He’s Back! Our Leslie Jordan’s Isolation in Tennessee Has Made Him an Instagram Star

America’s best coronavirus Instagram celebrity?   The man who quarantine and Instagram are making the star he’s always been?

That would be our Leslie Jordan.

Jordan, while he actually lives just outside of West Hollywood, has long considered the city to be his home (and the Big Gay Starbucks on Santa Monica at Westmount to be his “house.”)

However, for the past few months he’s been isolating himself at an Airbnb in Chattanooga, Tenn., near where his 84-year-old mother and twin sisters live (and where Jordan, now 65, grew up and acquired his classic Southern accent).  While there helping out his mother, he has posted a series of hilarious videos about his life in coronavirus isolation that have grown his Instagram following from 80,000 people to more than four million and led national media to declare him an Instagram star.

And Leslie Jordan is back, as can be seen in the video above (posted on Istagram this morning) in which he leaves his favorite Starbucks (the Big Gay one) with his morning sweet tea and reminisces about his encounter there on July 29, 2015, with three young men who referred to the gay customers around them as “faggots.”

Jozseph Daniels, a photographer who was there, said Jordan yelled at the men to  “get out of my house.” Jordan followed the men outside objecting to their language. Daniels and another customer walked outside to protect  their 4’11” friend. Jordan. “The guy lunged at Leslie to hit him,” Daniels said of one of the men. “Then Leslie threw his drink at the guy. Then (another) guy threw his drink to hit me.”

Sheriff’s deputies showed up quickly and spent about 45 minutes interviewing those present at the altercation. Daniels said deputies urged the gay men not to file charges against the others, saying that if they did the men screaming “faggots” could accuse Jordan of assault for throwing his drink at one of them and the deputies then would have to arrest him. Daniels said the three men then walked away, headed east on Santa Monica and making obscene gestures to the gay men and continuing to call them “faggots.”

Jordan made the most of that encounter, staging a one-man comedy show titled “Not In My House!” at Feinstein’s at the Nikko, a cabaret at a San Francisco hotel. He joked to WEHOville that news about the incident, which was published around the world, got him so many calls from agents that a friend had told him he should do the same thing at every Starbucks.

Jordan arrived in Hollywood in 1982 (with $1,500 sewn into his clothing by his mother). After a brief career as a jockey, he began his long and up and down quest for a career in the entertainment industry. He won an Emmy Award winner in 2006 for his role as Beverley Leslie in “Will & Grace”. He has had great reviews of his original stage plays (“My Trip Down the Pink Carpet,” “Stories I Can’t Tell Mama,” “Fruit Fly”). He has been praised by critics for his off-Broadway musical theatre debut in 2011 (“The Lucky Guy”). Jordan also was the author and star of his own HBO special, “Pink Carpet.”