Matt Cain: Gay Publishing

“It’s funny, the gay thing,” he says, seriously. “Sometimes in the past I would try to write gay central characters and publishers would say, ‘Make it less gay, if it’s going to be mainstream.’ But the brilliant thing was, I got this great deal with Pan Macmillan and the editor said straight away, ‘I love that gay character. Why did you not bring him in till chapter four? Let’s have more of him!’ There’s something about being told that if you talk about [being gay] in public then people won’t like you that feeds into a self-loathing. But I didn’t want the gay character to be a tragedy figure so I wanted him to be funny and I wanted to give him an uplifting ending.”

Matt Cain, former Culture Editor at Channel 4, talking to The Independent On Sunday about his first novel, Shot Through The Heart. 

It's a “camp, fluffy novel that’s a beach read”, apparently.

Update: Did Matt inspire the "really camp" character, David Wilkes, the BBC's Entertainment Format Producer, in W1A?

It would seem so. 

Fagburn thought W1A was the funniest thing on the tellybox for a long time, for the record.