Let's get one thing straight.

OK, unfortunate choice of words, but bear with me. Comedian Margaret Cho isn't gay, strictly speaking. She's been married to a man, artist Al Ridenour, since 2003. But she's been part of the gay community nearly as long as she can remember. A self-described "fag hag," Cho, 36, grew up around Polk Street in San Francisco, where her parents ran a bookstore, and later lived in the Castro neighborhood until she hit the road in 1990 and eventually settled in Los Angeles.

"Fag hags are the backbone of the gay community," Cho says in her act. "Without us, you're nothing!"

The nice thing about being a woman who loves men who love other men is that they love her right back, and gay men make up a large portion of Cho's fan base. (Fag-hag hags, maybe? Um, maybe not.)

"That's like the best thing ever," she gushes on the phone from a tour stop in New York. "Only the best people have lots of gay fans -- these great, tragic, crazy divas, gay icons like Judy Garland or Liza Minnelli. And I'm a fan of these women, too. I'm also very gay in that way."

Cho came up as a comedian in gay-oriented venues like Josie's Juice Joint in the Castro, and some of us who'd seen her act about early lesbian encounters and clubbing with her gay friends (who'd ditch her whenever they got lucky) were a little taken aback when she appeared on a prime-time Bob Hope special in 1992. There was her act about growing up Korean American, with her ever-popular parody of her heavily accented mother -- only without all the gay stuff.

Next thing you knew, she was dating Quentin Tarantino and embodying the sitcom version of an Asian American family (to be fair, the first sitcom version of an Asian American family) on ABC's "All-American Girl" in 1994, and just as suddenly the network pulled the plug. What the heck happened to Margaret Cho?

Her 1999 solo show "I'm the One That I Want" gave the answer, chronicling the speedy rise and fall of her TV show, for which she was asked to lose weight to play herself, and the downward spiral that followed cancellation.

She also cleared up the whole wait-wasn't-she-gay thing: "I was like, am I gay? Am I straight? And I realized, I'm just slutty. Where's my parade?"

A 2000 concert film of the show, shot at the Warfield in San Francisco, grossed more per print than any movie had before -- $1.4 million with only nine prints -- and was expanded into a best-selling memoir of the same name.

Since then, no one's had cause to wonder what's up with Cho because she's been more than willing to share. Her subsequent solo shows, "Notorious C.H.O." and "Revolution," also committed to film, have covered everything from sex and drugs to moments of incontinence with a frankness bordering on the extreme. She's recently written a second book, called "I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight" after Patty Hearst's memorable Stockholm-syndrome quote, due for release from Penguin Putnam in late October. Currently in postproduction is "Bam Bam and Celeste," a road movie she wrote and stars in with sometime-opening act Bruce Daniels that she describes as "a fag and fag-hag 'Dumb and Dumber,' " directed by longtime concert-film collaborator Lorene Machado.

Cho's latest one-woman show, "Assassin," which arrives Friday at Davies Symphony Hall, is really a continuation of last fall's "State of Emergency" tour, which went through swing states to rally voters before the presidential election. After things didn't go as she'd hoped in November, the show evolved into its current form of social commentary and general provocation. The Washington, D.C., stop was taped for the gay-oriented Here! cable network last month.

" 'State of Emergency' seemed a little bit inappropriate after the election, and I wanted to find a name that was really volatile," Cho says.

The Bush victory was a blow for Cho, as it was for many on the left, but more so because its rallying point seemed to be based on intolerance.

"What's sad is that so many people really wanted to vote for Bush just to make sure that gay marriage would not happen," she says. "People were voting out of their own fear, their own homophobia, their own ignorance, and I'm so embarrassed that so many Americans would take that as a motivation to vote."

That's not to say that Cho in any way endorses the view voiced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that Mayor Gavin Newsom somehow lost the election for John Kerry by allowing same-sex marriages in San Francisco.

"It's not his fault that so many Americans have this strange idea about homosexuality, that it's some kind of perversion, and that it will somehow affect their lives," she says. "I think Gavin Newsom really had higher hopes for Americans, and it's not a crime. All politicians should try to aim higher. It's so dumb for Democrats to blame him for legitimizing gay marriage because gay marriage should be absolutely legal in the first place."

For Cho, equal access to the institution of marriage for same-sex couples is a basic civil rights issue, and it's one she's especially passionate about. She maintains a marriage-equality resource Web site called LoveIsLoveIsLove. com to share breaking news and exchange ideas on the issue.

"It's an important issue for me because it's not really about marriage, it's about equality and recognizing everybody as equal," she says. "We can't call ourselves a free country if we don't have real freedom, and real freedom is applicable to everybody, not just to a certain group of people."

Cho has taken some flak for being an advocate of gay marriage while having made a traditional choice herself -- to marry a guy. Because she's been so up front and right on about issues such as weight and sexuality, fans sometimes feel they have an investment in the way she lives her life. Her act invites people to get all up in her business, and one side effect is that they tend to stay there.

"It doesn't bother me," she says. "I mean, I don't consider anything necessarily private. People were very eager to be upset with me when I lost some weight, and felt that I may have somehow been dishonest in talking about being fat and not caring.

"But I still don't really care about my weight. My weight change is an incidental thing because I took up a physical activity that I really enjoyed. Another thing was that I got married, but being married made me see how important the whole idea of marriage was, and how necessary it was for gays and lesbians to attain that right. So it really helped me to become more of a queer activist."

Besides, anyone who looks at Cho's blog at margaretcho.com can see that she gives as good as she gets. But she doesn't lay into anyone with quite as much glee as she does the people who send her hate mail for voicing her political opinions.

"I think that getting a lot of hate mail, that's so hot," she says. "I love it when people get really racist, too. That's hilarious. And they just can't contain it. ... They have every type of racial expletive that they can think of, but they can't really argue with me about my political beliefs. All they can say is, 'Who do you think you are?' "

If you don't know by now, you're just not paying attention.