The third episode of the fourth season of Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List premiered on Bravo last night, and because it promised so much gay content, we decided to haul out the rarely used Gay-O-Meter to scientifically assess the gayness.

We start with Kathy and Team Griffin (Tom, Jessica, and Tiffany) discussing their upcoming flight to Australia. Not just any flight, BTW, but the all gay Pink Flight, where Kathy is scheduled to perform ... over the P.A. system. The fact that there will be drag queens on the flight doesn't sit well with Jessica, who has an irrational fear of them: "They're big and tall and clown-like, and I'm afraid they're going to touch me when I'm sleeping".

As soon as I heard that, one word sprang to mind - Maury. This would make a perfect topic for one of his "phobia" shows (which are even more entertaining then the constant baby-daddy shows). Some poor woman would come on his show to talk about her all consuming fear of cheese, only to be tormented on stage by a Maury staffer wielding a tray of Kraft Slices, and if she made the mistake of running backstage ... a guy dressed up as a cheese wheel.

Tom (who has quickly become my favorite Griffin team member), chimes in with this loveable schlub classic:

Tom: "Can I hope that someone touches me when I'm sleeping?

Kathy: "Tom, how many times do I have to tell you, you're not hot enough for them!

Tom: "....But I've been working out."

Kathy: (exasperated) "Meeting adjourned"

Before the Pink Flight takes off, there's a party at the terminal, which involves the entire crew, including the pilots. All of them are wearing feather boas and go-go dancing (don't tell, but that's how Air Force One prepares, too). Once the flight starts, Team Griffin passes out the official My Life on the D-List Condom to all the passengers, and Kathy prepares for her first stand-up gig aboard an airplane (or as she calls it "Chaos at 30,000 feet").

Kathy takes tickets at the gate. No, seriously.

Unfortunately, the logistics of using an airplane P.A. phone to perform stand-up leave a lot to be desired, so Kathy decides to entertain the passengers the old fashioned way - by sitting on laps, performing certain faux sex acts on cute sleeping passengers. The next morning she flings breakfast foods around the cabin with a surly attitude just like a real flight attendant.

Before the Pink Flight ends, the passengers hold a "bare chest" contest, and Kathy proves again why she's a gay's best friend by whipping off her shirt and joining in. After fourteen hours, the Pink Flight finally ends, and I have to admit to being a bit disappointed that Kathy went all that way without making a single "cockpit" joke.

Find out what happened in Australia, and if the Gay-O-Meter explodes, after the break!

Everybody run! The gay-adjacent comedy queen's got a gun!

But we're getting a little ahead of ourselves. The second episode of the fourth season of Kathy Griffin - My Life On The D-List opens with Kathy in a quandary. She has to find some way to push her concert merchandise line, specifically the "everybody can suck it" t-shirts (apparently, they're not work and church friendly). She makes a deal with "Team Griffin" (her assistants Jessica and Tiffany, and her tour manager Tom) that if they meet a certain quota of t-shirts sold, they'll get a "bonus".

Kathy's original "bonus" offer is nixed by the staff (let's just say it would fit in nicely with the t-shirt theme), and it's decided that the team will get new Blackberries if they meet the quota. Since Kathy is always looking for novel ways to push her wares, she decides to give concerts in the home towns of Tiffany and Tom (and maybe unload a butt-load of merch).

Before leaving on that road trip, though, she makes a spectacularly D-list appearance on Tom Green's talk show. Yes, the Tom Green who was married to Drew Barrymore for five minutes and starred in the Razzie favorite Freddy Got Fingered. He has his own talk show ... on the Internet ... which he films from his home (what's next, Pauly Shore filming a sitcom from his mother's garage?).

While Kathy is being interviewed by Tom, rapper Coolio shows up for some reason to talk about his own reality show, which will be premiering on the Oxygen channel. Correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't Oxygen an even more estrogen-fueled version of Lifetime? Every time I happen to glance at Oxygen, they're either showing a Tori & Dean marathon, or they're airing some show about women who snap and put the beat down on men who refused to take out the garbage. So I guess a show about the guy who did "Gangsta's Paradise" is a no-brainer, right?

While talking with Coolio, Kathy has an epiphany, and comes to the conclusion that since Coolio can be a reality show star and a Grammy winner, why can't she? She immediately sets a plan in motion to make a CD and win a Grammy, and they decide to record it during a concert in her manager Tom's hometown of St. Louis.

