My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Margaret Cho (1968): How to Break Every Oriental Stereotype in the Book

276 Margaret Cho How to Break Every Oriental Stereotype in the Book Kenji Oshima Chink!” . . . “Freak!” Ah, the verbal genius of junior high school taunting. Why do homophobic bullies never have anything clever to say? In the words of my diva, “Ooo, enchanté!” The full details of those torturous years evade me now, but seared into my experience is Danny Fitzpatrick calling me (INSERT any “Oriental” slur HERE) wherever and whenever he pleased—in class, the halls, gym, and once even in front of a teacher who only laughed. Name-calling, threats, and punching weren’t necessarily daily occurrences, but it was made crystal clear 277 to me that as the single nonwhite kid in my school, I could be accosted anytime. Even the instructors were openly racist when it came to Asians (and you gotta assume I was the tip of the iceberg ). “How do they do it in China?” one blonde teacher skewered me with when my friend Michael and I passed notes to one another. Don’t ask me what she meant; to this day, I haven’t a clue. And why “faggot” wasn’t my harassers’ slap of choice was never clear either, given that I was sensitive and long-haired with an obvious crush on the most popular boy. Since racism and homophobia were de rigueur throughout my teenage years, who better then to inspire my spleen-venting adulthood than a kick-ass, foul-mouthed, bisexual, brilliant San Francisco Asian woman who has an “inner drag queen,” and wouldn’t think twice about telling someone to fuck off? Whose diva would win the prizefight diva-bitch-slap contest? Mine. Margaret Cho is a fully enlightened fabulous diva who is utterly unabashed about sharing her struggles with addiction, racism, and an eating disorder. When a reporter once wondered aloud if her “Korean family was ashamed” of her, she shot back: “Any family would be ashamed of me.” That’s my mentor, of whom I am so proud. Some of my adulthood has been given over to processing the gauntlet of childhood and rejecting all the lies punched into me: that as a biracial Asian gay man, I’m not unattractive, not secondclass , not sexless, and never alone in struggles with my body issues and unfavorable internalized self-image. Luckily, I am off the rollercoaster self-esteem ride from hell. I have the “Notorious C.H.O.” to thank for helping to rid my psyche of these ugly beliefs. I’ve never been one of those gay boys who lined up for Barbra or paid two hundred dollars to see Céline fly around on wires (would someone please cut them already?). In fact I’d be really hard pressed to name who’s on the cover of People magazine, because somewhere along the Fag-O-Matic DNA-dispensing conveyer belt, I didn’t get the gossip gene. Margaret Cho 278 Who wants a diva who can strut around in a twentythousand -dollar gown, when my diva posted on her Web site the deluge of racist, homophobic hate mail she received after saying that “George Bush is not Hitler . . . he would be if he applied himself ”? The same ignorant masses who spammed her with “Dyke, chink, gook from Mongolia, go back to your country where you came from, you fat pig” unintentionally included their return e-mail addresses and “all their work information and their home email, and their home telephone number . . . and what kind of ice cream they liked . . . what they’re [sic] second choice was.” She confessed, “I didn’t realize this, but there are people out there who realllllly like me, and they are pissed off to begin with . . . [so] in posting these emails I had inadvertently activated the terrorist sleeper cell Al-Gay-Da.” And we all know what happens when you piss off a bunch of queens who love their divas? Particularly queens who vividly remember their junior high school years? I don’t think most of the morons who e-mailed Margaret knew what hit them. Can you imagine? Five thousand gay men, at work, bored, remembering being called something evil when they were little gay boys, now granted the opportunity to tell some of these dunces what they thought? She joked, “I was getting apology emails so fast . . . flooding in . . . I’m sorry, I’m sorry I called you a chink . . . please make these gay people leave...