Crossing Jordan

By Kevin Perry

When you love life as much as Leslie Jordan does, you are eager to share your journey. The aw-shucks dynamo is bringing his Southern sass to the stage at Martinis Above Fourth on Jan. 29^–30, so we caught up with him for a revealing preview.

“It’s stories about a little boy who fell out of the womb and landed in his mama’s high heels!” giggled Jordan. “I ended up in Hollywood in a time when it wasn’t really kosher to be gay. I’ve always had gay agents, it’s the weirdest thing. Even as early as ’82, when I got to Hollywood, I remember my agent telling me, ‘You keep your feet on the ground, honey. Keep your hands at your side and you put your voice in the lower register.’ It’s kinda the journey that I’ve taken in Hollywood.”

But before Tinseltown was lucky enough to have him, Leslie sought a career in the equestrian arts – that’s a fancy term for horseracing, honey.

“I’ve been riding my whole life. I started exercising racehorses on a tiny farm to get ‘em fit for the racetrack in Cartersville, Georgia. It was very near the house where I grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. When the horses shipped in the fall to New York, I went with them. Literally, in the back of the horse van!” Jordan said.

It was a wild ride indeed, but Jordan’s boundless enthusiasm was soon reined in by the entertainment industry’s lackadaisical pace.

“When you’re a jockey, you’re waiting for that really good mount,” Jordan said. “Y’know, that really good horse. And when that really good horse comes along, you’re the same jockey that you were yesterday, but all of a sudden, everyone thinks you’re the best. And when I got into acting, I thought, ‘It’s the exact same.’ I’m just sitting here waiting for that one big part and when that one big part comes along, I’ll still be the same actor I was yesterday, but everyone will be applauding me.”

While Leslie was searching for that ever-elusive breakthrough role, he took a toxic detour into the shadows of substance abuse.

“I am in recovery from drugs and alcohol, that’s 22 years,” confided Jordan. “When I got sober at 42, I had never registered to vote. That is such a source of shame for me. We were just drinkin’ and druggin’ and who had time to vote? Who even woke up in time?”

Pivoting from infectious laughter to introspection galore, Leslie beseeches, “A change has got to come from within. Young gay people, you have got to vote. You’ve just got to. It is so important, this year especially. Don’t do like me, don’t wait till you’re 42! Please vote. You don’t think it matters, but it does. Oh, it matters.”

Ever since he traded the booze for YAYs, Jordan’s world has truly opened up.

“I wasn’t a very masculine kid; I wasn’t good at sports. I was asked a few years ago to throw the first pitch out for the Washington Nationals against the Chicago Cubs in memory of the people who were massacred at the Orlando nightclub. And I had never held a baseball in my life! So there’s this whole story of me, the little sissy kid, redeeming himself in front of 38,000 people, cuz I did really good!” Jordan said.

The world is finally acknowledging the bubbly, boundless joy erupting from Leslie Jordan, but some people took their sweet time. “Straight guys used to come up to me and ask, ‘Hey, aren’t you on TV?’ And I’d tell ‘em I was on ‘Will & Grace,’ and they’d say, ‘My girlfriend watches that’ or ‘my wife watches that.’ They would never say ‘I watch that.’ But by the time we went off the air almost eight years later, there were guys out on the street, y’know, with the construction crews, yelling, ‘Hey, I love you on ‘Will & Grace.’’”

Summoning the gravity of his role in LGBTQ history, Jordan punctuates, “That’s progress.”

Never one to dwell on the somber, Leslie adds a sudden flourish of gleeful self-promotion. “Y’know, I won an Emmy – let me get that in real quick! When I won an Emmy, I really didn’t have a speech prepared because who knew I was gonna win? My God, I was up against Ben Stiller and Alec Baldwin and Patrick Stewart. But when I won, I said, ‘Y’know there’s two ways to combat homophobia. One is through humor. I learned that in dodgeball in junior high school! When they yelled, ‘Smear the queer!’ I was up there tap dancing to make ‘em laugh. And the other way is to put a face on it. With ‘Will & Grace,’ people allowed these four characters into their homes and we laughed and we loved and a lot of progress was made.”

From his high-heeled birth to his eventual tap dance with destiny, Leslie Jordan has been leaving his footprints on gay culture for decades. To tiptoe through the triumphs with him, buy your tickets to “Over Exposed” at Martinis Above Fourth. Otherwise, you’ll be filled with gin and regret.