Arts & Entertainment
Mother’s Day with Margaret
Cho on her new tour, hit Lifetime show and being in bed with Joan Rivers
Margaret Cho’s tour celebrates her own mother’s ‘amazing innate wisdom,’ but also the grand dame-type mantle she’s found placed upon her by the gay community. (Photo courtesy Miss Missy Photography via Ken Phillips Publicity Group)
Margaret Cho
‘Mother Tour’
Saturday
Warner Theater
1299 Pennsylvania Ave.
With Jim Short
$40.50-$69.50
8 p.m.
Margaret Cho has her hand in so many different ventures, she makes Ryan Seacrest look like a lazy slob.
Her hit show “Drop Dead Diva” is in the midst of its fifth season and airs Sunday nights at 9 p.m. on Lifetime. It just got picked for a sixth. “In Transition,” a YouTube series about three women fresh out of jail, ran until mid-September. She teamed with comedian Jim Short for a new podcast show called “Monsters of Talk” and she was just on “The Talk,” “The Arsenio Hall Show,” “E!’s Fashion Police with Joan Rivers,” Hallmark Channel’s “Home & Family” and “Chelsea Lately.”
Look for her on “The Late Late Show” with Craig Ferguson on Nov. 19. And on Saturday night, she brings her “Mother Tour,” which kicked off in Georgia in August, to the Warner Theater.
We caught up with Cho, a long-time LGBT advocate and bi herself, a few weeks ago by phone. Her comments have been slightly edited for length.
WASHINGTON BLADE: Congratulations on the success with “Drop Dead Diva.” You must be delighted it’s doing so well.
MARGARET CHO: Yes, I am. You’re always expecting that anything could happen and it’s also very rare to have a show that lasts that long. Very few shows I’ve done have ever really gone more than one season so it’s a very — well, you get more used to things getting canceled than picked up. You just always prepare for the worst. The last thing we had heard (at the end of the fourth season) was that we had been cancelled, but then it got picked up again which was interesting. I’d never seen that happen before.
BLADE: Where is it shot?
CHO: In Atlanta. But not even in the city itself. It’s about an hour south in a little town called Peachtree City.
BLADE: Do you live in L.A.?
CHO: Yes, but in Atlanta when we’re filming. I’m also on the road all the time.
BLADE: How does it feel politically in the South?
CHO: Atlanta itself is incredibly queer-friendly and progressive. We have great restaurants and great chefs and mixologists, so it’s very sophisticated and a really gorgeous place to live and hang out but then you go, like, one mile outside the city and it’s so country and so conservative you can’t believe it. I drive by a sign all the time that says “actors and models for Christ.” Peachtree City is like southern headquarters for the tea party, which they’re very proud of. There’s a little gay bar near where we work. We called them and asked if that was the gay bar and they were like, “Oh no, certainly not,” but it’s where the local gay people have agreed to hang out. They were offended when I even called and asked if it was true. But the real gay bar is the Home Depot by our set. They have aisles there that are specifically for cruising. That’s just stuff I’ve heard. People adapt to the environment.
Margaret Cho with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington in 2010. (Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)
BLADE: You’ve always been very progressive and outspoken. Does it make you crazy to be in that kind of environment?
CHO: I don’t really care as long as it doesn’t infringe on my life. When they’re trying to do things like ban gay marriage or trying to keep gay couples from adopting, when they’re trying to control what happens in our families, that’s when it becomes disturbing. I don’t have issues with anybody’s religion or thoughts about whatever as long as they’re not attacking other people, gay people. Also, I want some explanation. There’s another sign out here that just says “Jesus” in huge letters. No URL, no nothing else. I’m thinking, “OK, I’m supposed to look at this and think what exactly?” I mean, I know who Jesus is. I know it’s a name. But it’s just this thing, this sign.
BLADE: You’ve been on “The View” several times. Was it ever hard to keep your cool? Did you ever get into it with Elisabeth Hasselbeck?
