I thought it was pretty amazing that you did your remote segment on Politically Incorrect from a gay bar on Superbowl Sunday.
Bill Maher’s such a homophobe but I really love him for letting me do that. I mean, that’s so subversive, to just be able to do live television from a gay bar on Superbowl Sunday. And lesbians watch football; they’re really into it. So, it’s not just the domain of straight men, it’s for everybody. And that’s my bread and butter, the gay audience. It’s very familiar and very loving to me.

Didn’t you grow up right in the heart of gay America? 
Yeah. I grew up on Polk Street in San Francisco and my parents employed a lot of gay men (who at nighttime were drag queens, but I didn’t really know that until later). They really shaped my views on women and shaped my attitudes. They would just tell you not to worry about what other people think and always, always be true to yourself and love yourself. Of course, it didn’t sink in, but it really helped to hear it. There was one man in particular who was like my nanny. He was British and very dignified and took care of me. He really influenced the way I carried myself. He used to say, “The most important thing is to he noticed. You always want to be noticed.” He’d wear lots and lots of flouncy skirts. He really knew how to sell it, to work it, to know it and to be it.

Your mom is a huge part of this current show. Has she seen it? 
Yeah, she loves it. The night that she came, she came out of the auditorium and there was a line of people outside and she just wanted to walk down the line and thank everybody for coming. She and I have probably gotten a lot closer in the last couple of years, maybe because of my work. I spent a lot of time being angry at my family because they didn’t understand what I wanted to do for a career. They didn’t validate it until I got some measure of success. I got into this way of thinking: You didn’t help me, why should I acknowledge you now that I’m successful? All you did was discourage me and put all these fears in my mind about what could happen. Of course, now I realize that it was all because they loved me, and they were afraid and they didn’t understand. My mother especially didn’t understand. She grew up in such a different  world when they needed a man to just do anything. I was never about that. I never brought a boyfriend home, I never entertained the notion of having a relationship or even getting married. And my mother, that was all she ever wanted, that was the only way she saw success. Now, I’ve changed the definition of the; world for her and what’s possible.

Have you resolved your anger towards your parents? 
One of the most important things I’ve learned as an adult is making peace with my family. Making peace with my father especially, which is still hard. I mean, I still get angry. You know, I really love dogs so I started to think of my parents as two old dogs that have peed on the carpet, bit me and chewed [my] rugs and shoes. And that really alleviated a lot. It’s a really weird way to look at it, but I find it so easy to forgive dogs and I can’t forgive human beings. But then you apply the same thing [to humans]. To be able to forgive all the past pain of growing up—because I think it’s hard on all sides—has been a really good thing.

In your show, I’m the One That I Want, you admit how much you wanted fame. You say, “I wanted to be a star.”
I think that’s a really honest thing and I still want that. But, I have a clear vision of what that means. I also know now that that my definition of “star” was wrong then. I felt that my life would just be great and that everything would be perfect from then on—I would never have any more trouble with boys, I would always know what to say at a party, I would never feel insecure, I would never have to feel like a human being anymore—if I could just be a star. It was a shortcut to adulthood, which is what I wanted, and that was what was wrong. I realize now that my story is so unusual because I started so young. I was 16 years old. Right above my parents’ bookstore was a comedy club, and I started there, I knew right away that I was meant to do what I’m doing. The first few times I went onstage, I had so much power up there and I didn’t have any power in my life. And then, I had such a hard time because I bypassed some important rites of passage that people need to have to get to being an adult because I was on the road doing comedy. I sort of carried these ideas with me, that something outside myself was going to save me and make me feel good about my life and who I was, and I think that was a fatal mistake.

But doesn’t being on the road force you to grow up? 
Yeah, but it also isolates you so much that it keeps you from interacting with people. I became very capable and very mature in one area but very arrested in another. I didn’t really get a chance to completely grow up. It was very lonely traveling cross-country and seeing people everyday that were my age who were in college and having a great time. I’d come in and visit their world and just feel like this alien. It was really a sad existence.

