The thing was, Harry wasn't gay. He wasn't. He liked girls. He had dated Cho and Ginny after all, and they were pretty enough. He had been attracted to them. But having to play opposite another man? With potential nudity? Did that mean... sex scenes?
Harry spent the rest of the night reading through the script. And yes. There were sex scenes. With another man. He was going to have to pretend to have sex. With a man. Harry's panicking took over, and he barely slept through the night, having constant nightmares of being laughed off the stage for acting out gay sex.
The next morning, Harry decided to quit the show.
It wasn't like they had spent a lot of time with him. He had only just joined. And it wasn't as though they couldn't find a replacement. Surely someone else, someone who wasn't him, could play Liam. Someone who was gay! As he walked towards his director, Harry felt the guilt wash over him. He knocked on the door which proclaimed in faded yellow glitter "Director Daisy". As she opened the door, Harry smiled a sheepish grin.
"Can I come in? I need to talk to you."
"Sure!" Daisy stepped aside. "It's excellent you're here, I have just found-"
"I can't do the show." Harry blurted out as he took a seat in the very yellow office.
"What? Why not? What's the matter?"Daisy asked, sitting down in her own chair behind her desk. Was everything in this room yellow?
"It's just that... Last night, I was reading through the script..." Harry said, trying to articulate what he was thinking.
"And?"
"And I reached the part where Liam goes to Italy..."
"Oh..."
"And it's not that I'm homophobic, it's just... I'm not gay!"
"Right."
"And I don't know anything about being gay!"
"I see."
"So I honestly don't understand how to act-"
"Mister Potter." Daisy interrupted. "Forgive me for asking so personal a question, but have you ever been in love?"
"Uh..." Harry thought, "Yeah, but I don't see how that-
"Love, Mister Potter, is a wonderful thing."
"I completely agree, but what does that have to do with-"
"And what is so great about it, is that love has this wierd ability to be the same with everyone." Daisy looked Harry straight in the eye. "Love is the same whether it is between a man and a woman, two women, or two men. It doesn't differ because of gender. So in order for you to, as you put it, "act gay", you must simply recreate those emotions you felt between you and your love, and display them for the male who plays opposite you."
"But the sex scenes-" Harry blushed
"-will be choreographed. I will have no amateur performance on my stage, Mister Potter." said Daisy. "Now, any more concerns? If not, I think we best introduce you to your fellow lead."
And that was the first time Harry ever played a gay man on stage.
It was weird, how freeing it was to perform. Harry didn't have to be the saviour of the world, the boy-who-lived, the chosen one. He got to be a regular person, with a normal, typical life, enacting a cliched romance. Sure, the majority of the time he played gay characters. And after the first show, he had no problems with portraying such characters. They were the most freeing to play, in Harry's opinion, simply because they were so opposite.
But then he met Draco Malfoy, and things began to change.
A.N In this universe, Harry and Draco did not both attend Hogwarts. Harry did, but Draco ended up going to Durmstrang. Um, so yeah. Just thought that might be important to know.