Del Shores is an activist, screenwriter, playwright and really fun guy. Having been involved with shows like Queer As Folk and Dharma and Greg, he is also the creative force behind Sordid Lives: at first a play, then a movie and most recently a 12 episode series. We caught up with Del in Texas to discuss our favourite dysfunctional family.

“I started writing it before I had even dealt with coming out. It has been an odd evolution for the piece. It started as a short story about aunt Sissy trying to quit smoking and three days later her sister dies. In the story the nieces come in and are fighting over if the mother should wear the mink stole in the coffin. I realized it would make a good play, and then started writing monologues after I came out, and that portion of the play was based on my Mother’s reaction to my coming out. Then I started filling in a lot of blanks. When I wrote it, it was so structurally odd. That is when I started directing, because I couldn’t explain my vision to other directors,” he recalled.

”The play ran for 13 months in LA. You stand in the back of the theatre and start thinking that it would be good as a film. Beau Bridges saw the play one night, he called me the next day and said, Del, this is a movie and you’ve got to let me wear that black bra. He wanted to play GW. I started adapting it, and it adapted so fast and furious. I was with the agency ICM at the time and they shopped it around and no one would make it. I had to make it on a video camera basically. At the time Beverly D’Angelo was attached to it as well. One day Olivia Newton John called. She has been a friend of mine for many years. She asked what I was doing and I said I was trying to get the movie made. She said, you have to let me play that bar singer. She was kidding of course, but I called her the next day and said, can you send me a letter of intent? I called all of my friends with money and got it made for half a million dollars. I had no idea what I was working, but it worked.”

The show features names like Caroline Rhea, Rue McClanahan, Leslie Jordan and Olivia Newton John, as well as most of the cast from the play and film.

“I just love Rue, and have loved her work for many years as most gay men have. When I started thinking about doing it as a prequel I started seeing Rue in my head as the matriarch. For her to play this West Texas, sexually pent up woman so different from Blanche, would be a wonderful vehicle for her. I knew that I probably couldn’t get her. We had no money to shoot the series or pay the actors, they all worked for scale, basically. I figured, what the hell, I got Delta Burke to get the movie, and Olivia, so I will send her the script. Rue called me and said, Oh honey, I just love it. I never thought at my age I would get to play a woman in love again, and I love playing a woman in love.... it doesn’t pay anything does it. I said no, and she said well I don’t care. I want to do it. We will act like we are doing theatre. I really did take my theatre troop and put them on screen in a TV show.”

The gays watching the series quickly found themselves smitten with the adorable Ty, a blossoming actor in West Hollywood dealing with his own coming out, new relationship, and dealing with his family. Ty is played by Shore’s husband Jason Dottley. This means you are probably thinking “Del, you are a lucky man.”

“Yes I am, I am very fortunate. Not only do I get to go to bed with Jason a lot, when we are together he is just a good person. I already had quite a good career going but the Sordid franchise had stalled and it was his idea. He has such a great business mind. He is kind and sweet and we just celebrated our sixth anniversary of marriage, and coming up [we will have been] together eight years. We have been legally married only a year, we got re-married legally on the anniversary of our first wedding and a few days later Prop 8 passed. We are one of the 18,000 couples that legally married in California.”

Dottley lets it all hang out, so to speak, in a couple of nude scenes that leave nothing to the imagination. “Jason has no qualms about that. I told him, I would like you to think about being naked in the series, and he said ok. One of the main questions I always get was, how was it to direct your husband having sex with another man. It was so technical, I was hopping in and having to move their leg, getting the shot right. I have to admit though when I was editing, it was very hot. But not on the set, it was all about getting it right.”

The series is left hanging (no pun intended), with many storylines that still need to be tied off. Unfortunately, the second season likely won’t be happening any time soon.

“It is in such limbo right now. It is very frustrating what we have gone through with this series. I put four years of my life on hold while the financing came together, and really we shot it for a lot less than we should have. We did not have the support of Logo once we got in trouble with the producers, who still owe all of us residuals. It ran almost 300 times collectively and that adds up. We have not been paid any money on those reruns. Logo picked up the second season contingent on the other financiers. There is bad blood with all of us and the producers. It has gotten legal with the guild and nobody wants to work with these people. I presented to Logo that they should buy the series. I got a price from the company and it was less than a million dollars, and they said no. …I don’t believe it to be the people who run LOGO’s fault, it is Viacom, who owns LOGO, that is not supporting this gay network. Gay people want good product, we are very discriminate with what we want to watch.”

So what will the future be of these crazy Texans and their Sordid Lives be?

“I don’t know what is going to happen. The performance is so good. We shot the impossible. I do have the rights to do more movies. I don’t own the rights to the series and would love to get that back through arbitration. The franchise will continue. It is not all I will be doing but I would like to make a couple more movies - A Sordid Christmas and A Sordid Wedding. It does not mean there won’t be a series but it will give the fans more of my crazy characters while they wait.”