Cho & tell.

After a bout with drugs nearly derailed her career, comedian Margaret Cho is putting her painful past into a hit one-woman show. Now she's happy and "more than bi"

In 1994 Margaret Cho wanted to stop smoking. It was hell on earth, made worse by the news that the stand-up comedian's massively hyped sitcom, All-American Girl--which was supposed to catapult her into superstardom as the first Korean-American lead on television--was on the brink of cancellation. And matters weren't helped by the other little fact that she had just caused herself permanent kidney damage by losing 30 pounds in two weeks--because ABC felt her typically Korean round face was just "too full." "I was at a loss, cried all the time, and couldn't do a thing," she says, "except more drugs. So basically I quit cigarettes by doing a lot of pot brownies and special K."

Five years--and many drugs, drinks, and men--later, the 31-year-old, San Francisco-raised, self-proclaimed "Korean-American, fag hag, shit starter, girl comic, trash talker" took herself off the comedy circuit road, cleaned herself up in her Hollywood hills home, wrote her one-woman show (titled "I'm the One That I Want"), and headed for New York City. The production--raunchy, no-punches-pulled comic theater (recently filmed for big-screen release next year)--chronicled her TV and substance abuse debacles, outed its star as bisexual, and voila! Cho is now not only a critic's darling but a "defiantly gay-centric" (as Variety called her) brazen comedy star, right up there with Sandra Bernhard. Now pleasantly full-figured ("I feel bodacious and lush") and touring "I'm the One That I Want" to sold-out houses around the country through June, Cho is writing her "full-on memoirs," to be published in the fall of 2001. She has several independent film roles coming over the next few months, and on January 24 she'll give a little back by hosting the American Foundation for AIDS Research's Cinema Against AIDS benefit at the Sundance Film Festival in Colorado. With a sigh and a smile, she says, "I've finally found a very satisfying place in life."

Congrats, Margaret--book deals, film deals, plus an Entertainment Weekly rave that compared you to none other than that ultimate gay icon-survivor, Cher.

That was so funny. Though I am a lot like Cher--just not as tall [laughs].

Dark ladies aside, do you feel like you're finally becoming the Margaret Cho everyone thought you were gonna be five years ago with All-American Girl?

I really do. And it's wonderful to have grown into my career and myself like that--it's all so effortless now. The most significant change, of course, is that I'm sober, and that's so weird because I'm such a party girl [laughs]. I really am the Julia Roberts of fag hags.

A badge you've long worn proudly.

Well, it's the best thing I can be--I mean, I really do have a very special connection with gay men, a fact that particularly struck me just the other night when I was at the L.A. Hedwig and the Angry Inch premiere with [the rock musical's cowriter and original star] John Cameron Mitchell. They were taking our picture, and I was like, "This is so fabulous, John--we're the Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston of the queer set!"

And the bi set too.

[Laughs] Yes, but I'm way more than "bi"--"bi" is so sort of `70s, so David and Angela Bowie. I prefer the term [grandly] "pansexual."

OK, then, pansexual one, tell us who's hotter--girls or boys.

Ya know, I've known more drag queens than anyone else in my life, so I'm gonna say it's the trannies [laughs].

Good dodge. But I have to ask: Do your parents know that you're doing girls now occasionally?

Well, yeah [laughs]. They just act like they don't understand. They use their selective understanding of English at that point. They do understand, but they just don't mention it. I mean, with anybody. But they're actually sort of OK with everything.

Speaking of everything, now that your phoenix has risen again, how far do you want to take the fame thing?

I wanna be as famous as anybody can get. My spiritual mother is Madonna--she's my ideal--and I think her most exciting period was Truth or Dare, when it wasn't about sex, wasn't about spirituality, it was just about "I'm fucking famous" [laughs]. But fame doesn't really serve me, it--

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It doesn't. I just want it so I can get out there to more people and they can get happy.

What else do you hope your audience is getting?

A sense of joy and excitement to be alive: the feeling that it's OK to be different, OK to have feelings of not fitting in. I want them to love themselves and their own perspectives. And God, there's so much to be done there, especially when you're talking about gay men--I mean, I just did a benefit for GLSEN [Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network], and Matthew Shepard's parents were there. And I was onstage about to perform, and I saw them and just started to cry. I said, "I've never met you, but I think about you all the time." And it's true--I think, in this day and age, for Matthew Shepard to die because of how he felt and who he was is just wrong. There's so much work to be done, and that's the most important thing.

Of course, along with the human uplift, a Cho audience gets a bunch of dirty jokes too, don't they?

[Laughs] I don't think I'm that dirty. I think I discuss sex in a way that's not necessarily lascivious but more, well, practical--and that's a real drag queen thing. Like, in "I'm the One That I Want," I talk about going through this promiscuous period where I was trying to give head really fast. Now of course, gay men are the best people to talk to about giving fast, efficient head, so that's what I did. So the guy tells me, "Stick your finger up his ass, and you'll be home in five minutes watching Ally McBeal" [laughs]. Now, OK, that's a dirty joke, but it's really the perspective that's shocking--it's a woman and a gay man conspiring against a straight man, and that's absolutely terrifying to the status quo.

Indeed. But the heart of "I'm the One That I Want" centers on your post-All-American Girl descent into drugs, booze, and sex. What made you sober up?

I was in a really destructive relationship with this guy, and we egged each other on with substances and alcoholism, and it just got worse and worse. The end was about two years ago, when one day we woke and the bed was wet, but the stain was in the middle, so we couldn't figure out who'd done it. If we could've, I'd probably still be drinking.

Yikes. Was it hard to stop?

No, it was easy--it was either get sober or die.

And so you lived to tell your story in a smash show--and became a bona fide gay icon. As an expert, tell us: Who's tops in your gay pantheon?

Oh, you know, the classics--Judy and Barbra. [Sighs] Sometimes I just look at Barbra and start crying because she's so, so magical.

You know, I don't think you just identify with gay men, I think you are one.

It's true--I'm a gay man in a woman's body [laughs]. Not trapped in a woman's body, though, `cause I like it.

Bardin is a contributing editor at Details and Mirabella.