- “Some people are raised by wolves: I was raised by drag queens. The smell that takes me back is balls in pantyhose”
- “You know why lesbians love whale watching? Because they like the blowholes.”
- “Straight men are so simple – all they need are beer, and boobs, and buffalo wings.”
- “I love gay porn because the guys are fucking hot. The reason I love porn is I love dicks. I’m just a huge fan of the penis. Can I just say, I just love the penis!”
- “I have the biggest pubic mound in the whole world.”
- “You think you’re hot shit, but you’re just cold diarrhea.”
Margaret lives on the bend of a woodsy, curvy road high above the Los Angeles basin. The forest green and brown-colored split-level cottage is nestled among trees that blend into the environment. One lone wrought iron street lamp sits on the edge of the property. Cho lived here even before her trailblazing mid 90s sitcom All-American Girl premiered -- the first to showcase an Asian-American family in primetime.
Opening the old, creaky wood door, Margaret greets Tim Courtney (the A&U photographer) and me with her loving companion, a rowdy dog named Ralph (pronounced “Rafe,” as in actor Fiennes). Directly behind Margaret bursts the outdoors - the entire living room wall is a screened balcony! Between the leaves of the swaying trees, one can sneak a peek into the picturesque timberland beyond. She ushers me into the living room, where a camera crew is waiting to videotape our interview for an upcoming NAACP documentary. Remarkable Journey features Cho along with Hank Aaron, Cornel West, and Dolores Huerta and is hosted by Kweisi Mfume, head the NAACP.
Her modest home is well lived in, with an overload of scattered books, videos, CD’s, and trinkets that dominate this cabin in the woods. A bicycle leans against a bookcase. Among the pleasant clutter are several awards she has garnered, including the 1994 American Comedy Award for Best Female Stand-up Comic (Cho recently was bestowed GLAAD’s first-ever Golden Gate Award, joining the ranks with such honorees as Elizabeth Taylor and Elton John). In the kitchen, dog magnets decorate the fridge. The furniture - mainly two bright red oversized, low back couches - is arranged in no particular order. The biography of Brett Butler and New York City Ballet Workout lies on one of the couches. It’s a small, cozy living space, and one can see that this is Cho’s private haven where she spends a lot of time.
After introductions, we dodge around the lights, camera and wires. Margaret sits in her favorite plumpy black leather recliner chair. Her curvy, zaftig figure is garbed in a somewhat hippie-retro style: semi- loose orange-red blouse and snug jeans with lace ups from the cuff to the knee that expose her platform moccasins. She looks healthy and content.
I begin our conversation by acknowledging her humanitarian efforts. Margaret gives of herself. No, not that way, although she is a self-proclaimed slut. “I’m in a position, not just financially but in terms of my media power where I have the opportunity to speak on a lot of issues that are important to me. Issues like AIDS and this organization that helps people with AIDS keep their pets - PAWS [Progressive Animal Welfare Society]. It’s such a healing thing. When I lend my time to organizations like that it really helps me. It’s a means of educating myself as well. I get a lot out of it.”
And so do the AIDS organizations. Partial proceeds from her CD Live in Houston go directly to that city’s Montrose (HIV/AIDS) Clinic. Cho also has compassion for American’s gay youth. She is actively involved with the organization GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network), a national organization focused on combating anti-gay prejudice in schools. To benefit the GLSEN Scholarship Fund, she recently performed her club act in Palm Springs. Last year, she emceed Hands of Hope for the children of North Korea, where $60,000 was raised to send medical aid and food to North Korea. She is also an avid supporter of Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan, and is a member of The Feminist Majority. She’s amazed at how wonderful she feels when she contributes and helps others. “We’re all connected living on our planet together. It’s so wonderful to help each other,” she says then immediately teases: “But it’s all the T-shirts I receive that motivates me!”
At the Sundance Film Festival last January, she hosted amFAR’s Cinema Against AIDS benefit. Cho’s the first in line when a charity needs help. “I feel it’s so important. That’s why I want to be a bigger star, so that I can lend more money and more power to these organizations that I love. What’s the celebrity for? What’s the money for?” she says emphatically. “There are only so many times I can go to Barney’s! There’s nothing more important to me than doing work for these organizations,” she says, then adds softly, “It’s just how I live.”
