The Young Turks - Margaret Cho & Daniel Franzese, What Does Pride Mean To You?

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

Margaret Cho & Daniel Franzese, What Does Pride Mean To You? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to The Young Turks, the online news show. Make sure to follow and rate our show with not one, not two, not three, not four, but five stars. You're awesome. Thank you. Back to the special. Very excited to welcome to the show, our two next guests. First, comedian Margaret Show, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Very glad to have you here. And we're also joined by actor and host of the Yes Jesus podcast. Daniel Francisi,

welcome to the show as well. How's it going? I'm so happy to be here. No, we're glad to have you both here. We got a lot that we want to talk about, including projects that you're both working on that I'm personally very interested in. But I do want to start off in the same way to start off our last block. Since this is the launching point, we're launching into Pride Month. I'm going to start with you, Margaret. What does Pride mean to you in 2022? You know, I've been intending gay pride since 1978.

And so I have met many of many a memory, you know, the roar of the sun bikes that just fills my heart with so much promise and joy for the future. And I think we need it now more than ever. So I'm looking to this pride to bring some of that energy back, some of that healing energy, that togetherness, it's exciting. And Daniel? I just think it's an incredible time to just be an example of love in this world. I love the fact that I think that's the number one thing for LGBTQ people to think about

is just be an example of love and walk around and just unequivocally be you and be with whoever you want to be with. I think it's an amazing feeling. My first pride I was in the closet and working as a bouncer and it passed by my bar. And, you know, now to be somebody who, you know, I live my life out and proud and it just feels so amazing to be able to see that journey. It's never lost on me. That's absolutely awesome. And I know, you know, you know, you were talking about, you know, wanting to put this positivity out into the universe. I know we mentioned your podcast where you do that.

And I know a lot of people think that there's supposed to be this like dividing line between religion or Christianity specifically. and the community, but you don't don't feel that that's necessary at all. And I love that. Can you talk a little bit about how the work that you do in the podcast helps you to achieve the goals that you're talking about there? Yeah, I just think it's kind of weird that people are told that you have to choose between gay and God. It's like, if God is something that's that important to you and if God centers you and then you're not allowed to have it because you're gay, it's kind of an odd thing. I don't think God gives up on you. So why do you give up?

up on God, if someone said to you, what's your most favorite thing? And you're like, oh, my little puppy scruffy or my Louis Vuitton carry all. And if I said, oh, can I have it? Like, you'd be like, no, it's fine, but like you just let them take your God. Like, I mean, you know, it's a moral compass for a lot of us, it's a center. It's something, it's a vibration that we can reach. And I think to tell LGBTQ people that today shouldn't even be allowed to explore that or to be able to have that is doing a disservice to the Bible.

So we just look at things to like a rainbow lens. We are, we are sluts, we are sinners, or everything else. And it's just like we're questioning and asking questions and every week we just invite people on to wonder with us because who the hell knows? If you know, tell me, because nobody really knows what's what, you know, and I just think it's awful that, you know, there's so, Jesus mentioned hypocrite count so many times in the Bible, but he never once said anything bad about gay people. So I think that people really need to evaluate and follow the Christ that preaches love and not the one that preaches hate. I think that's awesome.

Well, look, through the course of this segment, we're going to be talking about representation, we've already sort of have been. But I want to get into one of the projects, Margaret Cho, I know that you're involved in. I believe we have a trailer for Fire Island. Can we play that? Get on the boat! Stupid bitch Noah every year. Oh, I made it, didn't I? This week is sacred.

We're going to Fire Island. And this is why straight people hate us. And also heteronropativity, Jeter Christian pathology, anal. For whatever reason, call it magic, time sort of works differently here. Finally, my girls ever wrong! And that is our makeshift little family.

We all met 10 years ago working at the same cursed brunch spot. Bottom this mimosa, bitches. Jackie Chan, hey, you're going on a refill here, bud. I can't believe you talked me into this again. I come here, I just feel terminally alone. Oh, are you all right? It's fine. It happens all the time.

