A Gay Hero?

You all know by now about my pathological devotion for NBC´s sci-fi drama HEROES.
So you must underestand my surprise about this new polemic decision of "streighten up" one of its characters.

Apparently, to have a gay rol is not a good thing for NBC... While the character ZACK (played by Thomas Dekker) was concived as a high school gay teenager, Dekker´s Managers started to pressure Heroes´ writting team to make him "straight".

Here´s the link to a very interesting articule about this crap.

And here´s the scene the articule is talking about:

November 20th episode of Heroes (titled “Homecoming”) Claire and Zach are walking through school when a rival cheerleader says something about Claire taking the “gay-boy” to the Homecoming dance, and that maybe he should be the one wearing the tiara. Claire punches the girl in the face, knocking her out cold.

Later in the episode, Zach climbs into Claire's window to encourage her to go to the Homecoming dance, despite being grounded. When she asks if he wants to be her date, he says he can't, for “millions of reasons”. He then launches into a heart-to-heart that is both encouraging to gay teens and incredibly frustrating in its refusal to commit.

Claire asks if he can't be her date because of what the other cheerleader said, and Zach says that he doesn't care what she said, that he knows who he is and is proud of it. He's more worried about Claire, who can't come to terms with her own “otherness”. He says, “You've got to embrace your inner freak … the only thing you'll regret is denying who you really are.”

Many viewers took that exchange as Zach's coming out.