Free My Trip Down the Pink Carpet by Leslie Jordan Page A

dark days. The divorce was horrendous. We were all so close. We all tried our best to not take sides, but I felt caught in the middle because I was Del’s only gay friend at the time. I had to lend him the most support as I was the only one who truly understood what it meant to come out.
    The only ones who seemed to take it all in stride were the ones we worried about the most: Del and Kelly’s daughters. They were six and four at the time. I remember once, right after the divorce, the girls wanted to get a hamburger at Carl’s Jr. Del pulled the car over to explain why we couldn’t eat at Carl’s Jr. I thought they were a little young to have any kind of understanding of the whole ordeal, but Del was adamant about explaining everything.
    “Girls, remember what I explained to you about being gay.”
    The girls were sitting in the back seat, bored stiff. They nodded their heads, looked out the window, and chomped their gum.
    “Well, there was this gay girl named Ellen. And Ellen had a television show that was very popular. When Ellen came out and told everyone she was gay, Carl’s Jr. pulled their advertising. So I don’t think we should give them our money.”
    The four-year-old, Caroline, sat there twirling her hair.
    Finally she said, “Well, thank God it wasn’t McDonald’s.”
    I am not proud of the fact that I was not around a lot during Rebecca and Caroline’s formative years. I was too busy drinking, doing drugs, and running around on the streets of Hollywood. But I sobered up, turned around, and there they stood: grown, accomplished, confident young women. They are both wonderfully nonjudgmental and they seem to take everything in stride. They have an amazing relationship with Kelly, Del, and Del’s longtime partner, Jason, who once flew eighteen hours all the way to Japan to see Madonna on the last leg of her world tour.
    How cool is that?

Itty-Bitty
    W HEN I was growing up in the hills of Tennessee, all of my friends were listening to Wet Willie, Black Oak Arkansas, the Charlie Daniels Band, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. I could not bear that white trash, rock ’n’ roll music. When Charlie Daniels later started singing that awful song about the Devil coming down to Georgia, I would just turn the dial on the radio.
    My theory was that the hippie ideals I longed to embrace had been lost along the way as they filtered out from San Francisco. The only ideals that reached the Deep South were growing your hair long, dropping out, and smoking dope.
    I was above all that.
    My tastes in music were a little more eclectic. I loved vintage country-and-western music, and the swing music of the 1940s, especially the Andrews Sisters, Patty, Maxine, and Laverne. I loved Dusty Springfield, especially her rendition of “Son of a Preacher Man,” which is found on one of the best albums ever recorded, Dusty in Memphis . Miss Springfield brought her smoky voice over from England, sat down with a bunch of Memphis blues musicians, and the rest is vinyl history.
    I also loved the music black people were listening to. I secretly tuned into WFLI—the Black Spot on Your Dial! I would sneak down to the Memorial Auditorium in downtown Chattanooga to hear Wilson Pickett sing “In the Midnight Hour,” or Millie Jackson wail through “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right.” Miss Jackson had an album that came out years later called Get It Out’cha System. I had to hide that album under my bed because the lyrics were so nasty. They were certainly not fitting song lyrics to be heard by a (very reluctant) Young Royal Ambassador for Christ.
    I was the only white boy in the whole auditorium. They used to call me the Blue-Eyed Soul Brother! I could do all the dances, too. The white kids laughed at the way I danced during the prom, but in reality, I was way ahead of them.
    I’ve always been a good dancer. In junior high school PE class, we were given a choice: play dodgeball or take ballroom dancing lessons. Hmm, let’s