Cho, born in 1968, and her brother were raised in San Francisco, where her parents owned a bookstore on Polk Street. (At sixteen, she spawned her stand-up career above the bookstore at The Rose & Thistle coffee shop.) Margaret remembers hearing about this mysterious gay cancer when she was a teen. In the seventies, gay businesses on Polk Street were thriving, but in the eighties many closed. Cho was stunned. “The crowds dissipated. To see the death of a neighborhood was devastating. AIDS killed off that whole community. Employees of my father died of AIDS. To watch that gradually happen over the years was really a painful thing. I grew up there,” she says sullenly, then adds, ‘I became aware of AIDS by being inside of it.”
Cho’s adult life has been surrounded by the AIDS epidemic. “I can’t even imagine life without AIDS,” she says tucking her legs in a lotus position. Like so many entertainers, Cho has lost friends to AIDS. She doesn’t mourn their loss - she thinks of death in a positive light in order to cope with the pain. She reasons that death is a part of life and accepts that the friendship she had with the person is not over. “I have relationships with people who are dead. And that sounds weird but I feel like I do communicate with people that I’ve lost to AIDS. I want to believe that there really is no death. That we all move on in a different space and time continuum,” she says in a Shirley MacLaineesque mode.
She continues: “There’s so much that can be done about AIDS, that for anybody to die from it is really wrong. More money should be put into AIDS research. More money should be put into education. More money should be put into finding a cure and finding a vaccine. The scientific research needs to go to the next level because there isn’t enough happening there.” Ralph affectionately brushes up against Margaret. She pets him. “A lot of friends from my generation have HIV and they shouldn’t have it! We grew up in the age of AIDS having this knowledge and awareness but yet there’s this strange apathy and strange feeling of being exempted from it – like, ‘That’s the older generation.’ There’s all these weird mindsets in my age group – people in their thirties. It’s really strange,” she says, then stresses, “We cannot let up on education, or the fact that this deadly disease is still out there. And we need to realize that HIV is not in any way a death sentence. You can live with HIV and you can live with AIDS. But there’s still that rage behind it. It’s like, ‘Why do we have to [use protection]? Why is AIDS still there?” She hesitates then laughs, barely sputtering out the words, “Why do we need Viagra?” She erupts with laughter. “We just don’t get it,” she winces as she addresses the barebacking issue while she shrugs in disgust. “It’s still a dangerous time!” Cho admits that she uses condoms but it seems sex is a rarity now. I remark, “I thought you were ‘slutty’?” She beams and chuckles. Then, as if she were sixteen again, she replies, “I was slutty, but…,” she fumbles for words, “I really don’t have a lot of sex. My relationships are so non-traditional. Yea, ‘non-traditional’ is the best word to use.”
Cho reiterates that there is this myth that AIDS is a thing of the past. She feels we need to turn back time a few years when there was a vast distribution of condoms and people wore the red ribbons. “It’s not over!” she yells. “We need to do more. We can’t stop. We have to keep fighting.” She urges people to exercise their political power by taking an interest in elections, finding out who’s in Congress, and being a responsible person by voting. “If we are that conscientious, the funding for AIDS will get better. We cannot be denied then.”
As with many Asian families, AIDS, like most emotional issues, was not discussed in the Cho household. “I know that it was a very painful thing for them, as it was for me, but we didn’t talk about it much,” she notes. In the Korean culture, there is a belief that there’s strength in silence, something Margaret doesn’t agree with. Because her family was so hard hit – both financially and emotionally – by the loss of their employees and customers to AIDS – Mr. Cho knew he had to address the “plague.” He wrote a sympathetic note to other merchants saying, “Because of AIDS, Polk Street has lost its vibrant gayness.” That was his way of dealing with the crisis, although Margaret giggles about her father’s choice of words.