Your experience on your TV show, All American Girl, was a pretty challenging test for you on a lot of levels, but was it your first encounter with racism in your career?
No. Early in my career I did Star Search but they didn’t allow me to do regular Star Search; I had to do Star Search International. That was really painful because I wanted to do regular Star Search. Star Search International was really lame because they only competed once and you could only win a prize of five thousand dollars, as opposed to one hundred thousand dollars. They tried to make it sound really good like, “Oooh, you have this opportunity where you could do Star Search International.” But it wasn’t; it was like, shitty. But I had to do it because I needed the work. It was really a demoralizing experience. When I was putting my material together for the set, the segment producer said, “Can you just be a little more Chinese?” I said, “I’m not Chinese, I’m Korean!” And he said, “Whatever.” I didn’t identify it as racist at the time; I just identified it as being treated differently because of my race, which is of course racist. I was afraid to identify it as that because I wanted to appear, at that point in my career, like none of that stuff affected me. I want to be judged like everybody else. “I’m a comic first!” Which is the weirdest attitude. So, that was one thing. [Another was when] I was in West Virginia one time and I was staying in a hotel. I started getting crank phone calls that I would be spending the night in the Klan stronghold. “Do you know you’re in a Klan stronghold?” Hang up. “You’re still in the Klan stronghold!” Hang up. I couldn’t figure out what a Klan stronghold was. Like, is that some sort of headlock?

Were you scared to perform that night? 
Yeah, I was freaked out to go to bed but I was leaving the next day. Stuff like that. Little things. Big things. But the most racist thing that I will never forget was when I was playing some theater, a real small place. I was, like, 20. They’d taken my name and a caricature of an Asian person with really big bucked teeth, doing kung fu with a rice bowl and chopsticks. It was this incredibly racist caricature and it said something like, “Margaret Cho: Proof that the Chinese are no laughing matter.” I couldn’t believe it. That night, I went onstage and I talked about how horrifying that was. People didn’t understand why I was horrified until I explained to them. Nobody really apologized or said they thought it was wrong, and I just realized then that people don’t really have the same racial sensitivities with Asian people that they do with almost every other ethnic group. There are some things about Asian people that seem to lend themselves to racist stereotypes that are somehow allowable in our society. You could never do that to an African American person; it would just not be acceptable.

The inside world of comedy is notorious for its misogyny. 
The sexism that is in comedy is just ridiculous. All the women comics I know work and are as successful, if not more successful, than our male counterparts. Yet, we’ll never get the respect from the boys, never. None of us do—not me, not Ellen, not Roseanne or anybody. Never, no matter how famous you are, it just doesn’t register with them. They don’t give it up to you, they don’t validate you as being anything. There is a prevailing notion among the male comics that the women aren’t really supposed to be doing it, that they’re not funny. There’s a reason why these men are in comedy: they’re just fucked up and the primary symptom of fucked up men is that they have a problem with women. They don’t want women to be their peers. They want women to stay in the places where they can identify them: they want wives, they want girlfriends, they want mothers, they want sisters. They don’t want colleagues. 

Being validated has come up a lot in this interview. Why do you have such a need for validation? 
There are a lot of reasons. I had a very difficult upbringing. My father is great but he was absent a lot, so I had to really adapt to my situation and be very charming with people I was with because I didn’t know who was staying or who was leaving. I would always try to make [my father] stay. My mother was always really unhappy with him, which is maybe why I put up with bad relationships because she was so stoic about it. She was like, this is my fate. Also, I was never considered pretty when I was growing up, which was very painful. I was very overweight as a teenager and the only way that I found that kind of acceptance or love was in performing. When I started doing comedy, it was very clear to me that that was a way to get approval. So there were so many reasons and needs to be validated. I needed to be validated all the time.

