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Jordan's career is now busier than ever. He just signed on to play a recurring character in an upcoming CW network series created by Kevin Williamson of Dawson's Creek. In the weeks leading up to the Emmy Awards, Jordan is performing onstage in Los Angeles in Sordid Lives, Like a Dog on Linoleum and Southern Baptist Sissies.

“And then,” he announces, “Delta Burke and I are taking off on a tour this fall, to get the word out and raise money for the movie version of Southern Baptist Sissies. It's working out beautifully. I've got all this TV work during the week, and then every weekend we'll hit a different city.”

Jordan is eager to tour with Burke, his longtime friend and showbiz colleague. “I love working with Delta,” he gushes. “She's the kind of actor I am. Some actors do a whole lot of preparation — they delve into the script, write all over it, chew it up, etc. Honey, Delta and I just do it ! If it ain't gonna be fun, we're not gonna do it. We just go up there and rely on the God-given kinetic instincts we have.”

Jordan compares Burke to Megan Mullally. “Megan and I just play verbal ping-pong. We go out there and have a good time.”

One of Jordan's favorite subjects, and a major recurring theme in his one-man shows, is his intensely close, often conflicted relationship with his mother.

“Let's just admit it,” sighs Jordan, “as with many gay men, I am my mother. My mom and I have the same sort of emotional responses to things. We are so much alike.”

As a young child, Jordan's uniqueness did not go unnoticed by his mother, yet she still encouraged his natural inclinations. “She told me on a daily basis that I was special and that I could achieve anything I wanted, “he says. “I had an idyllic childhood with her.”

Jordan recalls: “My mother and grandmother had taken one look at little Leslie, and said, ‘Well, he's gonna need some help.' So they circled the wagons as only good Southern women can do. They created a little secret garden for me, where it was OK for little boys to play with dolls, to sew, to make potholders. I was very artistic and we just kind of … didn't show Daddy.”

As an adolescent, Jordan also found encouragement in the works of gay writers such as Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Thomas Mann. “When you are 14 years old,” he says, “and you know you are gay, and you read Other Voices, Other Rooms and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Death in Venice with all those veiled inferences — I knew immediately what Skipper and Brick were up to — all of a sudden you get these glimmers of the world out there. Even though you are stuck in a Southern Baptist Church and told you are a mess that will burn in hell, when you read such things, you discover that there are other people like you.”

As an adult, Jordan found that his mother's conservative Southern sensibilities were often in conflict with his desire to, as he puts it, “get up in front of people and talk about what I talk about.”

Jordan, who has been sober for eight years, recalls that he and his mother often fought after they had a few drinks. “It would infuriate me that she seemed ashamed of me because I was a homosexual,” he says. “She was horrified with me in Sordid Lives, where
I play a man in full drag. After seeing me in it she said, ‘I can't even go to Sunday school with the way people talk — 51 years old and in that getup!'

“But in my journey into sobriety, my spiritual advisor gave me some wonderful advice. He said, ‘If you are going to expect her to accept you exactly as you are, then you need to give her the same respect.' My mother will never be Betty DeGeneres. She will never march in a PFLAG parade with a big sign. She is a very private person — very Southern. Manners are everything.”

In his mother's world, Jordan says, “There are things you do not talk about in polite society, one of them being your sexual preference. But it's interesting: When I began to just accept her, she began to at least whisper ‘gay.' She would lean over and say, ‘So-and-so has a brother and he's gaaaay.'" He drops his own tone into a whisper on the word "gay." "For me, that's progress.”

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