Thomas Dekker, Out and Loud

Thomas Dekker arrives at the premiere of HBO Films' Cinema Verite

Actor Thomas Dekker speaks with OUT this month. He's promoting his role in HBO's Cinema Verite, which dramatizes the production of PBS's landmark reality series An American Family. Dekker plays Lance Loud, who turned out to be the first openly gay person on American television. 

First, the money-quote. Dekker is possibly open to a same-sex romantic relationship:

“I’ve only really had relationships with women, but I’m certainly not closed to it. If there are possibilities of being able to do anything in life, why would you say you would never take any up? In the later chunk of my teen years I was so all over the place with sex. It was terrible. I never really had a real relationship at all. During puberty, it’s all about sex, and it’s all about figuring yourself out. I think I overdid it when I was younger.”

That's the item which a lot of people will no doubt be talking about today, although you could read that quote any number of ways. Feel free to weigh in with your interpretation in the comments.

We were actually a bit more interested in what Dekker had to say about what happened behind the scenes during his stint on Heroes. As you might recall, the now 23-year-old actor appeared on Heroes' wildly popular first season  way back in 2006. (God, has it been that long?) He played sensitive high school student "Zach" who set gaydar pinging the moment he showed up onscreen. Early on, NBC created a Myspace page for his character (remember MySpace?), which included the following details.....

And yet later, when asked about the character the NBC publicity department backtracked and specifically said he was straight. That seeming discrepancy led to speculation that either NBC got cold feet about having a GLBT teen on one of their prime time shows — or Dekker's management didn't want him playing a gay character.

According to Dekker, who here elaborates on the subject, he played the character for 12 episodes with no direction other than that his Zach had a crush on Claire (Hayden Panattiere). And then a few hours before filming, he was given a script that had Zach matter-of-factly stating he was gay.

“I went through the f*cking roof!” Dekker says. “If you’re going to have a gay character on your show come out and be a pioneer for kids, I would’ve liked to play that from the get-go from my perspective. I went to set and said to the writers, ‘I really wish that it wouldn’t have been five hours before I come into work that I get this news that [the character] I’d been playing for the last 12 episodes knows and is comfortable with the fact that he is gay. Because I would’ve played this very differently.’ But I said I’d do it, and then a couple hours later the creator, Tim Kring, showed up and said, ‘No, no, no. We’re going to change it [back to him being straight].’ ”

Dekker here makes it sound like he was simply sticking up for the integrity of the character and the ultimate decision to de-gay Zach belonged to the show's producers (Tim Kring and Bryan Fuller). That doesn't exactly jive with what they said about the incident. Fuller claimed it was Dekker's agent who forced the issue... because her client was up for The Sarah Connor Chronicles and because she feared it might have affected FOX's interest in hiring him.

Whatever the truth, it sounds as if Dekker is under new management these days. He's certainly been open to some edgier roles of late. There was his turn as a bisexual college student in Gregg Araki's Kaboom — and now playing American Family's Lance Loud in Cinema Verite. And to that we say, good for him!