01:00 AM EDT on Saturday, June 17, 2006

One of the three women sitting on my right at the bar asks the bartender to switch the TV to the game. He tells her there's no game. If there were one, he says, he would surely have it on, and we would not all be watching a generously proportioned Italian woman tell us how to cook potato gnocchi.

The woman sitting in the middle of the three is dressed in denim, with a couple of heavy metal chains looping down from her belt. The Harley Davidson logo on her cap makes me think that she and her friends, who are dressed a lot like her, have come here on their motorcycles. She tells the bartender that there is a game -- women from some college in Alabama are playing a very important fast-pitch softball game, and we would all like watching it very much.

Ordinarily I would not be sitting here, or anywhere else, watching a softball game, fast-pitch or otherwise. However, I have lost all interest in watching the woman on TV telling us how to make potato gnocchi, so I say, "It's okay with me if the bartender changes the channel."

When the three ladies start yelling and cheering every time someone gets a hit or makes a good play, I actually start watching the game. The woman next to me says that some of these fast-pitch softball players are very tough. I say some indeed look tough to me. When I say this, the three all look at me and smile and nod.

For some reason, this gets me thinking about the Advocate magazine. The Advocate is a very popular national gay magazine. Superman was on the cover of its May 23 issue, along with the headline "How Gay Is Superman?" The cover story was about Superman Returns, Superman's first movie in 19 years. It hits the theaters on June 28. I'd been a Superman fan for a long time, and had never once thought that he might be gay; you can imagine how surprised I was when I heard about the Advocate's story.

I ask the three women sitting at the bar with me what they think about the Advocate's running a story speculating that Superman might be gay. The one in the middle, with the Harley hat, says she's not really sure that he's gay, but she has noticed that a lot of his pictures in the ads for Superman Returns certainly make him look gay.

I tell them I've also read that Warner Bros. has worked out a marketing deal for the movie with the Topps trading-card people, and that one of their cards actually shows Superman coming out of a closet.

The woman next to me, without a Harley hat, says she's always wondered why Superman hasn't gotten together with Lois Lane. Still, she too isn't sure that he's gay.

When I mention all the commercial time that Warner Bros. has bought for the movie on the Logo cable channel, all three say this is pretty strong evidence that Warner's may think that Superman is gay. Logo bills itself as the channel for "Gay America."

The Harley hat says the only comic-book hero she's sure is gay is Batman. Her friend to her right says she heard George Clooney during an interview say that he had played him as gay in Batman and Robin. This gets me thinking about whether I've ever seen any pictures of Clooney out on a date with a woman. The Harley hat says Clooney's Batman costume had built-in nipples. The lady next to me says, "Batman, of course, lives with a young man."

I finish my sandwich and the last of my Heineken and walk out into the afternoon sun, still wondering if I've been wrong about Superman all these years and thinking how tough it has become to be a caped crusader.

-- Truman Taylor (trumanbtaylor@aol.com)