Do you want some whiskey? It would help with your niece. You trust me, I'm a doctor. No! I love that trailer. So, Margaret, tell us a little bit about Fire Island. It's basically a gay Asian American reimagining of pride and prejudice, kind of like gay pride and gay prejudice and happening on Fire Island. And I think it's really the class structures that were presented in the Jane Austen novel are just as rigid on Fire Island today.

I think oftentimes we think we're gay, we can't possibly be racist or classist or homophobic or sexist or body shaming. but we're actually all those things we can be and yet you know this is a very a deeply funny comedy it's all done with a lot of romance and a lot of heart and we get to see some Asian American gay people it's exciting that's awesome I love the trailer too you know this has been a very dark year I mean a lot of them have been this has been a pretty dark year and there are a few people that give me as much joy on a weekly basis as Bo and Yang so I can't wait to see see that? So that looks absolutely awesome. I can't wait to see your performance in it. I do want to ask both of you, though, the topic of representation has been one of the things

that the right has focused on in their attacks recently, especially the demonization of Disney, the idea that even to the very limited extent that Disney has had non-straight characters, and often the most that you get is a little bit of a hint. For some, politically, that has been considered to be too much, whereas other people believe that more representation could do a lot to make people feel more comfortable, more accepted, more understood and all that. So I want to start with you, Margaret. Tell me a little bit about this sort of cultural battle over getting even the limited amount of representation that we see these days.

It's so important and it's so vital to our society. You know, we want to be seen, we want to feel visible, we want to feel heard, we want to feel like we matter. We want to feel like we matter. And I think that the way that these conservatives are twisted into some kind of a moral argument, there is no morality really in our identity that it's corrupted or can be looked at in sort of a negative light. We're just telling our stories and we should be allowed to. I think there's just a very strange kind of propaganda, this message that they're pushing

that the this sort of cis heteronormative lifestyle is like somehow getting abandoned and left behind. That stuff will never go away. But we had enough of that. We have a whole canon of that. We have a hundred years of cinema to look back on for that. Now let's go and see what other lives are about. I feel the same thing. I mean, the last part of that really touched on it, see what other people's lives are all about. Like, aren't you bored just getting regurgitated the same information and the same stories over and over and over again? I feel like it's a win every time I'm on screen because I'm always like I don't see people like me on screen that often. So I do my best to try it to be as visible as possible.

And I think that any creator out there, like there are people who are dying to see the thing about yourself that you don't see in media. So go out there and put it out there for other people because there's like a little version of you that's just like begging for a glimmer of somebody that looks like them to feel okay with themselves. I this whole don't say gay thing is really awful. Florida is a state that I grew up in. And I, my family, I have, my little nieces and nephews are there now. And it's like I worry all the time about the future in places like that where you can't even talk about something or have a discussion about things. That's something we always explore in the podcast too.

And it's like just kind of just like, I think that's something that comedians were allowed to do. Like in stand-up, we're still like the last exploration of even having different ideas and talking about things that other people won't talk about. And I don't really believe in censorship and I don't believe in it being something that just seeing different types of people and different kinds of stories of people living really shouldn't affect how you live your life. I mean ignorance is really just the absence of information. So until we show it to them, they're not going to learn. Yeah, well, and I definitely agree.

It's one of the reasons why I think so many of the recent attacks being focused on schools and the experience that kids will have in school worry me so much because look, I didn't, you know, When I finished elementary school, I didn't come out of it thinking, like, we've got this thing locked down. We do an awesome job of educating kids. And it seems like they're only trying to go backwards in the years recently. So yeah, I don't like to see. Conversion therapy in Florida. And my parents were accepting.

