It’s
a lovefest before Margaret Cho and Peter Paige even walk in the door. “I
am a huge fan!” Paige gushes as he greets Cho in the parking lot of SmashBox
Studios on a warm Saturday morning in Culver City, Calif. His rental car
has peeled in with Cho’s sleek PT Cruiser literally on his heels. “I love
your show!” Cho gushes back. Their concurrent arrival is all the more surprising
as they’re both 10 minutes early—giving a whole new meaning to being ahead
of their time.
But that’s exactly what both of these performers are. Cho, a comic, actor, and writer, has been incorporating her bisexuality into her act for years, including her stage show, film, and book I’m the One That I Want. Paige, best known for playing the flamboyant Emmett on Showtime’s Queer as Folk, is one of the few high-profile openly gay actors currently working in Hollywood.
Before we can even ask a question, the two are excitedly chatting about each other’s work.
Paige: Last year, Scott [Lowell, who plays Ted on Queer as Folk] and I, during kind of a dark period, wanted to go see something funny, so we went and saw I’m the One That I Want and we howled. It was really fantastic.
Cho: Actually, in my shows I talk about how wonderful it is that we have Queer as Folk because there is this sudden reflection of what the gay community is on television. It’s so much better because when we were growing up, all we had was Wayland Flowers and Madame.
P: I vividly remember about 10 years ago calling up my best friend and saying, “Oh, my God—turn Ricki Lake on. She’s got gay people on!” It was some hopped-up club kid who was like, “I’m gay, mmm-kay? And that’s the way it is!” Even though he was a total mess, desperate for attention with sequins on his nipples, he was there, and there was something. But to go from that to here in 10 years, it’s amazing.
C: There are
young kids out there
who are seeing this
beautiful image of what their lives could be—well, there’s so much drama
too.
P: There is so much drama. And I hope that people understand that the show is a drama. It’s not the only choice you have as a gay person on how to live your life.
C: When you’re supposed to represent a group, you all of a sudden have the idea that there’s only one accurate image which you’re supposed to portray. As if we would ask that from any other straight, conventional television series.
P: Right. Nobody
asks if Once and Again is good for the straights. I don’t know. They’re
divorced and were having sex outside of marriage.
And while Queer as Folk has certainly been good for at least some of “the gays,” it’s also been good for Paige, who says taking on the role of Emmett has been a healing experience.
“There has always been an apology inherent in who I was and how I presented myself to the world, whether through omission or actual apology or not being willing to take up my space in a room,” he says, recalling a trip to France with his mother during which the two walked around the streets of Paris for five hours starving because they were afraid to go into a restaurant. “I don’t know what it was for my mother, but for me, it was about being gay and not feeling entitled to take up room. The lack of apology inherent in the show has helped me go, ‘Fuck this!’ ”
Cho echoes the feeling. “Being a minority in Hollywood,” says the San Francisco native, “even though it sounds clichéd and like you’re whining, it’s the truth. You feel weird. When you go up for a Bud Light commercial with all of the typical Hollywood-looking people, you think, Where do I fit in with this? Once I started doing my own work and I realized that there were people out there that valued it and wanted to hear it, I started to feel comfortable in my own skin and in my space—and started to take up that space. It’s a really good thing.”
Still, while the two
agree that the state of gays on television has vastly improved over the
past several years, there’s still a long way to go. Says Paige: “I’d love
to look back at Queer as Folk and think, Isn’t that quaint? Isn’t that
charming? We thought we were so cutting-edge. Now it’s about integration.”
C: Oz is hot.
P: I get that Oz is hot. But in saying so, I’m admitting my own fucked-up relationship to rape. That’s all it is!
C: There’s some tenderness.
P: I love you. You’re my bitch.
C: Well, Oz is not queer. Oz is about straight guys.
P: Oz is about power.
C: I would never include it in the pantheon of gay culture. Just because men are having sex doesn’t mean that it’s queer.
P: I always compare our show to Shaft.
C: Oh, yeah!
