Homosexuality and Bisexuality

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Close’ Director Lukas Dhont: Film’s Master Storyteller of Youth

      by

      At 31, Lukas Dhont already has two art-house hits to his name. The Belgian director’s latest film, “Close,” shows his skill at eliciting intense performances from young actors.As a child growing up in Dikkelvenne, a quiet, quaint village near the city of Ghent, Belgium, the movie director Lukas Dhont often felt like an outsider. Other boys saw him as too feminine and mocked his interest in dance, except one named Félicien, with whom he shared a close friendship. But as the two approached puberty, Dhont felt social pressures pulling them apart.“In that moment, that tenderness started to become looked at through the lens of sexuality,” Dhont, now 31, said in a recent interview. “People were divided into groups and boxes, and we were confronted with the idea of labels.” As they became fearful of being ostracized, their friendship evaporated, and Dhont, who is gay, was fiercely bullied for the rest of his school days.That experience as a young person struggling with expectations around gender and sexuality has shaped both of Dhont’s acclaimed feature films: “Girl,” his 2018 movie about a transgender ballerina, and “Close,” a devastating portrait of a friendship between two young boys in the Belgian countryside, which won the Grand Prix award, the equivalent to second place, at the Cannes Film Festival last year.From left: Gustav De Waele and Eden Dambrine in a scene from “Close,” and Victor Polster in a scene from “Girl.”A24; Netflix“Close” is being distributed by A24 in the United States and is being released in theaters on Friday. It further establishes Dhont as a phenom of global art house cinema and one of its most observant chroniclers of adolescence. And it cements his reputation as a filmmaker who is exceptionally skilled at eliciting intensely emotional performances from young, often untrained actors.Dhont, who employs loose scripts and encourages his actors to improvise dialogue, said his method resembled that “of a choreographer, introducing movements.” He said his relatively open approach allowed young actors “to bring so much of themselves” to the films. “I create characters for them to hide in,” he said. “They are like co-authors.”That strategy helped him to coax out two astonishing central performances for “Close,” a slow-burn drama about two 13-year-old boys named Léo and Rémi (played by newcomers Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele) whose close bond elicits scrutiny when classmates suspect they are a couple. After a skittish Léo begins distancing himself from Rémi, a series of slights build to tragedy.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.Dambrine, a French student at a dance academy in Belgium, had never acted before Dhont spotted him on a train in 2018 and approached him about auditioning for the lead role in “Close.” Dhont explained that he when he saw the then-11-year-old, he was struck by his “angelic and androgynous” features and “very big eyes.”Eden Dambrine in a scene from “Close.” Dambrine was a student at a dance academy when Dhont approached him on a train and asked him to audition for the movie.A24In a video call, Dambrine, who is now 15, explained that it had been a “boyhood dream” to act in a movie, and that he had gotten the impression that acting could be fun from watching the blooper reels from “Avengers” films. (He added that when he called his mother to tell her that a stranger had approached him about starring in a movie, she had responded: “Get off the train! Get off the train!”)His mother ultimately accompanied him throughout the shoot, which lasted two months, in Belgium and the Netherlands. Among other challenges, the film required Dambrine to act out several intensely emotional moments in long, silent close-up. After he nailed a scene, in the first take, in which his character has a breakdown in a doctor’s office, much of the crew began weeping, Dhont recalled.Dambrine’s mother, whose name is France, said Dhont’s talent for working with young actors was partly a function of his youth. “He is not that far from being a teen,” she said, adding that Dhont’s emphasis on fostering bonds between crew and cast members before shooting, and his openness to improvisation, allowed her son to feel comfortable so he could focus on the emotional elements of his performance.She also noted that Dhont and Dambrine shared the experience of having been raised by single mothers “who had to figure out how to raise their kids.” The director, she said, “has a lot of empathy.”