At a Crunch gym, Margaret recently ran into a guy – a former director of an AIDS hospice with a predominately Asian-American clientele – who told her that her comedy tapes were being played to create a bridge for communication between dying persons and their families. “It’s really hard for Asian people to come to grips with their homosexuality and come to a place of understanding with their families because a lot of Asian families are so incredibly homophobic and conservative and cannot accept that. So they tend to cast them out, and a lot of people wind up alone.” She indicates that she now has a close relationship with her family but she understands the kind of oppression many Asians experience within their families. “[Asians tend to be] stoic and they want to suffer in silence, which is another weird Asian trait. It’s really unfortunate. The Asian community can’t even face homosexuality let alone AIDS and anything beyond that. And because of the silence, people don’t get the medicine, the treatment, and the counseling that they need.”
Margaret takes a sip of water from a big mauve tumbler. “I’d always been afraid of men because the men in my family were really, like, mean. It’s a male-dominated culture, so it was a very sexist society that I grew up in and I always felt scared around them until I was around homosexual men. And the first thing I felt with gay me was safe. Being around them made me understand how to love men, and that was a really great place to be.” There was one special man who seriously caught her eye, a guy named Frank Ronzano, who worked at her parent’s bookstore. “He was like the Marlboro man but gay as they come – super queen with a real country-western thing. You know?” she laughs. “I had a such crush on him! I loved him so much,” she says tenderly.
Frank, who died of AIDS in 1987, was the first man Margaret ever loved. She misses and thinks about him often. Sometimes when Cho dates a man, she asks ‘Why this particular guy?’ and then realizes he reminds her of Frank. She says Frank is constantly with her in spirit. Even while playing Eric Roberts’ best friend in writer/director Randal Kleiser’s AIDS-themed film, It’s My Party (A&U, June 1998), Cho’s memory was triggered back to her teens, and Frank. At one point in It’s My Party, Margaret’s character, Charlene, says good-bye to Eric Roberts’ Nick, who has AIDS and is ending his life. Cho says that she felt Frank’s presence, which helped her create a more realistic character. The film is a true story about Randal Kleiser’s lover, Harry Stein, who threw himself a party just before he committed suicide to avoid a painful death from AIDS. “A lot of people who were in the film were actually at the real-life goodbye party,” says Cho. “This film was a beautiful love letter. This was really a beautiful goodbye to somebody that Randal had loved very much. It was a very personal film and meant a lot.” It’s My Party was a profound, healing and heartfelt experience for Cho who juxtaposes humor with the melancholy mood by saying, “Besides, I got to wear a fat suit! That made me so excited. It’s kind of like wearing a sofa,” before her voice trails off.
Her weight has been an issue for many years, ever since Margaret was cast as the ingenue in the sitcom All-American Girl. After she received raves on the Bob Hope and Arsenio Hall shows, the networks scrambled to create this show for Cho. They wanted to create a certain image for All-American Girl, so they demanded she lose weight. She did. Thirty pounds in two weeks. But she collapsed on the set, and ended up in a hospital with kidney failure, and the series was cancelled after one season. That was her pressure cooker ride into sitcom-land. She was truly unprepared for this landmark fame and has said that the experience was a “descent into hell.” Perhaps fame came too quickly. From there she took a four-year dive into drugs, alcohol and sex. Eventually, she pulled her act together and in the summer of 1999, appeared Off-Broadway in the critically acclaimed show, I’m The One That I Want –an autobiographical account about survival that touches on such personal issues as man problems, addiction, fat, and the failed sitcom. Variety critic Charles Isherwood found her show to be “a frank and brutally funny recounting of her bruising fifteen minutes of TV stardom.” Presently, the movie version is in national release.
During those four tumultuous years of exploration, the one major thing Margaret learned was to trust. “I have to trust myself as a person, as an artist, as a performer. I can’t turn that over to anybody else. I have to be in control and take care of myself. I need to love myself. Basically, that’s the most important lesson – self-love,” she reveals in a seemingly unguarded moment. Cho won’t do another sitcom because she doesn’t like the format and doesn’t find such shows particularly interesting, although she admits to watching Will & Grace. If she went back to television it would be a talk show. “Or I’d like to do a remake of Maude!” she says with frivolous conviction.
