It was not as if the Los Angeles Sparks, or, at least, their parent company, the Los Angeles Lakers, needed the publicity. This is the club of Shaq and Kobe; the defending National Basketball Association champions. Two years ago, the owner's daughter, now the club's executive vice-president, posed without her clothes for an article in Sports Illustrated, with just two strategically placed basketballs to cover her bounteous charms.

The Sparks are the Lakers' distaff side, as the Women's National Basketball Association, formed in 1997, is to the NBA.

The WNBA likes to market itself as the affordable, family-friendly version of the expensive, designer NBA. But a look around the crowds at the WNBA games reveals something else that has rarely, if ever, been acknowledged.

The teams were developing a devoted following among gay women. For a fledgling sports league with a precious national broadcasting contract, with all those loaded but ultra-sensitive advertisers, this was the demographic that dare not speak its name.

Until now. Last week, the Sparks found themselves at an autograph session with a difference. The WNBA regards its players as missionaries for their league. Apart from playin' hard and livin' right, their obligations include frequent appearances at shopping malls, where potential fans gather, to sign autographs and press the flesh.

The Sparks were at Girl Bar, the West Hollywood focal point of a gay women's social club 12,000-strong, to consummate a commercial relationship conceived by the club's general manager, Penny Toler, earlier this year. It is the first partnership in the United States between a mainstream sports body and a gay community group.

In their four-year history, the Sparks have yet to progress beyond the second round of the playoffs, while attracting an average of 6800 fans to their home games at the Forum, the former home of the Lakers. In 2000, the team boasted 1000 season ticket-holders. At all of those games, this minority constituency was there.

The WNBA has outlasted the American Basketball League, which folded in late 1998, in the midst of its third season. At that time, an ABL executive noted that the struggling league's four top-drawing teams were all located in cities with hate-crime laws. "That means those markets are progressive and receptive to a sport that obviously draws a relatively huge proportion of its fans from a marginalised population."

The executive, from a team called the Denver Xplosion, continued: "We're definitely drawing from gay crowds. That's one of our niches that does help us."

Which was also the argument of Penny Toler. "This isn't about marketing to sexual lifestyles," she said in an interview in the Los Angeles Times. "It's about marketing to a group of people we think will buy tickets."

Times columnist T.J. Simers, bereft of ideas for his Sunday piece, picked up on that story. Simers was once an accomplished NFL reporter who has since been transformed into the Times' resident curmudgeon, thin-skinned and petty.

There is a segment of the American population that will react to the word "lesbian" as a vampire will to a crucifix.

Simers knew his market, and cast these pearls to it: "I still wonder how those overhead scoreboard shots in Staples Centre (the Sparks' new home venue) when the camera pressures couples in the crowd to kiss each other, are going to go over, but I'm sure it won't be the first time these people have seen a man kissing a woman."