LESLIE JORDAN

We figured out as a community of gay people, we have to take care of our own.

The only thing I know how to do is be funny - that's it.

I grew up riding. From the time I was nineteen years old to the time I was twenty five I exercised race horses.

My mother had found this album of all these old slides from the '50s of me as a kid and I said, 'We should have these made into pictures because the color's so beautiful.' There were pictures of me from 1955 as a little baby wearing all these elaborate outfits, and in these pictures was this amazing story of a gay man and his mother.

Film's a director's medium. Stage an actor's medium.

I don't know why all three, my comedic idols are... women.

I really think 'Straight Outta Chattanooga' is one of my best shows.

I've always been interested in forensics and the way they solve things.

I'm very proud of my Southern accent, it's part of me.

I'm one of the most popular cabaret performers, and I don't sing a note. And nobody expects me to sing.

I can spot a homosexual at forty paces.

I won an Emmy in 2006!

I'm on the road almost eight months of the year.

I got sober at age forty-two.

I'm Southern to the bone.

You almost had to have grown up in the church like I did to realize how dark that is, how dark it is to be a kid and be told that God hates you or that there's something wrong with you.

I don't mind playing gay because there's a whole plethora of gay roles out there, but if I get asked to play one more Southern hairdresser, I'm going to scream.

I have a lot of shame, and until I got sober at 42 years of age, I had never voted. I was just a hippie.

I don't know what the other celebrity's lives are like but I lead a true celebrity life. I get pampered. I'm always alone.

I'm truly 95 percent a hermit.

I had 20,000 followers and I treasured that. People'd say, 'Oh that's nothing.' I said, 'What are you crazy? That's 20,000 people that wanna hear what I gotta say!'

I feel as if I've been to Miami a million times because I do so many cruises out of Miami.

Lesbian humor is nothing like gay men's humor. We're sillier.

In 1993, I premiered my solo piece 'Hysterical Blindness and Other Southern Tragedies That Have Plagued My Life So Far' at the Hudson Mainstage Theatre. It then went to New York and ran for several months Off-Broadway.

All my life I've always been so ashamed of being feminine.