CHO: No, she’s a really nice person. We’re all very opinionated on there and we all have our own ideas. We don’t necessarily agree, but that’s OK. It’s OK to agree to disagree. I don’t feel I have to try to control other people’s beliefs.
BLADE: I loved your episode of “In Bed With Joan” (Rivers). It’s obvious you have a good rapport with her. What’s she like when the camera’s not rolling?
CHO: She’s so sweet and so generous and actually really loving. I mean really wise. And just full of amazing stories. She was telling me recently about meeting Laurence Olivier and he had been doing impressions of Danny Kaye. They just had these wonderful moments and you can tell she has just been this amazing fag hag for forever with this true-life fag hag history that really needs to be preserved. I mean imagine being a fag hag like her back in the day when she was doing her Elizabeth Taylor shit. It was just so profound and cool.
BLADE: But is she “on” all the time like she is in her stage or on-camera persona?
CHO: She’s actually really gentle, which is kind of surprising when you think about her stage persona. But she’s actually more like a soft-spoken, gentle person — this almost shy kind of woman. But she’s really loving, really a mom and really just hilarious. I think she’s really special.
BLADE: Your tour is called “Mother.” Tell us a little about it.
CHO: I’ve just started doing it a little now. It’s really kind of about being like Joan in a way, just being that grand dame fag hag where now people call me mother. Like being some sort of mother superior. You get to a point where you sort of have this grandeur of outlook, a kind of maturity. Then some of it too, is about my mother. And just about aging, about sexuality, about bisexuality, a lot of different things.
BLADE: If somebody were to follow you around from city to city, how much does your act change from night to night? It looks so off the cuff, but obviously it can’t really be as improvisational as it seems.
CHO: I think it’s probably a pretty totally different thing. You never know where the audience will lead you. You have to be really adept at tuning into the audience and it gets really personalized. You do it all over the world, so you get a sense of the place and each show becomes really specifically about each different city.
BLADE: How do you read an audience?
CHO: I ask specific questions and some of it depends on what I’m feeling or what’s going on in the news or what I feel needs to be talked about. There are a lot of different ways to do that. And then you just build up a conversation and that leads you into other things. There are some jokes that may be there consistently but they change in a way. You’re personalizing it to them.
BLADE: So many female comedians from you and Kathy Griffin to Joan and even back to Phyllis Diller seem to have these strong gay male audiences. Why is that?
CHO: I’ve just always been in with the gay community. I grew up with it. I just always had a real strong sense of family within the gay community. I think what it is in general is just the attraction to these strong female archetypes. Like with Kathy and Joan, it’s like gay men are looking for mother figures in a way whether it’s almost like vintage, like with Joan Crawford, or something tragic, like Judy Garland, or just somebody really strong like Madonna or really young like Gaga. I think it’s really a great thing. Joan (Rivers) I think is seen as more of a mom type. Kathy and I not as much, but maybe another kind of strong figure. It’s great and really satisfying.
BLADE: Where were you when you heard about the DOMA repeal?
CHO: I think I must have been in Atlanta. I remember thinking it was hard to imagine what that would look like in a state like Georgia, in some of these places that are so conservative.
BLADE: How did you feel?
CHO: I was really excited. It had been a very long time coming. It’s something we’ve worked for for such a long time. It’s so great to see that you can actually effect change. That’s really gratifying. I was able years ago to perform weddings at City Hall in San Francisco. I think I’ll be doing that again, which is really awesome, really satisfying.
BLADE: You have so much going on. Do you get overwhelmed by it or just want to stay home sometimes?
CHO: A lot of my work is also tied up in my social life so it’s kind of not really work. It’s also play too. A lot of it allows me to see people I love and hang out with them and talk about whatever, whether it’s Joan or Kathy or any of these people I just adore. It’s just a great opportunity — you forget that you’re working.