“When you’re young, you want to belong to a group, but there are people for whom that doesn’t work,” Dhont said. Kevin Faingnaert for The New York TimesDhont recalled that he had first become interested in film as a child, amid his parents’ divorce, when his mother returned home one night from seeing “Titanic,” James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster. “My mom had been gloomy, and seeing her come back, telling me how beautiful it was,” he said, “I became obsessed with the film, and the feeling that a film could change someone.”His interest in making movies was bolstered at age 12, when an incident led him to give up his childhood dream of being a dancer. Dhont said that after performing a dance to the song “Fighter,” by Christina Aguilera, at a school talent show, his classmates mocked him even more mercilessly. “I felt so ashamed that I told myself I will not dance publicly anymore,” he recalled.Shortly after graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Ghent, where he studied film, he began making his first feature, “Girl,” at age 26. Partly inspired by Dhont’s own youthful experiences and the true story of Nora Monsecour, a transgender ballerina, the film won several awards, including the Caméra d’Or, at Cannes, but also drew a backlash from transgender people.Some were angered by the casting in the lead role of Victor Polster, a male actor who won an acting award at Cannes for his performance, while others argued that a climactic incident of self-inflicted violence in the film was exploitative. Writing in the Hollywood Reporter, the trans critic Oliver Whitney argued that “Girl” invited “the audience to react with disgust” at the main character’s body.“I just create characters for them to hide in,” Dhont said of the actors he works with. “They are like co-authors.”Kevin Faingnaert for The New York TimesThe blowback to the movie, Dhont said, was “emotionally challenging.” He added that “now, if I made a film with a trans character as the lead, I would make it differently,” but declined to get into the specifics of what he would change. “I can’t go back in time,” he said.Dhont said that his films thus far had been about the period in a person’s youth when they are “confronted with society for the first time” and “performing types of identities or stereotypes of identities.”“When you’re young, you want to belong to a group, but there are people for whom that doesn’t work,” Dhont said. “My films are about showing the world from that perspective.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      A Comedian’s Stunt Is a Sly Protest of Qatar’s LGBTQ Laws

      by

      Joe Lycett appeared to shred cash after demanding that David Beckham end his relationship with the World Cup. It was his latest performance with a point.LONDON — Hours before the opening ceremony of Qatar’s World Cup, the comedian Joe Lycett dropped great wads of cash into a shredder.Days earlier, he had posted a video in which he addressed the footballer David Beckham. Lycett called him a “gay icon” for appearing on the cover of a British gay lifestyle magazine. But he also gave him a week to stop being a World Cup ambassador for Qatar, which outlaws homosexuality and was reportedly paying Beckham 10 million pounds (more than $12 million) to promote the tournament.After hearing nothing from Beckham, the British comedian, wearing a pair of safety goggles and a frilly rainbow shirt, live-streamed himself feeding £10,000 of his own money into a wood chipper. He was subsequently criticized in British newspapers and on social media for shredding money at a time when many in the country are struggling financially.Except, in a follow-up video, Lycett revealed that he hadn’t really destroyed the cash, and instead had donated a total of £10,000 to two L.G.B.T.Q. charities. “To threaten to destroy money in a cost-of-living crisis? It’s a horrific thing to do,” he said, referring to Britain’s surging inflation rates.It was Lycett’s latest act of public performance as protest, an approach he had previously used to take on the British Conservative Party and Shell, the energy company. In a recent interview in a London pub, Lycett, 34, said he thought of these efforts as stunts: “War-gamed, and plotted.”Lycett, a popular stand-up comedian and TV personality in Britain who identifies as pansexual and so is attracted to people regardless of their gender identity, remembered visiting Qatar in 2015 as part of a comedy tour. “I didn’t feel safe there,” he said, adding that he was advised by the organizers not to leave his hotel. In Qatar, same-sex relations are punishable by up to seven years in prison, according to Human Rights Watch.Lycett onstage at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015. Earlier in his comedy career, Lycett said he preferred to make “gentle and nonabrasive” jokes “about cheese and being middle-class.”Richard Dyson/AlamySoccer fans around the world have expressed concern about