Chelsea Handler talks LA Pride

Pride weekend in LA has begun!

The festival doesn’t open until noon today but people have been partying all week already. A real highlight is always Sunday’s parade which I never miss – even the year someone decided it was a good idea to have Paris Hilton as the grand marshal.

Not a good choice.

A better pick seems to be this year’s grand marshal: Chelsea Handler. Like Paris, she’s blonde, but unlike Paris, she has wit and intelligence and great humor. She spoke with Frontiers In LA Magazine about Pride and other topics. Here is some of it:

Q. You’re doing Pride now, you were last year’s Queen of the Carnival for Halloween, so it seems like you may be trying to dethrone Madonna and become the new Queen of the Gays.

A. Oh no, she could take me in a fight, so I can’t even pretend to dethrone Madonna. I like to just do whatever I can when they ask me to. I try to show up for stuff if it’s local. I don’t really have any excuses since I live around the corner. [Laughs]

Q. You were one of the first celebs to speak out against Prop. 8 last year, so thank you. What’s your two cents on all the recent states to go for marriage and Miss California and all?

A. I think [the marriages are] great! That’s what they should be doing, they should be doing it regionally and then hopefully it can spread across the country. Miss California is an idiot and Donald Trump’s an idiot and they can both be idiots together.

Q. Do you mind all the press?

A. There is a certain point with the press when you say, “Enough already,” because you don’t want to be such a media whore. My TV show’s on seven nights a week, three times a day. E! repeats it, so it’s kind of like a saturation. But you don’t want to turn things down because you don’t want to get a reputation for not liking to do press. So I just try to keep an even balance. With my books I end up getting a lot more press, so combined it may be overwhelming for some people, especially people who are sick of me. I’m not trying to pull a Tori Spelling or anything.