Jonny McGovern :: Proud to be a pimp

"It's a great primer for our extremely retarded, faggoty show."

So says actor, comedian, musician and self-designated gay pimp Jonny McGovern. The star of The Big Gay Sketch Show is a king (or is it, queen?) of most media, and his latest release is a two-volume "best of" collection of his weekly podcast Gay Pimpin'.

Bay Windows chatted with Jonny about the collection of bits, the mainstreaming of queer humor, and his own collegiate connection to Boston.

I didn't realize that you went to college at Boston University! What did you think of your time here?
Oh God, I loved going to school in Boston! I grew up overseas. Moved away from Brooklyn when I was eight and lived in Thailand and Egypt. So I was coming back [to America] for the first time in years, and Boston was the perfect city to ease your way back in. I loved BU, and my mom lived in Boston for years and years after I went to college there.

What was the student gay scene like?
When I went to college, at least for me it was extremely insulated. I didn't go out a lot, but I was in the acting program so there was lots of everybody sleeping with everybody else.

You really don't need to go to the clubs when you're in the performing arts.
You really don't. Going to the acting school, it was like Fagapalooza.

When you were pulling together the Best of Gay Pimpin' volumes, were there any favorite bits that stuck out as personal favorites?
You know, when Britney Spears was going through her troubled year we had a lot of fun at her expense. Those were some of my favorite bits. ... I really loved [the skits about] Jojo the F to M Penis Made from a Clit.

Any that fell kind of flat for you?
Some of the fans really loved it when I got a script of the old Golden Girls episode, "Grab that Dough," and we recast it and read the episode. We even did our own laugh track! It had its moments, but when I listened back I thought maybe it wasn't that great an idea [laughs]. You hear us doing the parts, then hear us faking the laugh track...

And no one could ever do it like Bea Arthur.
I got so many condolences the day she passed away, and last week's episode was a full tribute to Bea. We did the whole [podcast] episode dedicated to all her greats. She was my number one hero, best actress in the world.

When you first started with your Gay Pimp persona, you caught a lot of flack for reinforcing gay stereotypes. Has the hubbub around that died down at all over the years?
Definitely. I mean people still criticize me for being too camp, too reveling in stereotypes of gayness. But again, I feel like, lighten the fuck up. I'm not representing everyone and everything in the world. I take some of the more sparkly aspects of gayness and blow them up. When I was first doing [the video] "Soccer Practice," with drag queen cheerleaders and cruising in the locker room, no one was doing that. Maybe if you went out to the gay clubs [you'd see humor like that], but to the rest of the world that was something they hadn't seen since the YMCA [laughs].

Do you think queer humor has become more mainstream since?
Definitely. You can see Tyra and Beyonce ... I mean, in the past I was like, you know, they have some gay whispering to them in their ear. But now they're no longer whispering, they're shouting! And they're shouting right back! I call them "tranny real girls." You look at Beyonce in the "Single Ladies" video, and it's J-Setting [a dance style popularized in southern black gay clubs], something they've developed in the past where basically guys dressed up in leotards are two degrees, two seconds off from each other. Lady Gaga is pulling a Lady Tranny. She's pulling all the tranny moves I've seen in the underground for years. And Tyra, she pretty much is a gay man. The way she talks, I want to be like, [exasperated] "Girl, I know it's fierce! I know, I know, you're the expert on fierce!"

Do you think as this humor permeates the mainstream that it sort of steals a private joke from the gay community?
It definitely does. Sometimes I'm like, "Bitch, you stole my joke! Now I need new material cause you stole the material I've been working on for years!"

Best of Gay Pimpin' Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 are available now at iTunes. For more info, visit jonnymcgovern.com.