Qatar’s human rights record, and when he heard that the World Cup was taking place in the Arab nation, Lycett was appalled. He hoped putting pressure on Beckham “to say or do something” would have “a much larger knock-on effect” in actively improving L.G.B.T.Q. rights in Qatar, he said.Beckham declined to comment for this article, but in a TV special made by Lycett that aired Thursday in Britain, Beckham’s team made a statement that read, in part: “We understand that there are different and strongly held views about engagement in the Middle East but see it as positive that debate about the key issues has been stimulated directly by the first World Cup being held in the region.”In an email after the show’s broadcast, Lycett said he was shocked by the statement’s “absence of even mentioning L.G.B.T.Q.+ people,” and its use of the word “debate.” “Essentially Beckham (or more likely his team) are saying human rights are up for debate,” Lycett said.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Dramatizing the Story of a Gay Mid-Century Tattoo Artist Who Was So Much More

      by

      “Underneath the Skin,” a theater piece by John Kelly, meditates on the life of Samuel Steward, who always lived boldly when others dared not.You might not expect a show about a man who wrote for the Illinois Dental Journal to come with a warning about “nudity, graphic images and adult themes.” But Samuel Steward, the subject of John Kelly’s “Underneath the Skin,” which begins previews at La MaMa on Thursday, may well be one of the wildest figures to ever prowl the outer reaches of American literature.Steward was an academic and a tattoo artist, a friend of Gertrude Stein’s who had trysts with Rudolph Valentino and Thornton Wilder, and such a meticulous documentarian of his own sex life that his extensive records, which included a detailed “Stud File,” were catnip to a certain Alfred C. Kinsey.“With this one, I just had to go for the gusto,” Kelly, 63, said of the piece, which he wrote, designed, directed and stars in. (Three other actors play various characters, and Lola Pashalinski appears on video as Stein.) “I’m at the point where I want to say ‘Screw you’ to everything, in a good way, and kind of puncture through a membrane of whatever’s left of propriety in my life.”Steward, who died at 84 in 1993, realized he was gay when he was quite young, and he steadfastly remained true to himself in an era less than hospitable to his kind. Even as society became more accepting, he was an outlier.This made him an ideal subject for Kelly, a polymathic visual artist, writer and performer with a decades-long history of creating shows about such real-life figures as Egon Schiele, Joni Mitchell, Caravaggio and the cross-dressing trapeze artist Barbette, each of whom he turned into characters in dance-theater fantasias. But even compared to those subjects, Steward led an extraordinary life — Justin Spring’s biography, “Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade,” which was nominated for a National Book Award in 2010, is an eye-popping, mind-blowing page-turner.John Kelly in “Underneath the Skin” at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club. The show is designed as a series of vignettes pulled from many stages of Steward’s life.Albie Mitchell“Underneath the Skin” guides us through Steward’s early years and sexual adventures, his trips to Europe in the 1930s, where he met Stein, Thomas Mann and Lord Alfred Douglas. (The show also elegantly brings to life its subject’s taste for group sex.)Feeling stifled by his American milieu’s oppressive propriety, Steward embraced a new creative outlet in the early 1950s. “He became enamored with tattoo culture, the underworld aspect of it, the sexy aspect of it, the human-contact aspect of it,” Kelly said.Steward started practicing tattooing on Chicago’s Skid Row, often applying his skills (in more ways than one) on sailors from the nearby Great Lakes training station; eventually he resettled in Berkeley, Calif., where he counted the local Hells Angels among his clients. That his canvasses included both the scandalous director Kenneth Anger (who had the word “Lucifer” tattooed across his chest) and Frederick IX, King of Denmark (whom he invited to drop into his shop), is a testimony to the range of people Steward encountered. Those extremes are reflected in a life where the literati rubbed elbows with rough trade, and violence was a frequent occurrence — sometimes consensual (this sadomasochism aficionado titled his general-interest column in the Illinois Dental Journal “The Victim’s Viewpoint”) and sometimes not.Kelly has created shows about such real-life figures as Egon Schiele, Joni Mitchell and the cross-dressing trapeze artist Barbette, each of whom he turned into characters in dance-theater fantasias.