Quinceañera TV pilot to take the "mystery gay" route

We reported a few weeks back that gay indie film Quinceañera (co-directed by out gay filmmakers Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer) is getting the pilot treatment for ABC Family -- kind of an interesting choice for a "family" net owned by Disney.

Well, it looks like the film is being considerably de-gayed (for better or for worse) for its potential television incarnation: not only are the rather predatory older gay men who are the landlords of the leads in the film not a part of the story (they've apparently been replaced by straight hipsters), but now it looks like troubled gay teen Carlos (played by Jesse Garcia) is also not going to make the jump to the small screen.

As Glatzer put it in a recent interview with Out in Hollywood's Greg Hernandez:

"It won't be the same name but there will be a gay character ... One of the things about Carlos in Quniceanera is that he was a real loner and what we have now is a kind of pack of guys and one of those guys will turn out to be gay but we're not gonna tell you which one! We want it to evolve over the development of the series ... we don't want it to all be in the pilot. We want to keep some mystery about that character."

There's something to be said for letting a character evolve, sure. But the recent Heroes debacle has also shown that "keeping some mystery" can come back to bite you -- particularly when it gives the network or the actor the opportunity to "de-gay" the character in question. We'll be keeping an eye on this one.