Gay fave Margaret Cho discusses her risqué show, The Sensuous Woman, being a gay icon and preaching to the choir.

From her struggles with network execs who said she was too fat for TV to her riotously self-empowering stage shows, to her embracing of the gay community (and her subsequent revelation that she is bisexual), Margaret Cho has become a beloved gay icon of the highest order. In her latest show, The Sensuous Woman, Cho hooks up with an array of gender-bending friends for a naughty variety show that combines vaudeville, burlesque, standup and performance art. And she gets naked too. As she tours the show across the country, Cho sits down with Instinct to chat about working with her friends, her love of Donny and Marie Osmond, and her show-stopping striptease number.

INSTINCT: Your show, The Sensuous Woman, is a bit of a departure from your last several. Were you tired of doing straight stand-up, or did you just want to try something different?
MARGARET CHO: I still love doing straight stand-up, and I do some of that in the show. This is just something that I thought would be new and different and kind of fun, so I just wanted to try it.

The show is structured like an old vaudeville burlesque show. What about those shows appeals to you?
I love the variety aspect of vaudeville and burlesque shows. I wasn’t around to see those shows, but I modeled it after shows like The Sonny and Cher Show and Donny and Marie, which I think are some of the most amazing, exciting entertainment experiences, because you have a star and then they have the glamour of their starkness, and they have other stars who back them up. They sing and dance and do comedy, so it’s really exciting.

Burlesque and vaudeville kinda died out back in the 50s with the onset of television. Do you think it’s a lost art?
I do, but I think that it’s coming back, because there are so many different kinds of burlesque revivals and I feel like this is a great time to do this. I think it’s a really fun way to come back to the theater.

There’s a lot of collaboration in this show. Is that something you enjoy?
Yeah. I like sharing the stage. I think it’s really great. I find that in a way that all of the performers I chose for my show are extensions of myself. I picked them and they are all friends of mine and they are amazing.

You’ve had quite an evolution as a performer over the years, from comedienne to TV sitcom star to one-woman powerhouse to movie actress and now burlesque performance artist. How do you account for being able to wear so many hats?
I just like to learn things and do different things. I’m always very influenced by who I’m hanging out with at the time, so that’s how this show came bout. It was a project amongst friends that we started doing a little over a year ago, and it just became a very popular thing.

With television shows having gotten so good again, would you ever consider making a return to series TV? If so, what kind of show would it be?
I love doing this show, but I’d love to return to series TV. I think there are so many great things happening in TV right now, so we’ll see. I’m kind of thinking maybe a reality show, which would be fun. I watch a lot of reality shows, so that’s kind of my taste right now.

You show a lot of skin in the new show. Considering your struggles with Hollywood’s beauty mentality, this must have been extremely liberating for you.
It was very liberating. I think it’s really important, because we never see images of real women in the media at all. So feeling invisible for all these years, I think, is really bad, and I just want to really be visible and show that women can not be the model types and still be beautiful.

You touch on this in the show, but having gone through your own struggle to come to terms with your body, is it hard for you to see so many gay men get caught up in the obsession with body perfectionism?
I think it’s really hard for gay men right now, because so much of their culture is based on a really unattainable body ideal, so I think it’s really tough for them. And I think it’s something that they need to just be easy with themselves with. They need to just relax about it.

Is it vanity, superficiality or insecurity that propels this kind of behavior? Or perhaps a bit of all three?
I think it’s all three, and also it’s a kind of social conditioning and a kind of competition. It’s a tough kind of cultural mandate that we don’t need to have.

How do you suggest that people reconcile the three?
I think that we need to look to other things in our lives that are better and good and that we can be grateful for. And also look to our bodies with a sense of gratitude as opposed to feeling like we have to fix something. We should be grateful for what we have now.

How important was it for you to address this topic with the gay community specifically?
I think it’s really important to address that in the gay community. It’s a difficult time, because we are not accomplishing all that we could be accomplishing because there is that distraction—this need to obtain to this physical ideal. There are just a lot of problems and issues there, like guys doing crystal meth to attain that body and then going into addiction. And that’s a major problem too.

You’ve developed such a huge gay following over the years. Do you ever worry that, like Madonna and Cher, you’ll be pigeonholed as a “gay performer”?
I would love to be pigeonholed as a gay performer. If it means being compared to people like Madonna and Cher, that would be awesome.

How do you react to the critics who say that you’re preaching to the choir?
I am, but I think that the choir needs to be preached to. I think we need to be celebrated for who we are and we need to have this safe place to come to and enjoy ourselves. I think that’s really important. So I keep on doing it. I think my comedy extends to the mainstream as well, but I feel that we [gays and lesbians] are mainstream. I feel that we are absolutely the norm.

What’s next for you?
After this show, I’m going to go back and do another solo standup show. Doing this show gives me a little opportunity to write it, because I’m doing standup in the show. I’m going to go back out on the road pretty quickly before the end of the year. I don’t know yet what kind of show it will be, because I’m still working on it. But it will be fun.