P: The black representation in cinema started as minstrels and then they went through the sainthood years with Sidney Poitier—God bless him, this is no disrespect to him. And then came the Shaft years, which is when they were like, “Fuck off! I’m entitled to be whoever I want and step up to the table.” That’s my own experience of Queer as Folk. We’ve gone from the martyr-sainthood years into…
C: Cleopatra Jones!
P: Exactly!
C: It’s about
creating what you perceive as a positive image. And I think being a badass
is the best positive image.
Both
say television has had a major effect on the way much of straight America
sees gays and lesbians. “I was recently walking in Times Square,” recalls
Paige. “This cop came up to me and said [in a New Yawk accent], ‘Excuse
me, sir? Could I take a picture with you? My girlfriend is a really big
fan of your show.’ So he put his arm around me, this cop in the middle
of Times Square with this big out homo! I would have been afraid of him
10 years ago.”
“You’re bringing together different groups of people,” points out Cho, who had a similar experience at the showing of I’m the One That I Want in San Francisco.’
“My parents were there, and then my fan club—a bunch of leather daddies who call themselves the Ass Master Fan Club—were sitting next to them. They were looking at my parents and laughing, and my parents were looking at them, laughing. And they would nod at each other. I felt really great about that. There was this incredible opportunity for me to be a bridge of understanding between leather queens and old Korean people. That’s what’s wonderful about what we’re doing.”
But Paige is quick to stress that the battle for acceptance is far from over: “I do think people’s attitudes are changing—I can’t say that they’ve changed. There are a lot of minds that have yet to be opened. But there’s certainly a sense of change in motion.”
One of the things that sets change in motion is when celebrities come out of the closet. “It’s the single most important political act a gay person can engage in,” says Paige. “I have said it before, I will say it again: It is what creates change.”
Last year Cho appeared
on the cover of Rosie O’Donnell’s magazine, Rosie, long before O’Donnell
came out publicly. “I haven’t talked to her since the whole thing happened,
but I think it’s great,” says Cho. “I’m really happy that she’s like, ‘Fuck
it—I’m a big dyke!’ I always thought she was so amazing. She has the kind
of audience where I don’t think a lot of them knew.”
“That’s interesting,
because we all certainly knew,” notes Paige, who says no one in his circle
of friends was surprised by the announcement. “I try really hard to have
the ‘everybody on his or her own schedule’ kind of attitude. But there
is part of me that wishes it had happened before she was leaving the show.
That there was time for the audience to continue to relate to her on a
daily basis and ‘renormalize’ her. But it didn’t, and I’m thrilled and
proud and excited that she did it now. And I totally love her.”
While Cho and Paige were definitely ahead of most people’s schedules, Cho admits, “I’m forever uncomfortable with my sexuality. But it doesn’t have anything to do with…” she trails off as they erupt into laughter.
“Gender identification?” offers Paige.
“It’s just a personal thing,” Cho responds.
While they’re both
extremely candid about their sexuality, the pair’s backgrounds could not
be more different. Cho was raised in a traditional Korean household. Paige
split his time between his somewhat conservative father and stepmother
and his ultraliberal mother, who worked in a women’s bookstore.
C: But my parents really encouraged nourishment of the mind. That was a great thing about my upbringing—I was really encouraged to read.
P: When you started coming out in the various ways that you did, did they seek out that information? Did they go to books?
C: No. My parents still think I’m a virgin. [Laughter] I never talked to them about it either. When they come to see me perform they use their selective understanding of English.
P: All of a sudden it becomes “Blah, blah, blah.”
C: But it doesn’t matter. They don’t have a comment about it.
P: I grew up,
when I lived with my mother, surrounded by lesbians and black women who
had changed their names to reflect their African roots. When I came out
to my mother, I fully expected her to be like, “Woo-hoo!” God bless her,
she was really supportive, but she really had to wrestle her way to pure
happiness for me. It was her own fear of the world that got in the way.
As with many gay people over the years, body image has played a significant role in the lives of both Cho and Paige. In I’m the One That I Want, Cho delved into the stress of working on her 1994 sitcom, All-American Girl, during which network executives pressured her to lose weight. A crash diet with exercise lost her 30 pounds in two weeks—and caused kidney failure.
