Gay Couple on Desperate Housewives

LOS ANGELES, CA -- Marc Cherry, creator of Desperate Housewives, revealed during the ABC Press Tour party last Thursday night in Los Angeles that Wisteria Lane is finally having its first same-sex couple move into the neighborhood in season 4.

"We're going to have the first male desperate housewives," Cherry told AfterElton.com. "They will move into the old Applewhite house and one of the gay men will just have a fractious, hateful relationship with Teri Hatcher. We just started writing the episodes so I probably won't start casting for another few weeks."

This storyline is said to be auto-biographical with Cherry, an openly gay man, who says he's basing the show's characters on some of the real-life neighbors he has had skirmishes with over the years. "I just decided to have them move onto the street and have as many issues as any other couple. Susan wants to be so politically correct and show how open-minded she is and she puts her foot in her mouth instantly and it goes downhill from there. I'm basing it a little bit on my relationship with my neighbors."

Cherry could not reveal who would play the same-sex couple as they have just started writing the episodes and won't start casting for another few weeks.

When it comes to other things of gay interest on the show, Cherry told AfterElton.com in April that Andrew (Shawn Pyfrom) might have a new love interest in Season 4 but would not elaborate and said the character was busy rebuilding bridges with his dysfunctional family.

"This is a guy who was kicked out of the house by his mother last season and had some rough experiences and now he's becoming a functioning member of the family," Cherry said then. "What I really worked on...was seeing him as a member of the family and it wasn't his gayness that came first, it was him as a son trying to re-establish his relationship with Bree. So this has been a year more about trying to get Bree and Andrew together as a family...and I'm sure something really awful is going to happen next year."

"I think that he'll have some interesting gay adventures," Cherry said when asked if Andrew would have a boyfriend. "Right now we're just winding down Season 3, but in June the writing staff gets together and we'll talk about that. But you know, he's had such a tame year, it's time to kind of juice him up again."