ALL IT "The Case of the Hard-Boiled Homosexuals."  Director Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies, and videotape) was meeting with a roomful of executives from Showtime's  stylish pulp-fiction anthology series, Fallen Angels, to plan "Professional Man," a summer episode in which a bar owner and his hit man clash over a fatal attraction to the same girl.  "So who do we get to play the girl?" someone asked.  As a joke, Soderbergh suggested a hunky male star.  Everyone laughed.        But that got him thinking.  "I'd seen the story of two guys and a girl before.  Making it three guys adds an extra layer of subtext," he decided.  "It gives Johnny, the hit man, another psychological reason to compartmentalize his life."  Howard Rodman, who adapted the story by cult writer David Goodis, needed some convincing.  "As a straight. white, dead, European male, I had trepidations," he acknowledges.  "But it felt like we were opening a door--allowing gay men into a genre that often had been either closed or closeted.            So Pearl. the barmaid, became Paul (Bruce Ramsay); Herman Charn, the bar owner, morphed from

a cigar chomping heavy to a  more insidious power broker (Peter Coyote).  And for the hit man of the title, Soderbergh turned to Brendan Fraser, the handsome young star of  The Scout.  "He's got a seething quality that reminds me of the young Mitchum," says the director.         "I've been making films for five years, and I'm still trying to figure out what my type is," Fraser admits.  "But Johnny is definitely an angry character--he's angry for who he is and for having to do what he does." Jumping into an all-male ménage a trois didn't faze the actor.  "It's the same dynamic between people no matter what their sex or sexual orientation.  you have to establish yourself as the dominant or the submissive, and in this relationship Johnny is calling the shots."  And if he needed a barometer to measure their body heat, he didn't have to look far.  "When Bruce and I were doing the bedroom scenes, all the girls on the set were squirming about."  Fraser laughs.  "They got all hot and bothered." --GREGG KILDAY Gregg Kilday is a senior writer for Entertainment Weekly in Los Angeles