Luckily, she is much better now, joking that she’s unable to resist the temptation of a certain crusty carb. “I have the bread disease,” she blurts out. “If I start eating bread, I never stop. I have a foundation dedicated to bread disease. It’s so sad.”
“Will you send me the
newsletter?” begs Paige, who can relate—he gave up bread, pasta, and potatoes
since booking Queer. “But when we wrap for the season, I will go directly
to a McDonalds and I will have french fries and a Big Mac and I will be
nauseous as all hell. Then I will go to a doughnut shop.” Paige admits
that he walks a fine line:
P: I’m naked on television, and it’s important to me that my body be in good shape without going bananas.
C: When we realize as human beings that part of us is all the same, we can let go of our pain. I think all pain stems from a feeling of separation, that we’re by ourselves.
P: I think gay people have their adolescence after their adolescence, in their 20s and 30s. It’s really easy to get stuck there and wrapped up in all those things that we should have sorted out as teenagers. A great thing that’s happening is that teenagers are coming out as teenagers, so they get to go through all this crap at 17, when you’re built to deal with that level of angst and vanity—instead of it becoming the model for your entire life.
C: So many men I know have eating disorders—anorexia and bulimia. They’re just like women—and that has always been the worst thing that women had to deal with.
P: There was a great quote last year: “Orange is the new pink, and men are the new women.”
C: I like a softy. I like a shlubby guy with a little softness around the edges.
P: I will admit to some body nazism in terms of my own aesthetic—more than I would like to have. I look forward to the day when I see some guy with hips and go, “Grrrr!”
C: Fat is an incredibly sexy thing on some people. For me, there’s nothing better than a big, manly old lesbian. I talk about it in my new show, that I want a woman who looks like John Goodman. This makes me think I must be really straight because I don’t like women who are femmey at all, I like women that are dykey! I want a dagger!
P: That doesn’t mean you’re straight. They still have a vagina.
C: But those women have dicks!
P: What do you think about women with facial hair?
C: Love it! It’s so hot.
P: I love you, Margaret Cho.
C: My favorite
is an F-to-M. That’s what I want to marry. An F-to-M chubby James Dean.
Although Paige and Cho are about as candid a duo as you’re likely to come by in Hollywood, both struggled with how to present their sexuality to the world. “For a long time early in my career, no one cared,” says Paige. “And then I couldn’t conceive going back into the closet because I got Queer as Folk. That would just be retarded. But there are always people who say, ‘You may want to keep it on the Q.T. so you can work.’ ”
Cho recalls that several years ago when she was performing at a comedy festival in Montreal, her then-manager took her aside and told her “not to sit in Lea DeLaria’s lap so much.” He then asked her if she was “completely straight.” “I told him I didn’t know. And he said, ‘It doesn’t matter if you are or if you’re not. You have to tell people that you are completely straight. You have to show that you are completely straight.’ I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t know how to be someone who wasn’t me.”
Paige remembers that when he arrived in Los Angeles five years ago, people told him, “ ‘Don’t think that just because it’s 1997 you can come out of the closet.’ I was told this by actors, agents, managers, gay people. But I’m a bad liar. My acting is based on emotional truth.”
Honesty and celebrity
has put Cho and Paige in the position of being role models, whether they
like it or not.
C [to Paige]: You may not be in it to be a role model, but guess what, you are. That’s not something that you call yourself; it’s something that’s been bestowed upon you.
P: I love that you said being a role model doesn’t have to be what you were taught when you were young. That being a badass can be a role model too.
C: It’s being a role model for smart people.
P: I don’t think that as a performer you set out to be a role model. If you’re really setting out to do that, you become an activist or a politician. Lots of incredible people took out their machetes and carved out the way for us. Ellen, obviously. Martina, big-time.
C: The guy in The Boys in the Band who says, “What I am is a 32-year-old, ugly…”
C and P: “Pockmarked Jew fairy…”
C: “If it takes me a little bit longer to get ready to pull myself together…” something like that.
P: I can’t watch that movie. The self-loathing inherent in it makes me sick. It’s so toxic.