BLADE: But don’t you feel pressure? Working non-stop in the entertainment industry seems like it would feel like swimming in a shark tank or something.
CHO: I guess, but I have pressure in other ways. In the standup world, I feel really comfortable. It’s something other people might find really scary, but it’s something I know I can do. It’s just part of my nature. It’s not nearly as much pressure as trying not to be so self conscious for the camera or on a photo shoot or something where I kind of just get so embarrassed at trying to put on my sexy face, which just feels so stupid. I get really self-conscious in the more visual representation stuff. But standup is the one place where it’s very effortless. It’s very calming.
BLADE: I remember this photo of Bob Hope once in Vanity Fair and he was showing his joke library, which looked like a huge card catalog system with rows and rows. Do you have any system for keeping track of your own material?
CHO: I don’t have anything physical where I’ve written anything out. I’ve made a bunch of standup comedy films so all the material is there in the films but I don’t have anything written down. That would be great — I would love to be that organized, but I have a pretty good handle on the stuff I’ve done.
BLADE: Like Gwen? That became a running gag with some friends of mine.
CHO: Oh yes. Yeah, with Gwen, I just remember being so upset and the procedure itself being actually physically quite painful and it just seemed so funny to me that this woman felt the need to introduce herself to me and tell me she was there to wash my vagina in this very matter-of-fact way. That’s just what she does. So I kind of laughed and calmed myself in the moment.
BLADE: It’s quite shocking sometimes how much you manage to get away with. With a society that can really rake somebody across the coals for going over the line — I’m thinking of the Don Imus incident a few years ago — do you ever fear you’ll go too far and really piss off the world or have people turn on you?
CHO: The thing with comedy is there’s always the possibility that something like that could happen and you never really know what people are going to find offensive so you want to ride that line of being really funny but that also runs the risk of — well, you want it to go far, but not too far and where that point is, you don’t always really know. I guess whatever happens I can handle. I just try to push it as far as I can and I think you get a little immunity if you’re a woman or a person of color and queer and a gay activist and a feminist. If you’re a civil rights person and people know that, you can get away with not always being so politically correct all the time. You can kind of play the race card, or the gender card as a kind of get-out-of-jail-type thing. But you can’t rely on that too much either. Yeah, it’s a very difficult position. I just try to do my best.
Movies
‘Thelma and Louise’ remains landmark of unspoken queer rebellion
Celebrating iconic film 35 years after its release
Hard as it is to believe for those who were around when it happened, “Thelma and Louise” celebrates the 35th anniversary of its release this year.
Deeply popular with both critics and audiences at the time, its reputation continues to ride high; it’s a movie that manages to exist within a nexus of intersecting genres – the “buddy picture”, the “crime thriller,” the “action adventure,” the” “western,” the “neo-noir” – by blending them seamlessly into a crowd-pleasing wild ride of a story, all while delivering a powerful feminist message of outrage, defiance, and empowerment.
And no, “Thelma and Louise” is not a “queer movie” – but it feels like one.
That’s partly because It exists within another genre, too: “lesbian noir,” which blossomed in its wake with films like “Bound” (1996) and has re-emerged in recent films like “Love Lies Bleeding” (2024) and “Honey, Don’t” (2025) – but that also stretches back across decades into the days of old Hollywood, when coded queer characters were a regular fixture in the seedy film noir classics of their time, never overtly identified as such but obvious to spot for anyone savvy enough to read the subtext. That’s why “Thelma and Louise” resonated (and continues to resonate) with lesbian and bisexual audiences who see themselves reflected in its two lead characters, even if there is nothing queer about their relationship — on the surface at least.
Of course, that can be a sore subject; subtext might seem like a “cop-out” for those who long for more open representation for LGBTQ people on the screen – but it’s everything when it comes to recognizing the queerness of older movies (and a lot of newer ones, too), and just because something is not explicitly stated, that doesn’t mean it’s being hidden. After all, most good stories rely on the transcendent power of nuance, which always relies on subtext to shine through. And if any movie relies upon subtext, “Thelma and Louise” is certainly one of them. In its masterfully crafted narrative of a weekend “girl’s trip” that goes horribly wrong, a lot of the most important information is left unspoken.