The St. Louis trip has its up and downs for Kathy. She's a little perturbed that the Mayor has named it Tom Vize day, and at every talk show she and Tom go on to plug the concert, she's almost completely ignored. She gets her revenge later, though, when Team Griffin go to a local park with Tom's police officer brother Bob and play "cops & robbers" with Tom as the crook. Kathy, Jessica, and Tiffany put the beat down on Tom like he had forgotten to take out the garbage, and then they all visit a local gun range, where Kathy is horrified to discover Tom's affinity for shooting paper targets with her face superimposed on them.

After the break, Kathy meets some actual gays!

The second episode of the fourth season of Kathy Griffin: My Life On The D-List airs tonight on Bravo. Given how much gay content there in store for us this season (Pink Flight! Gay Mardi Gras! Lesbian cruises!), we'll be recapping every Friday going forward ... so to get us in the mood, here's a quick recaplet of last week's season premiere. There wasn't much actual gay content, but since it's Kathy Griffin ... it's all gay content.

It's obvious that the running theme this season is the fact that Kathy is now an Emmy winner, and her Emmy speech pissed off a lot of people, especially "The Catholic League" (whom Kathy describes as "one guy with a computer"). In case you don't know, when she won the Emmy (finally beating the evil Extreme Home Makeover), she made a very Kathy-esque speech involving a popular religious figure, which inexplicably caused controversy.

This season starts out with Kathy being offered the chance to co-host the CNN New Year's Eve coverage in Times Square with the Silver Fox himself, Anderson Cooper. Her assignment is "humorous looks at events in pop culture", and her countdown for 2007 includes:

Britney Spears and her sister Jamie Lynn (Kathy wants to "go ahead and push for the abortion"); Marie Osmond and her collapsing baby doll dance; Paula Abdul and her big bag of crazy; David Hasselhoff and his inability to eat a hamburger while wasted; Alec Baldwin and his rude, thoughtless message to his daughter; Dog The Bounty Hunter and his racist bile; "Pampered" astronaut Lisa Nowak and her alleged stalking road trip; and to finish, Paris Hilton appearing on Larry King.

Ahh ... memories, light the corners of my mind...

Kathy makes a deal with her team (Tom, Jessica, and Tiffany) that each time she calls Anderson "Andy", they have to take a shot. By the end of the New Year's Eve show, Jessica is slurring her words, and very nearly hurls on Anderson's shoes.

It's a shame that Hollywood is so terrified of Kathy Griffin. Because if they really want to revive the Oscars, they really need to book this self-proclaimed "biggest bitch of them all" to host.

I went into my viewing of the first ever A-List Awards on Bravo with more than a little trepidation (and more than two fingers of Ketel One in my iced tea). The pre-show red carpet was a bit of a mess, with an assortment of reality show regulars and the odd, terrified A-Lister mulling a twenty-foot red carpet and doing their darnedest to avoid the advances of correspondent Billy Eichner (a new name for me), who made Isaac Mizrahi's booby-grabbing red-carpet demeanor look downright Victorian by comparison.

But thankfully the actual show - while by no means any classier - was a well-produced, irreverent, and uniformly entertaining show that puts pretty much all the other, more "legit" awards shows to shame. Remember how fun the MTV Video Awards used to be, back in, like, 1991, when you worried if Axl Rose might swan-dive off the stage and crush several Bangles? Well, that's what the feeling was here.

Aside from the audience, which was packed with every sort of personality you could imagine ranging from Padma to Lauren Hutton to that fat guy in the Tron costume (I kid you not), the show itself was a riot. First there was Griffin's masterful turn as ringleader. From her opening cabaret number (with out songwriter Marc Shaiman on piano), she was "on" for all ninety minutes. Check out the bawdy number below...

But that was just the beginning.

Aside from an obvious Justin Timberlake/Janet Jackson reference, I have no idea what's going on here. But I will say this: I clearly haven't been giving Lance the credit he deserves. You could crack walnuts between those thighs!

 A few of the best shots are after the break...

Even though the next Project Runway season is only a few weeks away (it debuts sometime next month) anyone feeling a bit of withdrawal will get a fashion fix next week as Bravo's A-List Awards will include a charity action featuring Project Runway alums designing dresses for an octet of fabulous stars. The proceeds from the auction will be donated to UNICEF's efforts in Myanmar. Three gay Runway designers will be a part of the mix:

Chris March will be designing a dress for Make Me a Supermodel winner Holly Kiser.

