up these kinds of confessions regularly, without any prompting.

“He dispenses it so casually,” said the television producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who cast Mr. Jordan in the early-’90s sitcom “Hearts Afire.” Stories about man trouble may come up, as might sudden visits to California penitentiaries.

She recalled: “He might go, ‘I’m going to be a little late tomorrow, because I have to go up to Lompoc to see my boyfriend. Unfortunately he got shot with a crossbow.’ And you go, ‘O.K.,’ and he’s not kidding.”

Mr. Jordan can be just as quick with his tongue when he believes he has been wronged by the entertainment industry. Two years on, he is still stung by his experience on “12 Miles of Bad Road,” a comedy that Ms. Bloodworth-Thomason created for HBO, in which he starred with Lily Tomlin and Mary Kay Place as the black-sheep member of an already eccentric family of Texas real estate magnates.

In 2008 HBO canceled the show after six episodes were shot but before any were broadcast, a result for which Mr. Jordan blames his controversial character — a hustler-chasing gay man named Kenny Kingman — and the conservative attitudes of HBO executives.

“I thought, ‘Why can’t you have a gay character that likes hustlers?’ ” Mr. Jordan said. “I stood in that room with HBO and said: ‘What is the problem? Just because he’s not muscle-bound and adopting a Chinese baby?’ ”

HBO said at the time that the show did not fit its overall creative vision, but that it supported the efforts of producers to place it at another network.

But beneath his off-the-wall and sometimes angry anecdotes, Mr. Jordan’s friends say he is sincere in his desire to provide a younger generation of gay men with the peer group that he never had.

“I didn’t think anyone else had my story,” said Levi Kreis, who plays Jerry Lee Lewis in the Broadway musical “Million Dollar Quartet,” and who met Mr. Jordan after he came to Los Angeles from Tennessee.

Like Mr. Jordan, Mr. Kreis was raised a Baptist; he also underwent several years of so-called reparative therapy meant to change him from gay to straight.

What Mr. Jordan offered him and other new arrivals to Hollywood, Mr. Kreis said, was the feeling that “we had a place to belong, regardless of sexuality or religious past.”

“As crazy as one might think Leslie seems,” Mr. Kreis said, Mr. Jordan has also been an inspiration as a performer.

“There’s not a week that goes by,” he said, “that I’m not right in the middle of a performance and I don’t think, ‘O.K., what would Leslie do?’ It’s kind of replaced ‘What would Jesus do?’ in my life.”

Ms. Tomlin, who, with her partner, Jane Wagner, signed on to present the Off Broadway run of “Pink Carpet” after its debut in 2008 at their namesake Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center in Los Angeles, said the show had the potential to reach gay and straight audiences alike.

“I think everybody in the world would like to know that they can be that free and open with an audience, whatever they might identify as,” Ms. Tomlin said, “and to know that people would laugh and embrace them.”

The ultimate test of this will be when Mr. Jordan’s 75-year-old mother sees “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet” in New York.

On a scale of filthiness, Mr. Jordan said: “My show is a 5, but I can go to a 10. That can also be remedied.” For example, he said he once hired people to sit in his audience and cough simultaneously to prevent his mother from hearing a vulgar punch line.

“To this day,” Mr. Jordan said, “my mother says, ‘Well, I missed the big laugh, but I don’t want to know what it was.’ ”