Leslie Jordan Is Here for a Good Time—And a Long Time

Image may contain Leslie Jordan Furniture Couch and Armchair
Photo: Miller Mobley

It takes just seconds after connecting with Leslie Jordan for the consummate storyteller to emerge. Even the most simple question receives a baroque response. Where was I finding him when we spoke last Thursday? “Well, I got off the bus in 1982 here from Chattanooga, Tennessee, with a degree from the local college that I couldn’t even pronounce,” says Jordan, before sounding out thee-ay-tur in his trademark Southern drawl, “and I’ve been here ever since. I think I’ve done okay for myself.” After a pause, Jordan seems to remember the question: He’s currently at his home in West Hollywood, in case you were wondering.

It’s been a long journey—longer than just the 2,000 or so miles from Chattanooga to Los Angeles—to get to where Jordan is now, however. Across his four-decade career as an entertainer, Jordan has flexed his comedic chops on the likes of Will & Grace and Pee-Wee's Playhouse, become an accomplished playwright, and appeared as everything from a psychic medium to a serial killer across multiple seasons of Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story. Despite all this, nothing could have prepared him for his latest role, possibly his biggest yet: a viral Instagram sensation. With over 5.7 million followers and counting, his daily missives during the first lockdowns last summer saw Jordan become a reliable source of light relief from the horrors unfolding on the news, keeping his legions of followers (Rihanna and Michelle Pfeiffer among them) entertained by strumming the ukelele, moaning at the top of his lungs to his mom downstairs, or simply saying hello to his “fellow hunker-downers.”

“Well, give me a good pandemic and I just flourish!” Jordan says, cackling. “Everything I ever wanted over the years seems to be coming to fruition. They’ll probably say I’m an overnight success, but that was a looong night, I’ll tell you that.” Jordan's popularity is anything but a flash-in-the-pan, but he admits the sheer level of recognition feels unprecedented. “I had always enjoyed a tiny bit of fame, sometimes people would recognize me from Will & Grace or American Horror Story,” he says. “But now, with this Instagram thing, I can’t even get down the street without people hollering my name!”

“It’s wonderful, though,” he continues. “Before the pandemic, I had probably 20,000 followers, and then Megan Mullally posted something of mine, and she’s got a trillion followers, and my numbers just started jumping all of a sudden. I was in Tennessee with my mother, and my friend called and said, ‘Honey, you’ve gone viral.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t have the virus. I’m fine!’ ‘No, you’ve gone internet viral.’ And then I just watched the numbers go up and up. People have asked me how I did it, to give them some advice, but I honestly have no idea how it happened.”

Photo: Miller Mobley
Photo: Miller Mobley

Despite his befuddlement at quite how he ended up here, it doesn’t exactly take a genius to see why the formula of Jordan’s dispatches from quarantine were so deliriously delightful. Between John Lennon lip-syncs, parties on private islands, and unsavory parallels drawn between lockdown and prison, 2020 was the year when the glitz of celebrity lost its shimmer for many, with the irony being that the stars offering unvarnished windows into their lockdown lives somehow ended up garnering the most cultish followings of all. What else did we have to do but scroll through Instagram of an evening, after all? “I think it's because I never tried to do a celebrity thing, I never mentioned my latest TV show or anything like that,” Jordan adds. “I kept it very real, you know, I would just look at the camera and say, ‘Well shit, what are y’all doing? This is awful. I’m so bored.’”

It was thanks to one of Jordan’s methods of keeping himself occupied that he stumbled upon the idea for his most recent project: a 15-track country and gospel album titled Company’s Comin’, which was born out of Jordan’s regular get-togethers with his friend, the musician Travis Howard, for a spot of good old-fashioned hymn singing on Instagram Live. While Jordan happily admits he won’t exactly be putting Beyoncé out of business any time soon, the charming twang of his vocals and his warm, witty asides saw his fans begin requesting a record. After reaching out to some of his favorite musicians, the album now features cameos from the likes of Brandi Carlile, Eddie Vedder, and none other than Dolly Parton, who is, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of Jordan’s life-long heroes. (He recalls going to see her perform as a teenager in Tennessee, “back when she used to pat her hair and say, ‘What’s a country girl without a haystack?’”) “I just think Dolly does such good,” he continues. “She puts her money where her mouth is. I wake up in the morning, and I think to myself if there's a quandary: What would Dolly do?”

Recording the bulk of the album in Nashville, Jordan finally got the chance to meet his idol, whose easy-going, convivial spirit he tried to capture on the record. “It sounds like a bunch of people sitting around singing and playing the guitar in somebody's living room, which I love,” he says. It’s a philosophy embodied by the album’s title, which serves partly as a tribute to Jordan’s mother, whom he spent much of his lockdown with back in Tennessee. “My mother would say ‘company’s coming’ when we were kids, and that meant you had to wash your face, you had to change your shirt, you had to sit up straight,” Jordan adds. “It was just a very Southern thing that mothers would shout.”

Of course, as a young gay man growing up in a deeply religious family in the South, life wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows for Jordan, something he speaks freely about. Why, then, did he choose to revisit this musical tradition, one so deeply entwined with memories of his youth which he’s openly admitted were often traumatic? “In my most dramatic interviews, I’ll say I walked away from the church. I didn’t walk away, I just quit going,” Jordan says. “A lot of people quit going to church! But when I started singing these old hymns that we grew up with, the response was just overwhelming. People would say, ‘Oh, I haven't heard that in years,’ or, ‘We played that at my grandfather’s funeral.’ So instead of proselytizing, I thought, let’s just put it out there and people can take away from it whatever they want. Whether you’re Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, whatever you are this, it’s just good music.”

Photo: Miller Mobley
Photo: Miller Mobley

It feels in keeping with Jordan’s love of a tall tale that he would be drawn to country music for its inherent playfulness and sense of narrative, but it’s also the genre’s candor that appeals to Jordan: the fact he’s very much an open book is partly the result of his 24 years of sobriety, achieved with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. While the tales of Jordan’s debauched youthful high-jinks amuse—there’s a particularly memorable anecdote about him sharing a jail cell with Robert Downey, Jr.—it’s the radical honesty of his humor today that feels ultimately more authentic, and still serves as an important coping strategy for Jordan.

“Being able to laugh when you look back, you learn that in the rooms of recovery,” he says. “Only in recovery could somebody say, 'And then I robbed my grandmother, and we're like…’” Jordan pauses for dramatic effect, before breaking out into an uproarious giggle. “But it’s because you understand that incomparable demoralization, where you went was just awful and so dark. Even when I was at my lowest, I was still able to laugh. I remember thinking to myself, if I ever lose my ability to laugh at things or my ability to make others laugh, then I'm in real big trouble.”

This ability to make others laugh hasn’t just kept him out of trouble, it seems, but given him a whole new lease of life. With the kinds of opportunities falling into his lap he’s worked his whole life towards, however, the biggest takeaway from talking to Jordan isn’t his wicked wit or his razor-sharp pop culture observations, but simply his overwhelming sense of gratitude. Jordan has worked hard for this moment, and he’s going to enjoy every darn second of it.

“When I got off the bus in 1982, I had a list: I wanted to do a television series, I wanted to do movies,” he concludes. “I’ve been able to achieve everything I ever wanted career-wise. And the beautiful part is that I’m 65 years old, I’ve done all that, and what’s next? Who knows. That’s the wonder of it. I’m open and ready, and I’ve got a few dollars in the bank. I’m available, honey!”