We had gay cousins. My grandmother had a gay uncle who was living with a partner until he passed in an elderly age. And it was accepted in my family. I would say lovingly tolerated, really. But it was the, it was the environment that I was in, it was the state, the people, media, I didn't see myself. People didn't make it seem like it was an okay thing to be that made me question myself. That's why it's so important that books are available to read and different kinds of view

should be shown on television. And why not have two lesbian moms pushing a baby and finding Dory? Like who cares? Like it's so simple, just, you know, like pretend they're sisters in your head. Get a different perspective if you need to. So you don't like whatever, like whatever it is that's bothering these people. I just think it's really nice for people that do have two moms to be able to see something like that and say, hey, that's like us. Yeah. Yeah. And as Margaret, as you were saying, it's not like there's not going to be straight couples in commercials.

Like they're always going to have that. It's not going to go away. We've seen so many straight people for such a long time. It's like, can you please just, we get it. You buy paper towels. So do we. I get it. I don't care what you do in the bedroom. I don't want to jump in my face anymore. I think that's a great point. The sex lives of people that I've never met living thousands of miles away have never interested in me. I am barely interested in what I do in my bedroom.

The idea of getting worked up about other people makes no sense to me. No, but let me ask you this, Margaret, like it feels to me and maybe I've been missing it. I am willing to engage with my potential ignorance that it's at a higher level, the attacks. and all that, the focus on a daily basis recently, like, do you think this is a thing they've decided to focus on, like how they focused on Dr. Seuss for a while last year? Is this the thing about the midterms or like, is this gonna burn out? Or do you, do you see this lingering on that side? I think it's, they're trying to divert attention away that we have

a serious problem with guns. And they don't want to take any responsibility for that. Because it's is there the fault that all these children and elderly and people of color have died because they refuse to let go of what they call the second amendment when that when a met the amendment the constitution doesn't mean anything to them they don't care about that unless serves them and so I feel like any of the attacks in the gay community are really just another ploy to distract from the real problems yeah I think that that's definitely uh Definitely behind it. Daniel, I know that you had an organization that you want to talk about.

We only have a couple more minutes, so I wanted to make sure that you had a chance to do that. Reeb is an organization, I just wanted to mention that is holding colleges accountable for making students that are in Christian or Catholic universities or religious universities, not giving them the full experience of equality. They trick, a lot of them trick you in a lot of these colleges, they'll put like two girls that look like lesbian sitting on a field, writing in each other's journals like inside the pamphlet, you know, or like the president of the school will, you know, give a speech behind a rainbow cross, but they're not accepting. When they get into school, they're not allowed to use gay in any of their emails or have any kind of clubs or be able to meet in any other way than profiling each other. It's a serious, dangerous thing. And reap, REAP, is an amazing organization for people to check out if they're looking to go into a school and they want to pursue even a religious education. If that's something that they want, they should be allowed to be able to do that if they're LGBTQ. That's awesome. And as we alluded to earlier, you have your podcast. Where can people catch that? Yeah, you can catch us at yes Jesuspod.com or at yes Jesus pod on Instagram or TikTok. It's just fun.

And we're on there just, you know, we're finding out new things. One thing I always love to mention when I'm talking about the podcast is that Joseph in the Technicolor dream coat, right? Like in 46 AD it wasn't a coat, it was a Ketanit Pasim, which has mentioned one other place in the Bible, which is a virginal princess dress. So Joseph's dress of many colors is what it should be called. And it's like little perspectives like that. Joseph could have been a gender queer person or a trans person of color, we don't know.

And I just think that not having queer perspectives on all these stories that we've been hearing all these years, they'll let vegetables tell it to us in cartoons in a way that's so twisted and weird, but they won't give us a queer perspective. And so that's what we're offering on yes Jesus, just to come in Bible wonder and just, I mean, you know, who knows? Nice. And Margaret, we alluded to Fire Island. I know that's coming out soon, but also you do, you have a tour coming up in the near future, don't you? Yes, I'm just still kind of going back out on the road doing stand-up comedy. I think it's very exciting so people can find out about it at margarettoe.com. Awesome. Margaret, Daniel, thank both for joining me. I really do appreciate it.

Thank you.