"My journey with Del Shores goes back almost twenty years. I went in to audition for a play that he wrote called Cheatin’ that was on its way to Kansas City. I went into the audition and the first line was, ‘Mornin’ Sid, Nice day. Ain’t it?’ I just said this one line as a dim witted postman and he fell off the couch. I didn’t know what was going on. He said, ‘Oh my God! Where are you from?’ Anyway, thus began this 20 year love-hate affair. (Laughs) We fight all the time, it’s so funny. Anyway, he started writing for me. We went to Kansas City and I sort of thought he was gay when I first met him, but then he got married in Kansas City while we were there. I met Kelly, his wife, and when you saw him with her, well he was a lot butcher than he is now. He’s going to kill me for saying that. Well, I didn’t suspect and I’ve got good gaydar. I can spot a gay boy at forty paces. I can spot ‘em clear across the street. He was my best friend for ten years and I never suspected. He wasn’t as happy as he is now. Anyway, his oldest daughter, Rebecca, is my goddaughter and I was involved in holidays and all that. Then ten years into the friendship, my phone rang one morning and I had heard that they had separated, but he didn’t say anything to me. I used to talk to him on the phone every day. The wild part is that his ex-wife used to say, ‘Why don’t you stop running with these rough hustlers, these mean trashy boys that you fall in love with, and get you a nice boyfriend?’ I said, ‘Well, when I find a gay Del Shores, that’s who I’m going to marry.’ So, all of the sudden, he calls me up and goes, ‘I wanna tell you something and I can’t and it angers me that I can’t, but you’ve got the biggest mouth in Hollywood. Telephone, telegraph, tell Leslie Jordan. I wanna tell people when I wanna tell people.’ I thought he had cancer. He goes, ‘I’m gay.’ I go, ‘WHAT???!’ and I hung up on him. The weird part was that I had the hardest time with it. I’ve looked bak on it and maybe I felt betrayed because he was my best friend. I thought if he could tell anybody, he could tell me, but he couldn’t. I really do have a huge mouth. I mean, I’m know for that. I’m learning right now to curb my tongue and to curb my pen. I’m such a gossip and I love to write mean letters when I’m mad at somebody. Especially with e-mail, because you write something and <ZAP> it’s gone. I used to write a letter and then I would send it, then regret it, then go the box and reach in and get it back. Anyway, so now Del’s out of the closet and it threw our relationship out of balance. Then we went to Texas to do something and we got drunk one night. I’m sober now for five years, but this was my drinking days, and Honey, I could drink. We got really drunk and hashed it all out. Del used to use me as bait. People would know me from my TV work. The really cute boys would come over and I would say, ‘Oh, do you know my friend, Del?’"

"I’m from Chattanooga, Tennessee, but my adopted home is Fort Worth Texas. We did Sordid Lives the play there years ago. Del called me and said that he’d gotten some interest from this tiny theatre in Fort Worth and they did his other play Daddy’s Dying Who’s Got the Will and would I be interested in going out there and directing and playing brother boy in Fort Worth, Texas. I said that I’d rather get beat with a stick. Why would I want to go to Texas in the summer time? I know heat. I grew up in Tennessee.

"I love Fort Worth. I go out there for three months at a time just to get away, eat chicken fried steak, get fat, hear southern accents, and see straight boys wear tight pants. Those Wranglers! Belt buckles you could serve a turkey on. It’s the real thing, none of this Oil Can Harry’s cowboy shit, the real thing, Honey! Then they wear those skin tight Wranglers that just show everything. They think that they’re puttin’ on a show for the women, but I’m right there in the front row. I would sit at this out door coffee shop and it was just a parade."

"Southern Baptist Sissies was a lot of fun. It helps when a part is written for you. The very last scene wasn’t in the original script. I said to Del, ‘You’ve got two plays going and I don’t think Peanut belongs in this play.’ He said that he thought that Peanut represented everything that these boys don’t want to become. And I said , ‘You have to say that Honey, somewhere along the line.’ And he came back to me with that last scene and I said ‘Oh gosh, now that I can work with.’ because otherwise, I’m just a buffoon, a sad old queen. I mean wildly funny but I loved the way I got to redeem myself in the end because I got to say to these kids, ‘don’t become me and live with all this shame.’