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesThrough it all, Steward never stopped writing: There was the Stud File (the subject of a Museum of Sex exhibition, “Obscene Diary,” in 2011) but also a detailed journal, essays, fiction. After a “legitimate” novel tanked in 1936, he went on to publish, under the name Phil Andros, erotic pulp fiction. Walking over to a low table in his living room, Kelly picked up some Andros books, including “The Boys in Blue” and “Greek Ways,” that he had managed to procure. “They were very expensive,” he said with a sigh.Steward’s punctilious, frank documentation of his sexual adventures was one of the things that appealed to Kelly, himself a diarist whose decades-long practice fueled his 2018 “live memoir” of a show “Time No Line.” But despite the abundance of biographical material, the new piece, which was first presented at N.Y.U. Skirball in 2019, is not a straightforward retelling. “Samuel Steward touched every single aspect of gay male sexuality over the course of the 20th century, and his life demanded to be theatricalized in some form, and obviously not in an episodic manner,” said Jay Wegman, the director of N.Y.U. Skirball, who commissioned the show. “John’s interpretation is more a meditation on his life.”The show is designed as a series of vignettes pulled from many stages of Steward’s life, sometimes re-enacting scenes he had described in his diary. To properly channel him, Kelly immersed himself in primary sources. “I wanted to find as many of his actual words as I could,” he said. “I had to find his voice, see photographs of him at different points in his life, see his drawings, see his tattoo designs, and develop a sense of his trajectory. What kind of flesh do you put on the bones? That’s a recipe of movement, of design, of video, of music.”For him, “Underneath the Skin” is a semaphore that signals a presence now too easy to forget. “I’m trying, in a polite way, to shove this story down people’s throats — meaning the 20th-century history of gay and lesbian and trans people who found ways of having a life when there were so many risks,” he said. “What makes him unique is the fact that his ephemera comes down to us so we have actual proof, so to speak, of his existence.”The specifics of Steward’s life can feel remote today, yet one thing still resonates loudly — his formidable will to be true to himself, and to connect. “Even when he’s musing on mortality and old age at the end of the piece, there’s still these images that come in the video of that quest for contact,” Kelly said. “It’s human nature: We need to make contact, we need to find warmth.” More

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Adeem the Artist, Crafting a Country Music of Their Own

      by

      Adeem Bingham has wrestled for decades with their identity as a Southern, Christian, queer songwriter. Can modern country music make space for them and their experiences?Hannah Bingham understood that the blouse she had bought for her spouse of six years, Adeem Bingham, who was turning 32 in 2020, would be more than a mere garment or birthday present. Deep green silk and speckled with slinking tigers and glaring giraffes, it was Hannah’s tacit blessing for Adeem to explore beyond the bounds of masculinity.“Adeem had expressed an interest in dressing more feminine, but they went in the opposite direction — boots, trucker hats, canvas work jackets,” she said in a phone interview from the couple’s home in Knoxville, Tenn., as their 5-year-old, Isley, cavorted within earshot. “I thought, ‘If you’re not doing this because it might change our relationship, I’m going to help you.’”The blouse proved an instant catalyst. Incandescent red lipstick followed, as did a svelte faux fur coat — another gift. Adeem donned the outfit for family photos on Christmas Eve, and a week later, announced online they were nonbinary. At the time, Adeem the Artist, as they’ve been known since 2016, was finishing a country album, “Cast-Iron Pansexual,” about the complications of being queer — bisexual, nonbinary, trans, whatever — in Appalachia.“That record became therapy, helping me understand and explain myself,” Adeem, 34, said, speaking slowly by phone during one of a series of long interviews. “But I didn’t have in mind to explain my queer experience to straight people. I had in mind to tell my stories to queer people.”