Above: Prefers the company of vaginas

Comic, actor, and writer Owen Benjamin is living in a world gone queer. That’s the premise of Benjamin’s new show on Crackle, Gaytown, where one average straight guy fights for acceptance in a small town full of intolerant and backwards gays. It’s like that weird Travolta movie White Man’s Burden where black people are bigoted and white people discriminated against. Except it’s fablarious (hilarious + fabulous)! Benjamin recently answered a few of our questions about Gaytown, the place, and Gaytown, the show.

Crackle: How did you get the idea for Gaytown—had you spent a lot of time in the Castro or West Hollywood recently?

Owen Benjamin: Living in Hollywood for sure was huge. Seeing rainbows on the police cars out here definitely was inspiring.

Crackle: You had a small part in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, which was about two dudes who pretend to be gay for financial reasons. Did this movie have any bearing on your creation of Gaytown?

OB: No, that was just insanely fun. I’ve been thinking about doing Gaytown for years.

Crackle: How have your gay friends reacted to the show—are you afraid at all of offending them?

OB: No, gay people seem to like it the best. I didn’t use the gay stereotype very much and I think a lot of them will see it as an eye opener to the straight community for what a lot of them go through. Of course some will be offended, but there are always people [who are] offended [by] everything comedic.
I’m sure “why did the chicken cross the road” wasn’t very popular in the chicken community.

Above: Gaytown, Episode One

Crackle: What is the closest you’ve ever come to a real-life Gaytown?

OB: West Hollywood and Chelsea [in NYC]. But neither of those places are anything like Gaytown. A main joke of Gaytown is that it’s very conservative. The gay communities I know are very artistic and liberal and open. In Gaytown its as if you’re in the center of Alabama but everyone is gay.

Crackle: You’re a Punk’d alumnus; how would a Gay Punk’d go?

OB: Probably not very well, haha. [ed: We'd had in mind something along the lines of staged repossession of all of Perez Hilton's hair product. But whatever.]

Crackle: Legally speaking, what’s it like to be straight in Gaytown? Can you get married? Are there laws against vaginal sex?

OB: There’s an anti-straight ordinance that forces all men to wear fannypacks.

Crackle: IMDB says that you’re in the upcoming movie The House Bunny, the story of a down-on-her-luck Playboy Bunny who teaches life lessons to a group of clueless sorority girls. Did any of this wisdom make it to you?

OB: I played Hugh Hefner’s shirtless butler. I don’t think my character was capable of too much wisdom, haha.

Crackle: On a scale of 1 to 10 and with as much commentary as possible, rate how much displeasure the following activities would cause if performed in a public place in Gaytown, where 1 is no displeasure and 10 is maximum
displeasure:

- Holding a ‘Bette Midler Sucks’ sign
7 - Don’t fuck with Bette.

- Wearing clothes that don’t fit right
1 - It’s actually encouraged.

- Buying tickets to ‘10,000 B.C.’
[The movie] doesn’t exist in Gaytown. It’s RENT everyday all day.

- Selling NASCAR memorabilia
2 - NASCAR is actually HUGE in the gay community.

- Eating McDonald’s
9 - Unless you plan on getting a no carb lettuce wrap.

Tune into C-SPOT on Crackle for a brand-new episode of Gaytown tomorrow, March 26th.