C: It is, but
I love it because it’s that broiling hot Sunday afternoon party that we’re
all dreading, but we all go. And we’re all mean and high—and I’m always
the only girl. I’ve had so many Sundays exactly like that. I love it because
for me, it was a big period of my life. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s
“positive”—those guys are really hot, they’re badasses.
The
specter of AIDS has been a major influence in both of their lives. Living
in San Francisco, Cho grew up in one of the epicenters of the disease’s
devastation. “When I was 11 or 12 years old, I really saw this whole community,
Polk Street, just disintegrate before my eyes,” she recalls. “It was, like,
this incredible holocaust. People gone every day. People that were close
to me and people who were not so close to me. It was really scary.”
Paige says he’s been very fortunate and has not lost anyone close to him to AIDS. “I’ve been very fortunate in some ways. I came out in the age of AIDS, so I don’t know anything else. To call that fortunate is odd. But had I been alive, were I 10 years older, there’s no way I’d be sitting here right now. There’s no doubt in my mind.”
Nowadays, Cho says, she has many close friends who are HIV-positive. “And they’re living really good, solid, healthy lives. But I’m afraid for the younger generation and what’s going to happen now. I think there’s so much less awareness.”
“There’s a really dangerous perception that it’s gone and that it doesn’t matter anymore,” Paige notes sadly.
But the future for both performers looks bright. Next month, Paige plays the best friend of Josh Charles in the Showtime movie Our America, a film based on the true story of a National Public Radio disc jockey who teaches two young African-American teens to make a documentary about their sometimes shocking urban life. And the character Paige plays is straight. “That was important to me from a career standpoint,” he admits. “Not from a self-loathing, homophobic place, but I’m an actor. I want to disappear into different roles. And it’s an amazing thing that in this day and age they got a gay actor to play a straight guy.” While he’s looking for other projects to work on this summer, he will return to shoot the third season of Queer as Folk later this year.
Cho’s Notorious C.H.O. concert CD, recorded onstage at Carnegie Hall, just hit record stores, and the movie version of the show, filmed in Seattle, will hit New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco July 4, “then parts beyond after that,” adds Cho.
It’s very different
from where the two were just a decade ago. “I was preparing to do All-American
Girl, and I didn’t really have a sense of what it was going to be or what
would happen,” Cho recalls.
“I was in Boston at
the Boston University acting conservatory,” says Paige. “I thought by now
I’d be on a sitcom. I grew up loving television.”
As for the next 10 years, Paige says he’d like to get into directing and has been shadowing the directors on the show, picking up technique. “And I’d love to have another show,” he adds. “I think Queer as Folk is going to be around for a while, but hopefully not 10 years! I don’t think I could play Emmett for 10 more years, as much as I love him.”
“I love what I do,” says Cho. “I want to write another book. I want to keep writing shows. I just want to do the same thing. I enjoy my life.”
As for the future of
gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered folks…
C: I hope there will be an all-trans network—tranny TV!
P: All tranny, all the time.
C: I want tranny news.
P: It’s a dangerous
thing to wish for, but part of me wishes that the gay community is completely
mainstreamed and that
nobody gives it a second thought. And a little part of me wants to make
sure there are some culturally insulated pockets, which create that “outside
the boundaries” work.
C: That’s always going to be there because there’s always going to be cutting-edge stuff happening.
P: Such fantastic art comes out of a period of struggle. When George [W.] Bush got elected, so many of my friends were screaming and crying and I was like, “You know what? The gay community needed it.” The gay community needs a point of focus. We need to be reenergized. We got really complacent during the Clinton years. We had enough of an ally in the White House that everyone kicked back.
C: The best-case scenario is that it stops being special—it stops being something of note. You would see a straight couple going to see a ‘gay film’ and not have them feeling that they’re looking at how the other half lives. We for so long have been forced to go to straight movies and translate all the things that Mel Gibson goes through into what it means to our lives. It means not having to look at life through this Harrison Ford filter. Oh, and I think Peter and I should do a remake of Hart to Hart! We’re due for that. We’ll do the Hart to Hart movie.”