It’s a chilly Wednesday night in Buffalo, N.Y., as Pansy Division frontman Jon Ginoli steps out of The Mohawk an hour before his band is set to go on.

He talks loudly on a pay phone outside, trying to escape the noisy club, but bits and pieces of the opening band’s set still pour into earshot of the receiver.

“We just ate the best dinner we’ve probably ever had on the road,” Ginoli says, as cars swish by and traffic rages on. “The promoter of this show is a chef, and he just showed us his talents.”

Gay punk-popsters Pansy Division are in the midst of a massive North American tour, crisscrossing the United States and Canada, hitting smaller venues like the Maintenance Shop — a far cry from Madison Square Garden.

But that’s exactly where the band found themselves when they went on tour with Green Day during the “Dookie” explosion of 1994.

“It got our name out there in a way that we hadn’t expected to happen … ever,” the 40-year-old Ginoli explains. “After that, we had a reality check. It’s like ‘OK. Back to doing our own tours in a van.'”

So that’s what they did, but the Green Day recollections never went away — even on their current tour.

“In Montreal one night and Quebec City the next night, we had people come up to us and say ‘Wow! I saw you when you played up here with Green Day and I’ve been waiting to see you ever since,'” Ginoli says. “We made some long term fans out of that.”

As a gay band, it’s conceivable that Ginoli and his bandmates may be faced with stereotypes. But for the most part, the stereotypes they receive luckily have not come in the form of gay bashing or discrimination.

“We were very fearful when we first started traveling outside California that people would attack us and be there to protest and nothing like that has ever happened,” Ginoli says. “I think that just means that the acceptance of gay people has improved a lot since the ’80s. We’ve helped change the times but we’re also a sign of our times.”

Instead, Pansy Division has felt pressure to conform to certain “gay” standards.

“To say you like rock music is hardly rebellious at this point in the 20th century — unless you’re gay,” he says excitedly. “When I was a musician, living in Illinois, playing in bands there, I was one of the few gay people involved in the rock music, indie, underground scene. Most of my friends were straight because gay people didn’t pay attention to what I was doing; they were paying attention to what was playing in the gay dance clubs.”

Ginoli says he and Pansy Division bassist Chris Freeman got a lot of slack for liking rock music and punk rock in the ’80s. “We always felt alienated from a certain gay culture because what we grew up on turned out to be so different than what most gay people like. It seems like kind of a silly thing to be so upset about, but we were on the receiving end of the upset, we weren’t like, ‘No one likes the Rolling Stones, I’m miffed.’

“It’s like ‘Oh … you don’t like what we like … you’re not part of us,'” he adds, slipping into his best snobby voice.

After making several albums of punk rock, the band has also confronted the challenge of keeping things fresh without betraying old fans.

“When we started out, we wanted to do something that just really made us happy and we made a lot of songs that were humorous and sexual,” Ginoli says. “What we wanted to hear, we hadn’t heard a band doing that was gay. After we’d done it for awhile we thought, well, we can either keep this pattern or we can find some kind of natural evolution.”

Instead of addressing primarily sexuality, with albums titles such as “Nine Inch Males,” Pansy Division’s latest album, “Absurd Pop Song Romance,” deals more with relationships and friendships.

But are the guys in Pansy Division shedding their punk rock image?

“We’ve gotten to the point where people will just take us or leave us as a gay band, so let’s broaden what we sing about and not repeat ourselves,” Ginoli says. “We’re not a huge band. People aren’t going to automatically know who we are. It’s like a lot of underground music — it gets around through word of mouth. Our continuation as a band relies on new people getting excited about it, telling people. And it’s been good so far.”

For the few people who have been touched by Pansy Division’s music and message, it’s all worth it for Ginoli.

“It’s great to have kids that write to you that say you know, ‘I’m living in Bridgetown Nova Scotia. I’m the only lesbian at my school and everyone thinks that I’m a freak. And I got your record and it made me feel a lot better.’ There’s really nothing more rewarding than that.”

With that said, Ginoli cuts the conversation off because it’s too cold. He heads inside the New York club to play another show and bring his message to another room of awaiting fans.