Margaret Cho is in a good place right now, and it shows. When we meet, she’s wearing a stylish mix of designer and vintage, a Nieves Lavi silk jersey dress, killer heels, and cute multicolored tights from Topshop in London. Her skin is glowing and her figure is sleek, thanks to regular belly dancing; she even recently tried her hand at ballet. And her creative cup runneth over—there’s a film (Bam Bam and Celeste, a “fag-and-fag-hag Thelma and Louise,” she says); the True Colors concert tour with Cyndi Lauper, Erasure, Debbie Harry, and the Gossip this summer; and talk of taking her burlesque show The Sensuous Woman off-Broadway this fall.

Clearly, Margaret Cho is much more than a comic these days—she’s a one-woman renaissance. “I just feel so free right now,” she says as we chat in her dressing room at Hollywood’s Sunset Gower studios just before her appearance on Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed. “This is such a good time in my life. I am 38 and I feel good physically, plus I am doing all these different things and having fun with them all. It’s great.”

Cho exudes a calm centeredness. If she were a chapter in a self-help book, she’d be the one at the end where you release your inner child and get in touch with your anger—but it’s been a long road. When she was growing up in San Francisco in the late ’70s, her parents had a bookstore on Polk Street, an epicenter of gay culture. At school, she liked to dress up like her style icons, Siouxsie Sioux and Cyndi Lauper. “I had a really hard time at school,” she says. “I was very shy but at the same time I looked very strange. To me, it was a really important aesthetic expression. I wanted my hair to be pink. It was the only way I could express myself safely.”

She relives her youth in the semiautobiographical Bam Bam and Celeste, a low-budget road movie starring herself and long-time comedian colleague Bruce Daniels as best friends who get sick of small-town life and head to New York City to enter a hairdressing competition (the film premieres aboard the Queen Mary 2 from May 29 to June 4, and is being released on DVD on July 24). It stars some well-known faces: Alan Cumming, sporting an awe-inspiring side part, plays her gawky love interest; The L Word’s Jane Lynch plays a handsome, mulleted “lesbian lone ranger”; and John Cho, who starred in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (“he’s my little baby,” says Margaret) stars as an obnoxious talk-show host. Bam Bam and Celeste may not be Lynch, Bergman, or even Tarantino (whom she dated in the ’90s), but it possesses a spirited charm that will undoubtedly endear it to her queer fans, boldly tackling racism and homophobia and beauty—its central theme.

Beauty and self-image are recurring themes for Cho, which she has explored throughout her personal and professional life. After a few hazy years post–All-American Girl, the sitcom that was supposed to brand her as a nationwide star but instead sent her into a spiral of drug and body-image problems, Cho’s career rebirth came in 1999 when she launched her first one-woman show, I’m the One That I Want. She fessed up about her problems, about the drugs and booze, the boyfriends, the girlfriends, the abortions, and the weight issues. Audiences loved it. Then came Notorious C.H.O. in 2002, followed by Revolution and Assassin. Her humor, raunchier and more biting than ever before, hit the spot. (“So there I was, getting fisted by this midget butch lesbian,” she casually states in Notorious C.H.O.) Like all the great queer performers, Cho had taken her tragedy and made it work, splitting our sides in the process.

The great divide between the beautiful and the ugly will cease to be. Because we are all what we choose.”
—Margaret Cho, on her blog

The success of Notorious C.H.O. and several subsequent shows gave Cho the confidence to explore those themes in different ways. Her neo-burlesque variety show The Sensuous Woman, now a year old, is an out-and-out celebration of beauty in all its various guises. It has been a transformative experience for Cho, who belly dances on stage.

“Belly dancing has just given me more confidence in my body and freedom of movement than I ever had before,” she says. Starring alongside Cho are former punk Pleasant Gehman, aka Princess Farhana (Cho’s belly-dancing mentor); Selene Luna, the four-foot-tall former Velvet Hammer star; and Internet star Kelly, real name: Liam Sullivan. (Kelly’s cult-hit Internet music video “Shoes” came into being after Cho’s husband supplied a robot for the shoot. “My husband showed me the results and I was amazed,” says Cho. She posted “Shoes” on her blog, and Kelly, the YouTube star, was born.)

Cho hopes to take Kelly and the rest of the Sensuous Woman cast off-Broadway this fall, shortly after the 15-city True Colors tour, which she is hosting. Set to perform on the tour are such legends as Debbie Harry, Erasure, the Gossip, the Dresden Dolls—and Cho’s childhood hero, Cyndi Lauper. “Cyndi Lauper is the one who inspired my crazy haircuts back in the ’80s,” she says. “Meeting her, it’s like coming full circle.”

The True Colors tour, in support of the Human Rights Campaign, kicks off in Las Vegas on June 8 and concludes at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on June 30.