To judge from her one-woman show, filmed during two performances at San Francisco's Warfield Theater in November 1999, her parade wouldn't be too different from San Francisco's annual gay pride procession. She made her name at queer clubs and has a huge following of gay fans. In the prelude to the film, several say they live for three things: ass, Judy Garland and Margaret Cho.

Cho, a native of the Haight in San Francisco who grew up partly on gay Polk Street (where her parents ran a bookstore), will be the celebrity grand marshal of the Pride Parade on June 25, two days after her performance film screens at the S.F. International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. (It premiered at the Honolulu Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and will play regular theatrical engagements in major cities throughout the summer.)

Although this show has been reviewed as if it were the equal of unified performance pieces from stand-ups as different as Sandra Bernhard and Julia Sweeney, you can find at least a third of it on Cho's 1996 CD, "Drunk With Power," which documents her comedy club act. But in "I'm the One That I Want," Cho, 31, goes into detail about her brief stint as the first Asian-American sitcom star on ABC's 1994-95 series "All-American Girl," views her subsequent slide into alcoholism as a near-suicidal descent and frames it as a tale about a young woman growing up in an entertainment pressure cooker. As "Variety" reviewer Charles Isherwood wrote, "Cho's sitcom saga is full of grotesque ironies that could only happen in Hollywood, where the building of half-hour comedies takes place in an environment of humorlessness and desperation more likely to be associated with bloody war campaigns."

If Cho's performance veers uneasily from raucous nightclub grandstanding to ruefulness and pathos, her show is fascinating for the way it captures a comic talent in transition, struggling to broaden and deepen while remaining frank, particular and gaudy. She is now working on her autobiography (scheduled for publication in 2001 from Ballantine). When I called her at her Los Angeles home, I let her know how naive I had been about her gay-bar roots and camp following.

For non-Cho initiates -- for those of us who know you from random TV appearances and from "All-American Girl" -- the fag-hag/slut stuff is startling.

Which is so fabulous! When I started I did a lot of gay clubs and gay bars -- this was when I was real young, 17, 18, 19. And I got quite a following from that. It was where my friends went. I was friends with a lot of gay guys; they said, "You should go here and here and here," and I just went and did it. When I started doing television, the Midnight Sun, a bar in the Castro that has video stuff, started playing my appearances. A lot of guys began to ask, "Oh, who's that?" They liked me, and would come and see me when I played at Josie's Juice Joint in the Castro, a big place for me coming up as a stand-up. I learned a lot there and had a great time. I've always been a fag hag, ever since I was a young girl. It was a natural, easy thing for me. My life, my love -- it's who I am.

Most of the time, you present your mother as a conventional middle-class person concerned by the thought you might be gay. But at the end you talk about her working in a bookshop that had a gay porn section. Were your parents sending you mixed signals?

It was just a different world; my parents were showing me a different way of life. There were a lot of things going on psychologically for me when I was 12 years old. I had developed really early. So I had a real distrust of men, because the men I knew were lecherous. They were always asking personal questions. They were very touchy, at a time when I was very uncomfortable with my body. So I was a young woman who was afraid of men. But suddenly I realized what homosexuality was and understood it, and was surrounded by gay men. I felt utterly safe, utterly protected, and grew to understand how to love men. Homosexuality brought me to a place where I could love men and connect with them. So I've always had that. It's about being safe and protected, being loved, and, on another level, about being a minority and finding a community within another minority -- that was a part of it as well.

You're saying it helped you relate better to straight men?

And to people in general. I felt really lucky to have been able to grow up that way, in that environment, and that naturally evolved into my life. I was always working in gay bars and always had gay men friends -- in the entertainment industry, that's just par for the course. That's great. I always had a great time.

And, just so I understand your upbringing: Your parents accepted and liked this?

They wanted to expose me to different people. At the bookstore the people were mostly gay men, and they were all smart and well read. My father encouraged me to talk to them about books. He felt that gay men knew the best of the best -- they had the best taste and would be the perfect educators for me. We couldn't afford charm school or finishing school for me, so hanging out with gay men was the affordable solution.

We get a different idea of your parents in the show. Have you explored this side of them in other stand-up bits?

It's interesting, I haven't. But I do plan to explore that in the book I'm writing. That will be in there. My parents were pretty open-minded.

Aside from more gay subject matter, is there a difference between the comedy that goes over in a gay club and what goes over in other clubs?

I don't know. For me, when I'm in front of a gay audience, it's more like I'm in front of family, and I can talk about things with more specificity, more detail. I feel I can get really down. It's my ideal place to perform: The gay audience is my tribe, where I want to do it and where I do it best. I perform for lots of different people, and I really get joy out of any audience. But the gay audience -- I'm down with them.

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