“Cast-Iron Pansexual,” though, slipped through the crevices in country’s straight white firmament, which have been widened in the past decade by the likes of Brandi Carlile, Orville Peck, Rissi Palmer and even Lil Nas X. Adeem self-recorded and self-released the LP in a rush to satisfy Patreon subscribers. Galvanized by its surprise success, they returned to a half-finished set of songs that more fully explored the misadventures and intrigues of a lifelong Southern outlier.Those tunes — cut in a proper studio with a band of ringers for the album “White Trash Revelry,” out Friday — sound ready for country radio, with their skywriting ballads swaddled in pedal steel and rollicking tales rooted in honky-tonk rhythms. Adeem culled its cast of tragic figures and hopeful radicals from their own circuitous story.On her radio show, Carlile recently called Adeem “one of the best writers in roots music.” In an interview, B.J. Barham, who fronts the boisterous but sensitive barroom country act American Aquarium, suggested Adeem might be the voice of a country frontier.“People aren’t coming to shows because of a nonbinary singer-songwriter. They’re coming because of songs,” said Barham, who asked Adeem to join him on tour the moment he heard Adeem’s trenchant Toby Keith sendup, “I Wish You Would’ve Been a Cowboy.” “If your songs are as good as Adeem’s, they transcend everything else.”Before the blouse, Adeem struggled with discrete phases of intense doubt about identity, rooted in Southern stereotypes. First came the realization they were a “poor white redneck,” they said, a seventh-generation North Carolinian whose parents had a one-night stand while their mom worked late at a Texaco and married only after realizing she was pregnant. The family were pariahs, accused of spreading lice in a Baptist church and lambasted by an elementary-school teacher for teaching young Adeem to swear.“I was this misfit in the small-town South, really into hip-hop and metal, with long, bleached-blond hair,” Adeem said. “I was beyond that cultural sphere.”When Adeem was 13, the family moved to Syracuse, N.Y. Adeem tried to drop their drawl. “Everybody thought I was stupid no matter what I said,” Adeem recalled by video from their cluttered home studio, gentle waves of a mahogany mullet cascading across a tie-dye hoodie. “I wanted to be cerebral and poetic, words that seemed wholly incompatible with the accent.”“I imagine these songs getting on a playlist beside Luke Bryan,” Adeem said, “articulating a full scope of the country experience.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThough their family attended church sporadically in North Carolina, Adeem began to pine for religion in New York, hoping for a kind of literal instruction manual for life. They moved to Tennessee to become a worship pastor, writing and performing songs (in nail polish, no less) that sometimes bordered on heresy. Months later, “hellbent on living life like people in the Scripture,” Adeem shifted to Messianic Judaism.Nothing stuck, so they gave up on God entirely. (“That felt really great,” Adeem said and chuckled. “Big fan of leaving.”) Still, soon after marrying in 2014, Adeem and Hannah decamped to an Episcopal mission in New Jersey, where queer folks, trans friends and people of color prompted Adeem to face the ingrained racism, sexism and shame of their childhood. “I met my first person who used they/them pronouns,” Adeem said. “It put language to so much I struggled with.”Years later, that experience helped Adeem, a new parent back in Tennessee, address gender at last. Adeem’s father had jeered the flashes of femininity, which Adeem cloaked in masculine camouflage, continuing the practice even as they realized they were bisexual, then pansexual.Working on a construction crew in Knoxville, surrounded by casual misogyny, Adeem broke. They listened to Carlile’s “The Mother,” a first-person ode to atypical parenthood, until working up the nerve to walk off the job. A year later, the silk blouse appeared.A poor Southerner, a proselytizing Christian, a performative man: Adeem once thought they could change those models from within before abandoning them altogether, at least temporarily. Country music represented another avenue of progress, one they now have no intention of leaving.Adeem came to country when their parents decided their firstborn should not be singing the Backstreet Boys. Adeem fell hard for Garth Brooks and the genre’s ’90s dynamo women — Deana Carter, Reba McEntire, Mindy McCready. Adeem’s own music later flitted among angular rock and ramshackle folk, but for “Cast-Iron Pansexual” country represented a powerful homecoming. “Using the vernacular of country, I got to showcase my values with the conduit of my oppression,” Adeem said, laughing at how high-minded it all seemed.Where “Cast-Iron Pansexual,” which opened with the winking “I Never Came Out,” indeed felt like a coming-out manifesto, “White Trash Revelry” expresses a worldview built by reconciling past pain with future hope. Adeem addresses the grievances of poor white people they have called kin with empathy and exasperation on “My America.” They mourn American militarism and state-sponsored PTSD on “Middle of a Heart.” They fantasize about a revolution of backwoods leftists on “Run This Town.”