Written by:
Diane Anderson-Minshall
Photographer:
Austin Young
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this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 14#6
Lesbians — perhaps even more than the hordes of gay men who flock to her shows — love Margaret Cho. There are so many reasons: her endless activism; her open bisexuality; her struggles with Hollywood’s sexism, racism and fatphobia; and even her new line of clothing, which includes same-sex wedding dresses for gals racing to the altar just ahead of legal injunctions (“You don’t have to deny yourself the dignity and grace of the traditional white satin feeling. It’s a symbolic gesture”).
Cho’s latest manifesto, Revolution, debuted last summer to glowing reviews and sold-out theaters. As she kept busy landing in hot water with conservatives over her comments about Iraq and President Bush and gearing up for a tour with Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls, Curve was there to ask the most pressing question of all: What was it like making out with Anna Nicole Smith during the busty exhibitionist’s televised Christmas special?
Cho bubbles, “Ohhhhh … she’s great. It was like a really funny thing, because it was such a staged party, and I don’t know her, and I don’t know any of those guys, and I don’t drink or anything, but they kept trying to make me drink out of this weird fountain. It was this ice fountain that they had filled with Jägermeister that was a mold of her body. … I didn’t know what else to do, because I was so bored. It was like, when it was on TV, it was for one second or something. But actually, we made out for like 10 minutes. I mean, it was really a long time.”
So why the Sapphic smooches?
“I kind of didn’t know what else to do,” Cho admits. “That’s been my solution at other parties.” (Where was Cho during our high-school keggers?)
The Anna Nicole Show aside, Cho isn’t a fan of television’s latest reality craze.
“I don’t really understand it. I think what’s very demeaning in general are the extreme-makeover shows, which are very horrifying. … It’s abusive of women not only on the show, but on a greater scale of, you know, the American [public] and how we feel about ourselves as women, what we are supposed to be, and our role in society.”
Cho admits she hasn’t seen The L Word yet (though she’s a Mia Kirshner fan), but she knows exactly what a lesbian reality show would look like.
“I think it would kind of be set in and around Home Depot,” she laughs. “And softball teams … and moving.”
For a comic with so many lesbian fans, it’s easy to imagine Cho getting lots of visits from baby-dyke groupies bearing tofu casseroles and earnestly written sonnets. That, she says, is a bit off the mark.
“I get a lot of dream catchers and a lot of beadwork. It’s all because I’m a big fan of that kind of work. I actually make my own jewelry.”
So is Cho a bit more hippy-dippy than her public persona allows? Yes and no.
“You know, I met the Indigo Girls at the March for Women’s Lives in Washington a few weeks ago and I almost died, I was so excited.”
This year’s march was just the latest in a series of political maneuvers Cho has undertaken recently — she’s agitated against the war in Iraq, engaged in vociferous debates for the legalization of same-sex marriage and articulated fervent arguments against the death penalty.
“I find the people who are against war in Iraq are for same-sex marriage. They understand that we are really fighting for the real America that was laid down before the current administration came into office,” Cho rails. “So [I’m looking to take] entertainment and spin it into a political realm, but make it more about women and [our] unifying causes.”
But Cho insists that critics who call her simply “angry” are confusing anger with the truth.
“I don’t think they understand that … when women speak we aren’t always angry, we are not always bitches. … We are just speaking the truth, which is a very frightening thing for a patriarchal society.” For a Korean-American woman raised among the queers, feminists and hippies of freewheeling San Francisco, that patriarchal mindset is more than frightening. As an artist who has built a career out of freedom of speech, Cho was reminded of just how patriarchal our culture still is during the Janet Jackson Nipplegate fiasco months ago.
“Women are … exploited constantly in the media, and … [when a woman uses] her body, her music, her politics to create, she is vilified. It is a stupid argument. That is a big black mark against free speech, women’s rights, respect for women, everything. I just can’t stand it. People are getting it now, how dumb it was, and how it was just smoke and mirrors to deflect attention away from the real crimes that are happening in Washington and overseas.”
For all the antics and theatrics that have accompanied the feisty comedian — skits about trading sex for chores, recalling the glory of, er, glory holes — today, she’s more of a political leader than a Hollywood hotshot.
“The future of marriage does not exist unless there is same-sex marriage, because that would mean that we have been treating gays and lesbians as second-class citizens all this time,” she argues, sounding more like a campaign contender than the next Lucille Ball.
Just when we thought Margaret Cho had gone all grown-up on us — getting married, coming out as a politically active feminist — she reminds us why she’s one of America’s funniest women. Like when she interrupts a political debate to talk about how she doesn’t watch American Idol.
“I don’t really have a handle on things in terms of pop culture,” Cho admits. “You know, I can talk to you more about what I think is creepy — that Nicole Kidman is going out with that guy from Fox News. To me, she’s a big Queer Eye, and I wonder how she can go out with a guy from Fox News. He’s so creepy.”
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