Notes & Queeries is a monthly column from Malinda Lo that focuses on the personal side of pop culture for lesbians and bisexual women.
Last Saturday night onstage at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, queer comedian Margaret Cho – now on tour with her new show, Beautiful – recalled going on a radio show where the host asked her: “What if you woke up tomorrow and you were beautiful? What if you woke up and you were blond, had blue eyes, were 5-foot-11, weighed 100 pounds, and you were beautiful? What would you do?”
In a deadpan voice, Cho said she responded, “I probably wouldn’t get up because I would be too weak to stand.”
Though she joked about the radio host’s question, there was an underlying sadness to the tale. Anybody who isn’t tall, blond, blue-eyed and thin (that’s most of us) can easily understand why.
That’s why, Cho said, she wanted to name her new stand-up show Beautiful: to celebrate the fact that she is beautiful.
In a way, Beautiful is a return to I’m the One That I Want, the hit 1999 tour that marked her comeback from the failure of her sitcom, All-American Girl. Back in 1999, I went to her Boston performance with a few Asian-American lesbian friends. At that time – probably because I was a bit less loud and proud about being queer than I am now, as the managing editor of this site – Cho’s comedy made me nervous.
She did everything that my Chinese parents told me not to do. She cursed. She made fun of Asian Americans, including her mother. She revealed in detail how much she loved the gays. She talked bluntly about sex – way too bluntly.
She made me uncomfortable, but she also got my attention. That’s why Margaret Cho is so necessary. The sharpest comedy shows you the boundaries of your own tolerance, and pushes them.
Cho is still exhorting her audience to love themselves (with the help of an armful of sexually explicit jokes), but Beautiful is more than a repeat of her tried-and-true message. It’s the next step.
She seems to be saying: Now that we’ve chosen ourselves, it’s time to celebrate our beauty. It’s disturbing how deeply the roots of self-hatred go; it’s also disturbing when it’s excused as modesty. I say this because just the other day, I found myself dismissing a compliment that I received from someone whom I had every reason to believe.
It was Sunday afternoon, the day after Beautiful, and my girlfriend told me (as she often does) that I looked beautiful. I laughed at her and said, “Whatever, you’re biased.”
Possibly because I had dismissed her compliments more than once (and because she knew I wasn’t just being coy), she objected, “No, you look beautiful when you’re dressed up or when you’re wearing a T-shirt or whether you’re wearing makeup or not.”
And then she said, “Sometimes we can’t see what others can see more easily.”
I think of myself as someone who is relatively well-adjusted in terms of my own self-worth, but she hit upon something that I haven’t really admitted to myself until now: I still, often, think of myself as less than beautiful, and that’s because beautiful, in contemporary American culture, is indeed about being tall, thin, blond and blue-eyed.
That definition excludes the vast majority of the population. How could I possibly believe that?
I’ve done a pretty good job of denying that I have felt this way. In my baby dyke years, I rejected the trappings of mainstream femininity, cutting my hair short and wearing flannel shirts and Doc Martens to declare my separation from it. Then, when my understanding of feminism and lesbianism matured, I realized there was still room for me to wear skirts and pretty shoes and to carry purses – so I did, and I enjoyed every minute of being femme.
Living in San Francisco, I surrounded myself with women who challenge mainstream notions of womanhood and female sexuality. In a way, we created our own distinct economy of beauty and success, adjacent to but mostly unaffected by the heterosexual world. We celebrated women’s bodies of all shapes and sizes, accepted each other’s quirks and encouraged exploring the boundaries of sex. I started writing about gender in pop culture for a large lesbian and bisexual website (the one you’re reading). I dated women who were more butch than femme, and I loved the fact that their femininity was obscured by a masculine exterior. I still do.
I even wrote an entire novel in which I retold the story of “Cinderella,” the classic beautiful-girl-meets-her-prince fairy tale. In my version, Cinderella’s beauty was irrelevant; it was her wit and her desire that made her who she was. And in the end, she chose a woman instead of Prince Charming.
All of this reminded me that being beautiful is not about being tall, thin, blond and blue-eyed. But it still wasn’t enough to erase the persistent message that mainstream society sends about beauty.
If even I still buy into the beauty myth at some subconscious level, there must be millions more women who accept it as bald fact.
Margaret Cho’s Beautiful isn’t going to change that. She’s only one voice – albeit an amplified one – in an unending struggle against intolerance for those who are “different.” But she does lodge an arrow in the wall separating those chosen few beautiful ones from the rest of us. I would guess that seeing her show on Saturday night opened a window for me to finally hear my girlfriend when she said, “No, you are beautiful.”
For some people, Cho’s comedy will be too abrasive, and her message will be lost in the recoil from her brash, blunt jokes about sex. In Beautiful, not only does she talk about what she likes, she talks about what she doesn’t like. She talks about the dirtiness of it all – and by dirty I mean actual filth, as well as the kinkier interpretations.
In Beautiful, she revels in queerness, praising gay men and their anatomies with a fervor that can only be expressed by a fag hag. And then she turns around and delivers an ode to sex with women that is unexpectedly sweet and tender.
And I will admit that there are aspects of Cho’s stand-up routine that tread too close to the line between funny and distasteful (particularly when she talks about female anatomy), but appreciating her means appreciating the good with the bad, the ugly with the beautiful. And that is, of course, the theme of her new tour. For many years now, Cho has been preaching a message of self-acceptance, but she’s certainly no Oprah. There’s an edge to her humor that will likely prevent her from becoming a huge mainstream hit like Ellen DeGeneres.
But in a world where kids are still murdered because they don’t look like the mainstream ideal, Cho’s edge is practically a requirement. We need someone to fight back for us and declare that hey, even if we’re Asian or queer or slutty (or all of the above), we’re beautiful, too.
Malinda Lo is the managing editor of AfterEllen.com. Watch her on The Lo-Down or visit her website for her blog and more.
