Tim Kring Apologizes for Making Gay Character Zach Straight

So everyone who speculated that Zach, the best friend to indestructible Texas cheerleader Claire (and played by actor Thomas Dekker), was gay was right after all. Well, sort of. Apparently the initial intention was to make Zach gay, but somewhere along the way producer/showrunner Tim Kring decided to make him straight again in order to…do something. Now most fans don’t know this, and don’t really care, as Zach’s maybe-maybe not homosexuality really didn’t fit all that much into the show’s storylines. The belief was that Zach “understood” Claire’s powers because he was an outcast, either because he was gay or he was a Goth kid. Either/or, right?

Well the gay website AfterElton noticed the change, and they want their gay Zach back. Which is kind of odd, as Zach has all but been written out of the show now that Dekker is going off to play the young John Connor in the new Fox sci-fi show “The Sarah Conner Chronicles”, the TV spinoff to the popular “Terminator” franchise.

This has gotten to be such a hot potato that Kring even wrote the AfterElton site saying this:

“I am very sorry this has caused concern for the readers of your website. It was certainly not our intention to confuse the issue of Zach’s character being gay… We have too much respect for our audience to do that intentionally. However, it has simply become too complicated behind the scenes to push this issue further with this particular character. We apologize for misleading the audience, and wish that we could have handled things better on our end. But making a TV show is often a very imprecise business.”

Zach was gay, and now he’s not gay. Big whoops. I don’t think anyone cared that Zach was gay in the first place, and most “Heroes” fans certainly don’t care now that he’s apparently no longer gay. Heck, if this story about Zach’s sexuality had never surfaced, I don’t think very many fans would even know that Kring had turned Zach straight again. We just assumed Zach was still gay.

You can read more about this odd story here.

“So, are you gay or aren’t you? I’m confused.”