Not that we needed any more confirmation that the character of Zach (Thomas Dekker) on Heroes had been degayed (a story broken by AfterElton.com), but Heroes writer Bryan Fuller (pictured) again says Zach was written as gay. He also again confirms that it was Dekker's agent who forced the issue because her client was up for the part of John Carter in The Sarah Connor Chronicles because she feared it might affect FOX's interest in hiring him. Instead, she got him yanked off one of the year's biggest hit shows, so don't go looking for him to reappear in tonight's episode. (Boy, Dekker sure has himself one smooth agent!)

Here are some quotes from the interview with with Popgurls.com.

On whether making Zach gay was a path they were always going to take:

It absolutely was a path that we were going to take. In the first meetings when we were sitting down and talking about the show, one of the things about the show that Tim said that he wanted all these characters to represent different people in the world and we had an Asian guy and an Indian guy and. a whole bunch of white people. He just wanted it to be a United Benetton cast. I said that's fantastic, but if we have this many people, then we need to have a gay character. If you want to represent the world, that's certainly a demographic that we need to hit.

On why it would have been good to have a gay character on Heroes:

Considering Heroes is a show about people embracing what's special about themselves, it would have been great for gay teens see themselves reflected on TV by Zach.

On his reaction to the whole debacle:

I was very upset by it - I was not happy about it at all. There were times I had to avoid talking about it because we didn't want to have a negative reflection on the show. The show's been such a positive experience for so many people, we didn't want to get hung up on the fact that one actor's management felt that it was a career killer for him to play a homosexual which, as a gay man, I found incredibly insulting.

Hopefully, this will finally shut up clarify things for all the straight boys who keep insisting Zach was never gay.