"I think that my greatest achievement in my career happened in ‘93. I wrote this one man show called Hysterical Blindness and Other Southern Tragedies that have Plagued My Life Thus Far about growing up gay in a Baptist church. I had a full Southern Baptist choir behind me of big fat Christian women in robes who became characters as I told my stories. I produced it myself and it ran at the Hudson Theatre here in Los Angeles. All I could afford was the ten o’clock spot on Saturday night and it became like a cult thing. It ran forever, then it went to New York and it ran Off-Broadway for seven months. I became toast of the town, then made probably the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. I was invited into every development office in town for every network. It would always begin the same way. There would be four or five guys sitting there in suits, this was in ‘93 long before Ellen, and they would say, ‘Oh, we loved that play. Loved that mother character that had the hysterical blindness.’ It was about my mom who had this weird psycho-sematic illness when I was growing up. When she got upset, her eyes would snap shut. She couldn’t open them. It’s true. They would say, ‘We love it, BUT we just don’t think we could have our lead character as gay.’ They asked me to pitch it to them where the lead character wasn’t gay or where it wasn’t an issue and I wouldn’t do it. In retrospect I should have done what Ellen did which was get it on the air and when it gets in the top ten, I’m going to come out. Let America fall in love and then that will put a face on homophobia, but I didn’t. I just said, ‘F*ck em.’ So, here I sit guest starring on Will and Grace."

"Will and Grace is an absolute blast. If I could get on that show more, that would be heaven. They wrote my part for Joan Collins originally. She was going to steal Rosario then they were going to have a huge DYNASTY bitch fight across the pool table. At the last minute, she wouldn’t let them pull her wig off and they said, ‘Well, that’s the joke!’ So, my agent called and said, ‘Run over there and dress up like Truman Capote.’ People think that they wrote this part for me because his name is Beverly Leslie. It does seem like they wrote it for me. Of course they do write for me now. We did one episode not to long ago where we were at this Human Right Campaign Dinner on the show and because of that, I was invited to the real HRC Dinner in Los Angeles. They had silent auctions and wonderful entertainment. It was weird because Max (Mutchnick) was there and I was ready for the director to yell, "Cut!!!" I was belle of the ball because all the people there would come up and say, ‘Oh, we saw you on Will and Grace.’"

My Heros

"My dad was my hero. He was killed in a plane crash when I was eleven. He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army. He was a man’s man. It was a weird journey because I felt I was a disappointment to him because I wasn’t good at sports. They made me join T-ball and I couldn’t even hit the ball when it was on that little tee. I’d lay down in the outfield with my mitt over my face because I was bored. I’d practice cheerleader jumps. Anyway, not too long ago, my mom pulled out all of these slides of me when I was a kid and in my dad’s handwriting on every one of those slides was ‘my pride and joy.’ It was sweet. Other than him, I didn’t really have heroes growing up. I wish that some sports figure would come out and say that he is gay. Women have sports figures and Ellen and Rosie but we don’t really have someone to emulate. I remember lying in bed thinking that I’m the only one and that there is something radically wrong with me."

"As far as women heroes, I was walking up Third Street Promenade the other day and there was this big guy. I looked up and thought, ‘I know that man.’ I didn’t know from where and anyway next to him was this tiny little woman just prissin’ and she had this tiny little butt going everywhere. It was Bette Midler. She married this huge guy. Anyway, when I was in college in 1972, she came to Knoxville, Tennessee to do the homecoming concert. It was practically all gay men. I remember thinking, ‘God, there’s a world out there.’ It was my first exposure to gay humor or gay sensibility, whatever that is."

"Wait, you know who my childhood heroes were? I remember in junior high, I read Tennessee Williams’ plays and all of the sudden... I mean, I knew what was up between Skipper and Brick. I didn’t think that anyone else knew. I knew what was up in Other Voices, Other Rooms, that Truman Capote novelette with the funny uncle. That sort of kept me sane just knowing that there was someone out there. I remember reading Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and I just knew. Today, those are my three favorite writers. I also have this fascination with hustlers. I have this fascination with bad boys. I don’t know what it is. I have this fantasy that somewhere out there is this fallen angel and I take him under my wing and he ends up robbing me. Anyway, all three of these writers have an unbridled fascination with scum. My theory with the fascination is that maybe because of the shame attached with being gay in the fifties that they didn’t feel that they were worthy of a better partner; but then I think that’s bullshit too. We just love those rough young boys. They remind us of our crushes in high school. They are kinda straight acting. So yeah, my heroes were Christopher Isherwood, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and those gay hustler boys."

Be sure to see Leslie perform on stage in The Last of the Honky Tonk Angels at Globe Theatre, 1107 Kings Rd., W. Hollywood. Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 5 p.m. June 22-Aug. 10, 2003. Tickets are $22. Call today to reserve. (323) 656-9069.