And then there’s love, one of the hopeful burdens of being in your thirties. 
I’m addicted to crushes. I always have crushes and I don’t know how to deal with them. I look at myself in a crush—they make me feel so good. I wish I could have that crush energy all the time. My attitude now is if I can just love everybody as much as I can equally, then I can get rid of this idea that there’s gonna be this special guy that comes along, this romantic notion. It’s hard to let go of that dream. Society bombards us with it, everything contains the romantic myth that that person is gonna be there and make everything okay. If I see a guy that I’m attracted to, it’s like I don’t think about anything except him. I’m totally taken over, I’m invaded and I don’t even have to know him. I don’t even want to know him, I just want to dream about what he might be like in every way and create a personality for him. Again, it’s almost like you’re taking that idea of looking outside yourself to make yourself feel better again. You know who else had crushes? Judy Garland couldn’t perform unless she had a crush on somebody

Why aren’t more people in your position saying what you’re saying? 
Because silence is one of the status quo’s biggest weapons. It really keeps us from experiencing the range of who we can really be as artists because so much energy is put in to conforming to a certain look or a certain way of being. My experience is so common, my experience is so common—every actress that I know, every singer, any artist that’s out there in the public eye has gone through a similar thing. And they always tell me, “I wish I could talk about it but I just can’t.” It’s like, “Well that’s fine, you don’t have to, I will.” I really like Camryn Manheim because she’s done a lot, but she’s so alone. There aren’t a lot of these voices out there.

How did you manage to overcome your demons? 
It’s just that I couldn’t take the self-hatred anymore. Now, I work out really hard, but my attitude towards exercise and diet has changed. Before, it was all about losing weight. Now, I don’t care, I just wanna have a strong back, I wanna have strong bones, I wanna live to be 100,1 wanna be strong. I focus all my energy towards that. I love working out. Whereas before I hated it because it was all an exercise in hating myself and punishing myself, now it’s a celebration of having this body and really loving that I have a body. Also, I really feel like I’ve earned the right to feel beautiful. I’ve spent so much time feeling ugly and being treated as ugly because I felt so ugly. But change your attitude and say, “I’m beautiful because I’m beautiful, I’m beautiful because I love everybody as much as I can, I’m beautiful because I do all these things, I’m beautiful because I have wonderful friends, and I’m beautiful because I said I was. I’ve earned it and I’m just gonna be it.” That has really helped but it is hard. I want to take the competition out of my relationship with other women because beauty has become a competitive thing, a thing that sets us apart a lot of times. That’s just me internalizing some social structure and I just have to let go of that and know that we are all beautiful.

At the same time, women who aren’t classically beautiful are vilified, even when it’s their actions that should be held under a microscope and not anything else.
Exactly. Gloria Steinem was just on 20/20 or something and she was talking about how there is such Lookism when we’re talking about women as opposed to men, how Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp are treated in the press, and how that would never happen to a man in an equal situation. The correspondent asked Gloria Steinem what we need to do to change that, and Gloria said, “We need a revolution. We just need a revolution.” And Barbara Walters came back and she was like, [Margaret sing songs] “Revolution? I don’t know.” And that made me so mad, I just wanted to throttle her. That was like the last word of the segment so it’s the last thing you hear! I think Barbara Walters doesn’t want a revolution because that makes her achievement so much less extraordinary.

What do you think we need? 
I think we need a revolution. That’s it. A complete revolution in how we think. We don’t, [pointing to me and her] but everybody else does. All other women do. We just need to find a sense of helping each other and community and strength with each other. It’s not over, it’s just beginning. We are so fucked up, especially in the areas of self image, body image, Lookism, weight issues and all of those things. We need so much growth and we’re just beginning to address it.

I think you are a person who has started the wheels of the revolution. You are the voice of the next wave of feminism. 
I hope so. I want to be. We just don’t feel like we’re enough because women are always trying to get this approval from the outside. I nearly killed myself doing it. I didn’t have any messages to tell me it was wrong. It’s really scary but it’s important because I don’t want anybody to go through what I went through.