The gay character on "Heroes" that wasn't...

Most "Heroes" fans presumed Zach was gay but he was “de-gayed” in a statement from the NBC and a line stating that Zach admitted being gay was excised from an episode recap posted on NBC’s website.
“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,” Fuller said, “which, as a gay man, I found incredibly insulting. We had episodes planned for him to be in, and she pulled him from the show altogether. So that's why he sort of disappeared.”
In the first episode of "Heroes," Zach is teased about getting aroused in the boys locker room. In an episode last November, a school mate calls Zach a “gay-boy” and he dismisses the remark by telling confidante Claire that he knows who he is and likes who he is. Fuller said the original script for one episode had Zach saying to Claire: “I would take you to homecoming but you have to know that I don’t like girls that way.”
AfterElton.com was on this from the very beginning and exposed what was going on. Back in December, co-executive producer Tim Kring told the site: “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.”
Fuller, whose credits include " Dead Like Me" and "Wonderfalls," said the character was supposed to be gay from the start.
“In the first meetings when we were sitting down and talking about the show, one of the things about the show that Tim (Kring) 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 said. “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. So we were definitely going down a route of making (Zach) the gay character and having him have a big role in her life and sort of teaching her to come out about her ability and embrace herself and actually using the coming out metaphor and the gay metaphor in that instance as a fun piece of storytelling.”
Good grief. This is the hottest new show on network television! What will Dekker do if "Sarah Conner" bombs? I'd fire the manager, first of all, then I'd think about how playing gay did nothing to harm the careers of Daniel Craig, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Val Kilmer, Matthew Broderick, Christopher Reeve, Michael Caine, William Hurt, Tom Hanks and Antonio Bandaras. And that's just movie stars. Would Matthew Rhys be the star he is today if not for his breakout role as a gay man on ABC's "Brothers & Sisters"? And what about Shawn Pyfrom? He'd be just another cast member on a hit show instead of the classic TV character of gay teen Andrew Van de Kamp.

And if I were NBC,. I woiuld have recast the part immediately instead of changing the script. To let one actor's manager dictate a storyline is ridiculous and I'm happy that Fuller has spoken out this way.