As the film crew raps and strikes their set I ask her how she feels about fame. “You mean the TV show? The movie?” she jests. “I don’t think about it too much. Someplaces I can’t go to, which is weird.” A certain puzzled yet sad look comes over her. She pauses slightly. “When I get recognized, I get kind of freaked out. But then, other times, I get compliments, which is nice.” Margaret abruptly looks down to find Ralph lying next to her. “My fame means more than just being an actor. I embody so many different minority groups - I’m a woman, a woman of color, a gay activist - there’s so many things that are political in who I am and what I do.” Cho leans forward with a more determined look, like she has now latched on to the answer. “I love my fame because I can encourage other people who feel like they can’t succeed because they’re not represented by the majority or they don’t feel like they’re part of the dominant culture. I want to be an instigator. I want people to see me and go, ‘Oh, I can do that too.’ And so,” she says thoughtfully, “I think that I’ve inspired a lot of people. And that’s the most important thing to me.”
We bid the film crew adieu. Cho poses for the A&U photographer. During the shoot I find out some tasty tidbits. Ralph sleeps with Margaret every night; she has a dying desire to meet Madonna; she practices yoga with a passion (after we leave, she dashes off to a class); and she will jet to Hawaii the next day to attend the gay and lesbian film festival where they are screening her movie. She confides that she’s in the midst of writing a book (due out in 2001) based on her movie. And she recalls her summer. Cho was Grand Marshall of several gay pride parades, on tour promoting her movie, and onstage performing her one-woman show. Later next year, she will perform club dates in order to develop fresh material for a brand new show à la I’m The One That I Want.
The conversation turns again to the issue of AIDS. She seems feistier now. “Just because the government doesn’t care that we get AIDS doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t care. We should be smarter than that. It should not happen to us, to anybody. We need to do more work in our community to stop AIDS. It’s an outrage. We need to talk more about it. We need to talk about prevention, cure, improving the quality of life for people who have it, positive ways of healing, a way to heal ourselves with medicine. Wherever the body goes the mind follows, and vice versa. We need to care for ourselves and realize that the government is not going to do it. We have to do it ourselves first, and then the government will follow.” And once again the comedian is not being funny.
Margaret Cho Stats
Favorite movie
All About Eve because
I am every single woman in that movie. Sometimes I’m Eve, sometimes
I’m Margo.
Favorite cuss word
Motherfucker or cocksucker.
I like multisyllabic cuss words. The monosyllabic cuss words don’t
have enough force.
Greatest fear
That things will never
change. I will just stay the same forever, that I’ll stop changing and
I’ll never move on. Stagnancy is very scary to me.
Favorite TV sitcom
Laverne and Shirley
Greatest regret
None. I feel
great about my life and what I do.
Most marked characteristic
Indecision
A place you go to
escape
In my black chair
[the one she’s seated on]
What would you do
with just one month to live
Probably what I am
doing now. I live very fully every moment. I try to do as much
for other people as possible because that’s the biggest thing. I’d
just go on.
Name the people
you would like to have at your dream dinner
Quentin Crisp, Dorothy
Parker and Ricky Martin.
Name one woman and
one man you’d like to have a sexual tryst with
Ralph Fiennes and
Joan Jett
Pick one word for
Margaret Cho
Effervescent; foaming;
happy
Party with Margaret and log onto www.margaretcho.net or pick her up at your friendly video store in one of these movies: (’94) Angie with Geena Davis, (’95) Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation, (’96) Sweethearts with Janeane Garofalo, (’97) Face/Off with Travolta and Cage, (’97) Fakin’Da Funk with Pam Grier, (’98) Spent with Rain Phoenix, (’98) Ground Control with Kiefer Sutherland, (’98) Rugrats, the voice of Lt. Klann, (’99) Can’t Stop Dancing with Janeane Garofalo.
Dann Dulin is Senior
Editor of A&U.
This article is in
the September 2000 issue of A&U. To order a copy, call 888-245-4333
or 518-426-9010, or email mailbox@aumag.org or write:
A&U Magazine
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© 2001 by Art
& Understanding, Inc.
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