Season two fave Nick Verreos will get to design a dress for gay fave Kathy Griffin.

Hairspay lead Nikki Blonsky will sport an outfit from early season three exit Malan Breton.

The rest of the celebrity list includes plenty of women on the gay pop culture radar including Sex and the City columnist Candace Bushnell (wearing a dress by Daniel Franco), Brothers & Sisters' Rebecca Budig (sporting a design by Alison Kelly), Mario Lopez' former Dancing with the Stars partner Katrina Smrnoff (modeling a Michael Knight design), model Nikki Taylor (paired with Laura Bennett) and tattoo artist Kat Von D (aptly wearing a dress by Sweet P).

As excited as I am, I'm a bit bummed that my all-time fave Diana Eng isn't on the list -- I would have loved to see her designing for a sci-fi diva like Sigourney Weaver. Still, the chance to see those designers together again has me a little bit excited, especially with "Uncle Nick", Chris and Malan coming back.

Ever since Survivor became a big hit in the summer of 2000, there have been people who have claimed that reality TV is the of civilization... and ever since The Mole debuted in January 2001, there have been a lot of sentences that begin with, "I don't usually watch reality TV but..."

After years of waiting (and two seasons of suffering through a "celebrity edition" where Kathy Griffin's ability to make Corbin Bernsen and Stephen Baldwin's personalities tolerable was severely tested), fans of The Mole have a new series to look forward starting in June. The series, where contestants face challenges while being undermined by a Mole posing as an ally, was known for mixing intellectual and physical challenges with an overall whodunit, as the final goal in the game is to figure out "who is The Mole?".

ABC has been slowly releasing information about the contestants and restaurant manager Bobby is openly gay. In fact, he thinks being gay will give him an advantage in the game:

Being gay, he feels that his "gaydar", the ability to recognize other gay people, will help him read people in the game.

In the "Meet Bobby!" video at show's website Bobby adds that being gay and growing up hiding who he really was has made him a good liar, which will probably play well in the show. He also speaks Spanish, which will be helpful since some of the show will film in Chile. I'm sure being a total cutie will be helpful, too. 

The Mole has its place in gay pop culture as it was many TV viewers' introduction to gay fave news anchor Anderson Cooper, but the news of a gay contestant puts the show's long-awaited return squarely on our RADAR. (Can. Not. Wait.)

Last year's GayVN Awards for gay porn certainly got a lot more media attention than usual. Not only did they hold their ceremonies in the landmark Castro Theatre, but they got gay fave comedienne Kathy Griffin to host the show (which also got the ceremony featured on Griffin's Bravo reality series, Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List).

However, this year, the awards sponsors opted against hiring Griffin for a second time, deciding her fee was too high. They also decided against renting out the Castro Theatre again... so how does Kathy respond to getting dropped by the GayVNs? She schedules a performance for the same weekend... and at the Castro Theatre, too.

Between all this, the ongoing filming of Milk and the International Bear Rendezvous, this is sounding like a busy weekend in San Francisco. I'm just hoping Kathy has her D-List camera crew following her around the city and capturing the drama.

In a continued effort to bring you all that is important in the world of gay entertainment and ensure that you are being spoon-fed images of gorgeous, commoditized manflesh, we present the newly-minted AfterElton Briefs. Following the usual assortment of carefully-selected news items, interested readers can find a refreshing pic of a hot man in underwear after the jump. Yes, we're serious.

• Tonight on Make Me a Supermodel (Bravo 10:00pm EST), openly gay contestant (and cutie-patootie) Ronnie Kroell is up for possible elimination. Dan McCallum will be liveblogging the show right here on AfterElton.com.

• Kathy Griffin claims she had a secret affair with a member of N'Sync back in the nineties, but won't name which one. Could it be Justin Timberlake, J.C. Chasez, Joey Fatone, Lance Bass, or that last one who's name I can never quite remember?

• Larry Craig gets "public letter of admonition" from the Senate. I gotta ask, don't they have better things to do?

• From today's Hollywood Reporter: Ian Ziering will join Jerry O'Connell and Heather Graham in the independent film "Baby on Board." Ziering will play a gay obstetrician and Graham's confidante.