Take Thelma (Geena Davis), to start with: a naive young housewife whose husband Darryl (Christopher McDonald) treats her like a possession, she blithely ignores his mediocrity and disregards – or at least, pretends to – his repressive tactics to control her, choosing instead to live in a tenuous illusion of “traditional” marriage dynamics; yet when her bestie Louise (Susan Sarandon) offers her a chance to escape for a weekend, she jumps at it – even if she has to skip the part where she asks his permission.
Louise (Susan Sarandon), a bit older and a lot more worldly, is a waitress who spends her days fending off the insults and advances of her male customers at the diner where she works; she sees Thelma’s situation clearly, and hopes that a temporary respite from Darryl will help her recognize the dead-end reality of her marriage. We understand this immediately, even though a direct word is never said about it, and she’s right, of course. They’ve barely even gotten on the road before Thelma’s longing for attention from someone other than her inadequate husband – a honky-tonk Lothario (Timothy Carhart) she meets in a roadhouse where they stop for drinks on the way out of town – leads to an attempted rape that is only prevented when Louise shoots the predator dead in the parking lot.
That killing is the catalyst that turns them into fugitives; as Louise rightly understands, there’s no evidence of sexual assault, just a dead body and a pair of runaway women, and the letter of the law is not on their side. But in truth, that fatal shot is fired not to save Thelma, who has already been freed from her would-be rapist’s clutches when it happens, but because Louise has traumatic memories – and a chip on her shoulder – over something that “happened in Texas,” years before. We never find out what it was that happened, and we don’t need to; our imaginations tell us all we need to know, just as we know that the killing, while it may have been cold-blooded murder, is a justifiable homicide all the same.
There’s more of that subtextual nuance throughout, from the perversely inspiring motivations of hitchhiking hustler J.D. (Brad Pitt, in the sex-on-a-stick performance that launched him on his trajectory to stardom), who takes advantage of Thelma’s gullibility to rob the heroines even as he teaches her the tactics that will soon launch them on their fateful ride-or-die fugitive adventure; to the self-serving “chivalry” of Louise’s erstwhile boyfriend (Michael Madsen) as he casts himself as the “martyr” in letting her go. And yes, even to the benignly sublimated patriarchal programming that drives police investigator Hal Slocumb (Harvey Keitel in an uncharacteristically empathetic role) to act as the would-be savior of these two “fallen” women, though they want no part of his well-meaning attempts to “rescue” them from the consequences of their choices. And when the two fugitives terrorize a piggish trucker (Marco St. John) before blowing up his big-rig tanker, nobody says – or needs to say – why it feels to them like the right thing to do; it simply IS the right thing, and we, as the audience, know it. What we have seen up to that point has placed us firmly on Thelma and Louise’s side already, and we’re as ready to watch the puerile patriarchy burn as they are.
None of this is spoken aloud, nor is it even alluded to, but it comes through, nonetheless. Chalk it up, if you like, to the power of cinema, especially in the hands of a versatile, stylish, and seasoned director like Ridley Scott, to communicate what is inherently beyond the power of words.
Thelma and Louise may not be “a couple,” but we can’t help but notice as their clothing evolves from frilly-femme to “butch” utilitarianism along the way, or how their connection to the men in their lives easily dissolves without fanfare. And by the time we reach the movie’s thrilling denouement, when all they have left is their commitment to simply stand up against all the things that have kept them feeling incomplete, unfulfilled, and unacceptable, it’s an achingly familiar feeling for any queer viewer who has experienced the same.
