The gays love Kathy Griffin, and Kathy Griffin, she loves the gays. And two in particular, Dennis Hensley and Tony Tripoli, are her peeps on the new Bravo TV reality series “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List” (airing Wednesdays at 10:00 p.m.).

Hensley has worn many hats in the entertainment field, from his humble beginnings ushering audiences into tapings of ’80s sitcoms “She’s The Sheriff” and “My Sister Sam” to landing work on the high seas as a singer/dancer/cruise director for Princess Cruises for five years, and beyond. In 2003, Hensley co-wrote the feature film Testosterone starring Antonio Sabato, Jr., and that was the same year he made an appearance in the drag queen opus Girls Will Be Girls.

“I always gravitated toward anything to do with show business,” Hensley said about his childhood. “I was big into TV and movies. I subscribed to Us Magazine as a teenager. I started to get into plays, musicals, choir and dance classes. Of course I fantasized about being a kid from Fame.”

It was this love of entertaining that led him to try out for Madonna’s “Blond Ambition Tour,” but not making the cut turned out to be a good thing; it led to his first story, Confessions of a Boy Toy Wannabe.

And the domino effect began. Hensley’s byline began appearing in such magazines as Maxim, Us, Cosmopolitan and The Advocate. But, it was his fiction column, “Misadventures in the (213)” in Detour Magazine that produced his first novel of the same name – very Carrie Bradshaw of him, don’t you think?

His second book, The Screening Party, is a hilarious non-fiction account of him and a group of friends (Tripoli included) who gather religiously to skewer all things celluloid. From stalwarts such as The Sound of Music and Jaws to the craptastic-ness that is St. Elmo’s Fire and Glitter, their scathing commentary – like suggesting Lorraine Gary stick her face in the water to scare the shark away in Jaws, or observing that Demi Moore’s lipstick in St. Elmo’s Fire looks like she’d gone down on C-3PO in the bathroom – is strikingly reminiscent of a certain D-Lister’s celebrity diatribes.

“From word one, Kathy has always had the best celeb gossip, and she will totally spill,” Tripoli said. “But the thing is we’re fans. It’s not about making fun of people we don’t like… Oh wait. Yes, yes, yes, that’s exactly what it’s about… next question.”

Hensley added, “Kathy’s very good [at] cutting through the bullshit with celebrities, and I’m a big fan of that. Sussing out that dichotomy is a really interesting exercise, and Kathy’s better at it than anyone.”

Tripoli started singing at the tender age of 2, sang all the way through school and left Phoenix, Ariz., in 1988 for the bright lights of Los Angeles to attend college at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts. For the next several years, he traveled the world, bringing his gift of song to many a port of call. Like Hensley, he also sang on cruise ships, but found that living out of a suitcase didn’t bode well for settling down.

“Look, my whole life’s dream is to just be married, a father and Mary Hart’s sidekick on ‘ET.’” Tripoli said. “By the way, ‘the news’ in this house refers to ‘ET’ and ‘Access Hollywood.’ That’s my hour of power.”

So, how exactly did this friendship a tois come to be? We’ll start with Hensley and Tripoli’s fated meeting.

“I met Dennis at a party he threw,” Tripoli recalled. “I walked in the door, saw Vanessa Williams on TV [it was 1990]. I made a snotty comment. Dennis laughed and made a snottier comment.”

“We both thought her [Williams’] narrative between videos was hysterical in its superiority,” Hensley recanted. “The woman will not rest until everyone in America acknowledges that she is, in fact, a triple threat. That was the beginning of a long history of making fun of people on TV.”

Only in Gay Land would a solid 15-year friendship that progressed into becoming roommates be born out of mockery. And when did Ms. Griffin enter the picture?

“Kathy and I met through Margaret Cho,” Hensley said. “My first meeting with Kathy was prior to that, though. I had gone to see the movie Shakes the Clown at the Beverly Connection mall, because I had interviewed Florence Henderson for it – my first celebrity interview. And Kathy was standing in line to see the movie, too. I loved the idea that she was paying to see a movie that she was in. D-List city.”

Speaking of The D-List and life on it… what are some of the duties that a “main gay” performs?

“It’s sort of like being in the army,” Tripoli joked. “You know, we do more before breakfast than most people do in a month. Look, just because she’s famous, she still needs friends. Any friend will call and be upset that some asshole guy made a comment about their looks. But when Kathy calls, the asshole is Jay Leno.”

“You need to like to eat, and not healthy, either,” Hensley said. “Chips, tortillas, brownies, ice cream, pizza, etc. That’s a duty I take very seriously. You also have to be a bit of a TV fan, especially reality shows.”

“And when the finale of ‘The Amazing Race’ rolls around, it’s like Christmas for our people,” Tripoli added.

One of their duties documented on “My Life on the D-List” in the upcoming Aug. 24 episode is when Hensley and Tripoli help Griffin come up with questions to ask celebrities during her red carpet stint on E! for the Grammys.

“It was great to put words in her mouth. It’s stuff I would say, if I had the balls,” Tripoli said. “One thing I am proud of is when Kathy first tells us she’s doing the Grammys and needs funny questions, I immediately go, ‘Ask the stars, ‘Who here, besides Pam Anderson, has hepatitis C?’ Cut to the actual live telecast, and she asks the question. Then it was quoted in the paper the next day. To know that came out of my mouth and to see it on the show and how it traveled all the way to the telecast – it was so thrilling!”

Of Griffin’s on-air gaff of thinking the blind in Blind Boys was just a marketing ploy, Hensley said, “…I didn’t realize The Blind Boys of Alabama were actually blind either, so I may have had a hand in that particular faux pas.”

And what will the immediate future hold for these two?

Hensley is trying to get a new book off of the ground about his years as a cruise ship entertainer, and just worked on a presentation tape for a potential television series.

Tripoli, who recently signed with a manager, shot a pilot episode for a new show on E!, which didn’t work out. “The show didn’t fly, but they liked my work, and only had one note,” Tripoli said. “Something I never thought I would hear producers say: ‘not gay enough.’ Then I was over at Kathy’s, and they had pitched the show to her to host! She told them ‘my friend Tony Tripoli just did a test pilot for that, and you told him he wasn’t gay enough. So, what, I’m gay enough?!’”

To keep tabs on these boys, link to their Web sites via this article at www.gaylesbiantimes.com.