When wearing a Superman teeshirt, Bryan Singer looks like the manager over at Jay & Silent Bob's Private Stash over in Westwood.

This is one of the few things you will learn from Scott Foundas profile of the Superman director in the LA Weekly this week. Foundas touches on the whole gay thing without actually asking any questions about it. He chalks up all the Queer-El talk to "our supposedly enlightened age" being much less so. But in doing so, Foundas misses the point:

In conversation, Singer is engaging but guarded, sometimes grimacing slightly as I prepare to ask a new question. You can hardly blame him. Since long before X2 and the much-discussed "coming out" scene that made explicit the idea of mutation as a metaphor for homosexuality, journalists writing about Singer, who is openly gay, have often seemed more interested in their subject's sexuality than his filmmaking. Specious accusations of sexual misconduct on the Apt Pupil set continue to be dredged up to this day, while in the lead-up to the release of Superman Returns, publications ranging from the celebrity gossip Web site Defamer to the Los Angeles Times have questioned whether Singer’s take on Superman will be "too gay," despite the lack of compelling evidence that it will be gay at all. Finally, during the Superman Returns press junket over the weekend of June 9, Singer responded to the accusations by telling Reuters that Superman "is probably the most heterosexual character in any movie I’ve ever made." But I wonder if Singer should even have dignified the question with an answer. For it says something dispiriting about our supposedly enlightened, post–Brokeback Mountain age that so much worry should be expended on how a filmmaker’s sexual orientation will affect a cherished pop-culture icon -- a discussion it is nigh impossible to imagine arising were the director in question straight.

Journalists and gossip-mongers are the ones making the link between Singer's orientation and his movies. The audience itself –- including the in-the-know fan boys who lavished the first two X-Men with badly-spelled praise - - couldn’t care less about how Singer swings it as long as he brings it- - 'it' being that tortured outsider's grace that has made his mainstream vehicles stand out from the usual. I am sure that most people in America think Ang Lee is gay- - if they thought about it at all.