 DAYS OF HIS LIVES
The man behind your favorite southern soap opera, DEL SHORES, stakes his claim in TV territory this summer as Sordid Lives finally becomes a series on Logo
As a veteran writer-director, Del Shores has dealt with plenty of tough times over the years. But perhaps none was more soul-crushing than the unsolicited pan he got at his Southern Baptist church camp during the summer between eighth and ninth grade. “This girl said to me, ‘Why are you so fat and ugly and your brother’s so skinny and cute?’” recalls Shores, cringing at the memory. As a self-described “little, fat sissy boy who loved his mama, food, musicals and singing in the church choir,” it was not a new line of questioning. “But then the girl said, ‘But you’re the funny one,’” adds Shores, smiling. “I think that’s what happens sometimes with gay people. You had to make everybody laugh to compensate for being effeminate or whatever we were.”
With his autobiographical TV series, Sordid Lives, about to debut on Logo, Shores is getting the last laugh. And he’s thin, too, so there. Like the 1996 play and 2000 film it’s based on, Sordid Lives: The Series is a Southern-fried blend of comedy and tragedy, one part trailer-trash family saga, one part Hollywood coming-out story. Somehow it all comes together. “I’ve always blended tones without effort, even in my plays,” says Shores over dinner at a pasta place near the Burbank looping studio where he’s putting the finishing touches on the show’s last episodes. “To me, it just feels like that’s the way life is.”
Shores based Sordid Lives on his own upbringing in Texas, where folks go by names like Latrelle, Sissy and Bitsy Mae and the town motto might as well be “The higher the hair, the closer to God.” “It always pisses me off when a critic says, ‘These characters don’t exist. They’re too over the top,’” carps Shores. “I’m like, ‘Come with me. Let’s take a little trip.’” So how do the folks back home feel about being fodder for his work? “At first, they felt exposed and were not happy,” concedes Shores, “but now they’re a little more proud. I was really thrilled because my real Aunt Sissy lives two hours from where we shot, and she’s an extra in one scene. I told her, ‘You can be an extra at the church or at the bar,’ and she said, ‘I think I’d be more comfortable in the bar.’”
Fans of the movie—and there are many—will be happy to see the return of actors Bonnie Bedelia, Beth Grant, Ann Walker, Olivia Newton-John and Will & Grace scene-stealer Leslie Jordan as the Tammy Wynette-obsessed mental patient Brother Boy. But wait. No Delta Burke? “Delta wanted to return, but she had a family situation that she needed to tend to,” explains Shores. “When she fell out seven days before shooting, I cried. But then we got Caroline Rhea, who I’ve fallen in love with.”
Also new to the cast is Rue McClanahan as the family matriarch, Peggy, whose sudden death jump-started the movie version—the series is actually a prequel to the film. “Del’s writing is very smart and funny, and as a person, he’s unfailingly good-natured,” gushes McClanahan. “I shot Sordid Lives with a heavy limp from recent knee surgery and a heavy body from swollen lymph glands that made me look like a blimp. I’d do that for only two people: Norman Lear and Del Shores.”
Though Sordid Lives marks Logo’s most star-studded outing to date, the most intriguing bit of casting is perhaps Jason Dottley, Shores’ husband of five years, as the show’s tormented gay protagonist, Ty. “Jason never asked for the role,” Shores is careful to explain. “At one point, Logo said we were going to have to shoot in Canada for five months, and I said, ‘I’m not going out of the country without my husband, so in my contract we have to cast Jason.’ Logo had seen him in the role onstage, so they were very comfortable with that.” (The shoot ended up in Louisiana.)
Was Shores worried that people would find that nepotistic? “Of course,” he admits. “My relationship with him has always been judged because he is so much younger than me.” Shores recently turned 50, and Dottley is 27. “I gave up on giving a shit what other people think,” he continues, “but I do care deeply about the quality of my work. So from my end it was like, ‘Okay, he has to be good. He really has to be good.’ It was actually a relief when he stepped in front of the camera and he was so natural. I think he’s destined to have a really great career, and I’m happy that it’s launched in Sordid Lives, because it wouldn’t have been a series without him. Jason saw the madness that was out there with the fans, and I really owe him for saying, ‘This can be more.’”
