Free My Trip Down the Pink Carpet by Leslie Jordan

the editing bay.
    The writer to whom I owe most of my career is Del Shores. Although Del has written for many television shows, including Queer as Folk, Dharma & Greg, and Ned and Stacy, he is best known for his enormously successful plays. All of his plays take place in his home state of Texas and are known for eliciting both gut-wrenching laughter and heartrending moments of truth. Almost every acting job I have been hired to do can somehow be traced back to my appearance in one of Del Shores’s plays.
    I had heard that his first play, Cheatin’ (which I saw five times before I even met Del), was holding auditions at a dinner theatre in Kansas City. I had been in Los Angeles only a few years at that point, but had been lucky enough to get into two of the three actors’ unions: the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. I also wanted to get into Actors’ Equity, the stage union, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I went in to audition for the part of Bo Bob Jasper, a dim-witted, lovestruck mailman. I walked into the room and delivered the first line.
    “Mornin’, Sid. Nice day, ain’t it.”
    Del Shores almost fell off the couch. He laughed all the way through my audition. I was hired on the spot and he has not stopped laughing—at me and with me—for almost twenty years.
    Del, who is now openly gay, was engaged to a woman back then. Kelly Alexander was the daughter of Newel Alexander, who, like myself, had appeared in all of Del’s plays. We were one big huge family of displaced Southerners who relied on one another for love and support.
    I was asked to be a member of Del and Kelly’s wedding party. When their first daughter, Rebecca, was born, I was asked to be the godfather. Del Shores was my “straight” friend for ten years. We spoke three times a day on the phone.
    I have always considered my “gaydar” to be excellent. I can spot a fellow homo at forty paces. But never once did it cross my mind that Del might be homosexual. He is very masculine, and back then, like all good Texas boys, he wore Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots. He is the son of a Southern Baptist preacher and had graduated from a big Baptist college in Waco, Texas.
    In retrospect, I think he was a little too interested in my sexual shenanigans. This was years before I got sober, so my drunken, drug-addled sex life was like a soap opera unto itself. I do not think most straight men would want the details.
    Trust me, Del Shores wanted details.
    I had once gotten drunk, taken some pills for my nerves, and had a bad reaction. I somehow passed out inside the gates of a lumberyard that sits among all the gay bars in the middle of West Hollywood. How I got inside the gates of this lumberyard is anyone’s guess—but the really horrific part of the story is that when I got home, I realized I did not have on any underpants.
    When I told Del, he kept pressing me for more information.
    “What do you think happened?” he asked.
    “Delferd, I don’t know what happened. I got home and I was not wearing any underpants.”
    “Well, think hard! Think back real hard!”
    “I don’t know.”
    “It’s a wonder they didn’t press charges for trespassing !” Del exclaimed. “Do you think you had hot, steamy, homosexual sex on a forklift?”
    But back then I did not think twice about his sexuality.
    When he called to tell me the sad news that he and Kelly had separated, I was at a loss for words.
    “Leslie, I just cannot live this lie one more minute,” Del said. “I am a homosexual. I’ve known it forever. But because of my whole religious upbringing I could not bring myself to admit it. It is not fair to Kelly. I always thought it was something that would go away, but it has not. And I feel like my whole life is a lie.”
    The only thing I could think to say was, “Oh, honey, we are going to have so much fun!”
    He told me years later that remark brought him a lot of comfort during those