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While Superman Returns' Bryan Singer and Brandon Routh have taken every opportunity to dispel whispers that the Man of Steel might be ready to fly out of the super-closet, the maverick star of what might be the summer's biggest blockbuster openly invties the Gay Pirate Question in this month's Rolling Stone:

[Johnny] Depp says he was intrigued by a scholarly work titled "Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition." "I liked the idea of [Jack] being ambiguous," he tells Mark Binelli in the new summer double issue of Rolling Stone. "Because women were thought to be bad luck on ships. And these pirates would go out for years at a time. So, you know, there is a possibility that one thing might lead to another. You're lonely. You have an extra ration of rum. 'Cabin boy!'"

Depp's undoubtedly publicist-frustrating attitude towards pirate-on-pirate action is certainly refreshing, but perhaps he could've cut short his enthusiasm for sexual ambiguity on the high seas before he gave us that brief, yet thoroughly disturbing, image of Chris Elliott's iconic flunky and Jack Sparrow engaged in some drunken, experimental keel-hauling in the Captain's quarters.