Shores met Dottley six years ago through a mutual friend. The spark was instant, but Shores didn’t see the long-term potential at the time. “I thought he was a really cute Band-Aid for my previous relationship, which was just awful,” says Shores sheepishly. When it started looking like the real deal, Shores admits to being bothered by the chiding from the peanut gallery. “I used to care deeply about what people thought of us,” he says. “I remember someone had written something nasty about us being together and the age difference, and Sharyn Lane, my best friend and producing partner, who has since died of pancreatic cancer, said, ‘Let ’em judge. You know your relationship, so who gives a shit?’ She actually said something that’s now a title of a song that Olivia sings in the series: ‘It’s None Of My Business What You Think About Me.’”
Shores and Dottley were married in 2003 in a ceremony held at Lane’s beach house in Malibu and plan to make it legal now that California has legalized same-sex marriage. So who proposed to whom? “Jason asked me on my birthday,” says Shores. “I had a couple of bad birthdays: a horrible betrayal situation with an ex, and then my dad died on my birthday. So when Jason proposed, he said, ‘I want to change those memories to good ones.’ He’s really very romantic and wonderful.”
But what was it like for Shores to direct his husband’s romance with others in the show’s love scenes? “I think it was more uncomfortable for the straight crew in Louisiana than it was for us,” says the writer. “I’m so comfortable with our relationship, and Jason is such a free spirit, so it was fine.” Though Logo’s standards are relatively tame, especially compared to Queer As Folk, which Shores wrote for in its final three seasons, Shores shot steamier versions of some scenes for the DVD. “Jason does full frontal on the DVD,” Shores reveals, “and he has nothing to be ashamed of.”
For now, however, it’s just Jason’s face—and everything above the waist—that is about to turn up on TV sets nationwide. Is the couple ready for that? “When the trailer got leaked online, we went out and several people recognized him, and he loved it,” reports Shores. “He’s eating it up. I’m not as comfortable with that stuff as he is.” Yet Shores isn’t above a little healthy competition. “On the Internet Movie Database, his ‘Starmeter’ is already ahead of mine,” he says with mock outrage. “Maybe when this article comes out in Instinct, my Starmeter will go up a little bit.” We’ll do what we can, Del. “Thank you,” says Shores with a smile.
Though at this point in his life Shores is comfortable talking about and depicting gay desires, he kept those longings buried for most of his life. “My dad was a Southern Baptist preacher, and I was taught so strongly that being gay was this horrible thing,” says Shores, who wrote about this struggle in his 2000 play Southern Baptist Sissies. “I worked so hard at butching it up. I used to tape-record my voice and try to talk masculine, but I knew.”
Racked with internalized homophobia, Shores married and had two daughters, who are now teenagers and the lights of his life. “When my marriage fell apart in the mid-’90s after nine years, it felt like it was end of the world,” he remembers, “and actually it was like the beginning for me. I love being gay.
I just love it.”
Shores admits that after coming out, he made up for lost time big-time. “I was a wild man, like a kid in a candy store,” he recalls. “I was working on a TV show and then going out after and having lots and lots of sex. I hardly slept. It was liberating.” Sordid Lives co-star Olivia Newton-John claims she served as a beard for Shores for years, though she didn’t know it at the time. “Del once told me that I ‘kept him straight’ for two decades,” laughs Newton-John, who became friends with the writer after her sister Rona took her to see Shores’ first play, Cheatin’. “Before he came out, Del said that every time he questioned his sexuality, he thought, But wait. I am attracted to Olivia Newton-John. Then he said he found out that lots of gay men were attracted to me. He said he couldn’t go into a gay club without hearing a dance remix of Xanadu.”
So how did coming out affect his career? “I was so worried about it because everybody knew me as this straight Texas boy who always wrote really well for women,” says Shores, whose career actually seemed to blossom after his coming out. “Now I tell people, ‘I’m really not gay. I just needed a career boost.’”
With his dinner plate clean, Shores gets up to head home to rest up for another busy day of post-production. So is there a lesson that people can take from his life and career?
“I hope that people can look at me and think, You can tell the truth in your life and career and survive and make money,” he says thoughtfully. “When I wrote the play Sordid Lives, I would stand in the back of the theater and I would hear the laughter and the clapping and think, They’re okay with me being who I am. It was like a gift to myself.”
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Sordid Lives: The Series will debut on Logo July 23.
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written by genemayer on July 23, 2008
i thought the series was great. i hope it goes on for a long time. i cant wait to see more.
written by laughing in florida on July 29, 2008
i love del shores and his amazing characters!!!i can't wait for episode 2