We all know what happens, so it’s no spoiler to say that, when they drive off into oblivion in the Grand Canyon, they choose freedom over life itself – and when they head over that cliff, fully embracing their fate as a feminist iteration of the Bonnie and Clyde brand of “noble” outlaws, they seal their fate with a kiss.
At that point, no explanation is needed. Their love for each other transcends anything they’ve felt with the inadequate men in their lives; and in that final freeze-frame moment, when they drive off the cliff and sail into oblivion, we like to think that their car – like Danny Zuko’s at the end of “Grease” – simply flies away into the bliss of an endless summer, and you can’t get any queerer than that.
Out & About
LGBTQ Military Happy Hour set for Sept. 15
In-person gathering to be held at Tom’s Watch Bar
Modern Military Association of America will host “Pride in Service: An LGBTQ+ Military Happy Hour” on Tuesday, Sept. 15 at 4 p.m. at Tom’s Watch Bar.
This in-person gathering is the perfect chance to connect, share stories, and celebrate the diversity within the military community. Come relax, meet fellow LGBTQ+ service members and allies, and enjoy a fun, supportive atmosphere. Don’t miss out on an evening full of pride, camaraderie, and good vibes. Visit Eventbrite for more details.
Friday, September 11
Go Gay DC will host “Out in DC LGBTQ+ Community Social” at 7 p.m. at Hotel Zena.This is a chance to relax, make new friends, and enjoy happy hour specials at this classic retro venue. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Women in their Twenties and Thirties will meet at 8 p.m. on Zoom. This is a social discussion group for queer women in the Washington, D.C. area. For more details, visit Facebook.
Saturday, September 12
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 11 a.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ+ community, including allies, together for delicious food and conversation. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
The DC LGBTQ+ Community Center will host screenings of “Princess Sparkles” and “Kiloran Bay” at 1:30 p.m. “Kiloran Bay” is a 13-minute musical short set amid the wild beauty of the Scottish Hebrides and the fierce joy of a wedding cèilidh. “Princess Sparkles” is about a girl who accidentally signs up to pet-sit a princess only to discover she’s actually a nippy, Fox News-watching pig. More details are available on the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center’s website.
Sunday, September 13
“Nellie’s DC Drag Brunch” will be at 12 p.m. at Nellie’s Sports Bar. Come get served like a queen by a queen. Join Sapphire Blue, Deja Diamond and their team of amazing drag performers for the most fun you’ll have all weekend. Tickets are $58.51 and are available on Eventbrite.
Monday, September 14
“Center Aging: Monday Coffee Klatch” will be at 10:00a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ+ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more information, contact Adam ([email protected]).
Tuesday, September 15
Center Bi Pan+ Roundtable will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This is an opportunity for people to gather in order to discuss issues related to bisexuality or as Bi individuals in a private setting. Visit Facebook or Meetup for more information.
Wednesday, September 16
Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom upon request. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit thedccenter.org/careers.
The DC LGBTQ+ Community Center will host “Movement for Healing” at 3 p.m. This trauma- and yoga therapy–informed class is designed to help guests gently reconnect with their body and their breath. Through mindful movement, somatic awareness, and grounding practices, guests will explore how to release tension, increase mobility, and cultivate a deeper sense of safety and ease within. For more details, visit the DC Center’s website.
Thursday, September 17
The DC Center’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5:00 pm if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245.
Virtual Yoga Class will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This free weekly class is a combination of yoga, breathwork and meditation that allows LGBTQ+ community members to continue their healing journey with somatic and mindfulness practices. For more details, visit the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center’s website.
‘Thelma and Louise’ remains landmark of unspoken queer rebellion
Comings & Goings
LGBTQ Military Happy Hour set for Sept. 15
Calendar: September 11-17
Multi-billion-dollar 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund to continue until 2090
Md. groups receive state grants to fight hate crimes
Nominate your favorites for the Blade’s 25th annual Best Of LGBTQ DC Awards
Gloria Steinem’s life of substance and consequence
PHOTOS: SUNFESTIVAL