“I was this misfit in the small-town South, really into hip-hop and metal, with long, bleached-blond hair,” Adeem said of their childhood.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“I am passionate about not wanting to be the Toby Keith of the left,” Adeem said. “I imagine these songs getting on a playlist beside Luke Bryan, articulating a full scope of the country experience. The stories of queer Appalachians and Black activists in the rural South are part of this culture, too.”There are signs it could happen. To record “White Trash Revelry,” Adeem started a “Redneck Fundraiser,” asking donors for just a dollar, as if it were a community barn-raising. They quickly raised more than $15,000, including cash from the actor Vincent D’Onofrio. For Adeem, the campaign revealed “how many people feel estranged by the culture of country.” They’ve since landed a distribution deal with a big Nashville firm and played a coveted spot at the city’s iconic venue Exit/In during AmericanaFest. “Middle of a Heart,” even before the album was released, netted more than 300,000 streams, a stat that stunned Adeem.“Country should be this giant quilt work of people, of stories that let me see different struggles,” said American Aquarium’s Barham. “Excluding any of those stories, for gender or religion or race, is not country. Folks like Adeem remind you of that.”Adeem seemed less sanguine about the prospect of moving beyond country’s margins, of infiltrating a genre and lifestyle chained to obdurate mores. Still, they beamed talking about widening queer acceptance, despite recent tragedies and political setbacks. Might it be possible for Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry and New York’s Gay Ole Opry, a decade-old showcase of queer country, to one day overlap?“Every part of me thinks there’s no way I’m going to make it in the country industry,” said Adeem, pausing to swig from a giant Dale Earnhardt mug before continuing, drawl intact. “But no part of me thought Brandi Carlile would call me one of the best songwriters in roots music, so I have no idea anymore.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Leslie Jordan, ‘Will & Grace’ Actor and Instagram Star, Dies at 67

      by

      Shows like “Will & Grace” made him a familiar face, then the pandemic brought new fame. He was killed in a car crash in Hollywood.Leslie Jordan, a comic actor who after a late start in his performing career became a recognizable face from roles on numerous television shows, most notably “Will & Grace,” then achieved even more fame during the pandemic when his quirky homemade videos attracted millions of Instagram followers, died on Monday in a car crash in Hollywood, Calif. He was 67.David Shaul of the BRS/Gage Talent Agency, which represented him, confirmed the death. News reports quoting the police said Mr. Jordan’s car crashed into the side of a building after he had apparently experienced a medical emergency. A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department confirmed that someone driving a BMW collided with a wall in Hollywood at 9:30 a.m. and died, but he declined to identify the victim.“Not only was he a mega-talent and joy to work with,” Mr. Shaul said of Mr. Jordan by email, “but he provided an emotional sanctuary to the nation at one of its most difficult times.”That was a reference to Mr. Jordan’s surprising foray into viral videos during the pandemic. Sitting out Covid-19 in Tennessee, near his family, he began posting vignettes on Instagram — simple, amusing moments from his life — and was surprised to find his number of followers balloon into the millions. He had accumulated more than 130 television and film credits, so he hadn’t been exactly undiscovered, but the Instagram stardom at age 65 was an unexpected treat.“I’ve loved attention, wanted it my whole career,” he told The New York Times in 2020, “and I’ve never gotten this kind of attention.”He also found that he had become a sort of de facto comforter to those fans.“What I love, though,” he said, “are people that pull me aside and say: ‘Listen, I don’t want to bother you, but I’ve had a rough go. I’ve been locked down. I’ve got kids, and I looked forward to your posts and you really, really helped me through this tough time.’ When people tell you things like that, you realize comedy is important.”Mr. Jordan in 2020. The popular home videos he made during the Covid-19 pandemic “provided an emotional sanctuary to the nation at one of its most difficult times,” his agent said.Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesComedy came easily to Mr. Jordan, though it took him a while to find his way to a performing career. At under five feet tall, he was small enough that in his 20s he made a stab at becoming a jockey. But in his later 20s he gave up that idea, earned a theater degree and in 1982 took a bus to Hollywood.It was a difficult period for a gay actor like Mr. Jordan to find work, but he began getting jobs, first in commercials.“I was like Flo,” he said in the 2020 interview, a reference to the Progressive Insurance pitchwoman. “People would recognize me. I was the PIP Printing guy. I was the elevator operator to Hamburger Hell for Taco Bell, where you went if you didn’t eat tacos.”He began to get TV roles in 1986 — guests spots on “The Fall Guy,” “Murphy Brown,” “Newhart” and others, then recurring roles on “The People Next Door,” “Top of the Heap,” “Reasonable Doubts,” “Hearts Afire” and more.He made a particular impression on the sitcom “Will & Grace,” about the friendship between a gay lawyer and a straight interior designer sharing a New York City apartment. Mr. Jordan played the tart-tongued socialite Beverley Leslie, appearing both in the original series beginning in 2001 and in the recent reboot.In 2006, he won an Emmy for the role, for outstanding guest actor in a comedy series.Leslie Allen Jordan was born on April 29, 1955, in Memphis to Allen and Peggy Ann Jordan and was raised in Chattanooga, Tenn. His Southern drawl was as distinctive a part of his résumé as his height.Mr. Jordan said he knew from early in life that he was gay — he liked to say that he went directly from his mother’s womb into her high heels and had been “on the prance ever since.”The household was conservative, and his father, who was in the Army and died in a plane crash when Leslie was 11, was concerned enough about Leslie’s effeminate qualities to send his son to an all-boys summer camp one year. As Mr. Jordan told the story to The Times in 2020, at the camp’s parents day, awards were handed out, with the moms and dads looking on.“So here’s one for the best archer, here’s for the best horseback rider, here’s for the best swim person,” he said, “and I didn’t win anything. And my mother said my dad was just sinking lower and lower.”But the staff eventually brought out a trophy, presented it to Leslie, and someone announced: “This is for the best all-around camper. We have this kid who wasn’t actually the best at anything, but boy, he sure did make us laugh.”He loved horses but realized he wasn’t suited to be a jockey.“People think it’s size, or something,” he told The Telegraph of Britain in 2021. “It has nothing to do with that. You have to weigh about 104 pounds, and honey, my ass alone weighs 104.”When he decided to try showbiz, he said, “I had $1,200 that mother pinned into my underpants,” and he had to decide which direction to go from Tennessee, to New York or Hollywood.“If I was going to starve, I wanted to starve with a tan,” he said. He headed west.Mr. Jordan in 2010. In recent years he was much in demand, with recurring roles on several TV series.Richard Perry/The New York TimesAs he wrote in his book “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet” (2008), he knew that being gay might not help his prospects in Hollywood.“I decided I was going to make a real effort to ‘butch it up’ and hide any signs that I was a Big Homo,” he wrote. “The funny thing is, I am, without a doubt, the gayest man I know.”Once he began landing roles, they came quickly, but Mr. Jordan also had substance abuse problems.“I tell people: If you want to get sober, try 27 days in the L.A. men’s county jail,” he told The Guardian in 2021. At 42, he kicked his addictions to alcohol and crystal meth.Information on his survivors was not immediately available.Most of Mr. Jordan’s work was in television, but he also took the occasional film role, including in “The Help” (2011). He also had a one-man stage show that he performed frequently, titled, like his first book, “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet.” It was an autobiographical collection of stories.“I am a high school cheerleader stuck in a 55-year-old man’s body,” he confessed in one memorable line. “If you were to cut me open, Hannah Montana would jump out.”David Rooney reviewed it for The Times when the show was presented in New York in 2010.“Many gay rites-of-passage stories are echoed here: hostile small-town environment (Chattanooga, Tenn.); rigidly masculine father; humor as armor against bullies; unrequited loves; drug and alcohol dependency; internal homophobia; weakness for rough trade,” Mr. Rooney wrote. “But Mr. Jordan’s candor gives them a fresh spin.”In recent years Mr. Jordan was much in demand, with recurring roles in the TV series “American Horror Story,” “Call Me Kat,” “The Cool Kids” and “Living the Dream.” In 2021 he published another book, “How Y’All Doing? Misadventures and Mischief From a Life Well Lived.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More