This Harry Potter Character Is Even Gayer in ‘Cursed Child’ Revamp

Harry Potter is back in an abridged version of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the two-part play that served as a sequel (albeit one not acknowledged by all Potter fans) to the popular children’s books. And in this version, Harry’s son might actually be queer.

The new iteration of the controversial but popular play has been streamlined into a shorter story that can fit into a single production. The plot still follows the children of our original gang — Albus Potter, Rose Granger-Weasley, and Scorpius Malfoy as they start out on their own journey into the educational wizarding world of Hogwarts, but according to a review in The New York Times, the relationship between Albus and Scorpius turning “explicitly romantic” is a slightly new direction.

This isn’t entirely new — fans were reading into the friendship between the boys in the original version of the play. But the Harry Potter canon has always declined to include openly LGBTQ characters. Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald were only confirmed to have been in a relationship by author J.K. Rowling after the books ended their run, and it has yet to be canonized in any subsequent text.

And Rowling’s repeated transphobic sentiments haven’t given fans much hope that proper LGBTQ representation would ever be seen in the world of these stories.

Even now, it sounds as if whatever is happening between Albus and Scorpius may not be quite as explicit as The New York Times suggests.

According to a Twitter thread detailing the changes in Cursed Child, the references to Albus having a girlfriend have been removed, and lines have been added in which Albus tells Harry that Scorpius “is the most important person in my life” and “might always be the most important.”

And that's great, but that's also not the rep fans have been waiting for all these years. 

Director John Tiffany previously acknowledged that Cursed Child is “a love story between Scorpius and Albus in a lot of ways,” but denied queerbaiting in the original while also insisting showing a budding relationship between characters that are between the ages of 11 and 15 during the course of the story “would not be appropriate.” He also shared his belief that having an explicitly romantic relationship between the two would then “become the story,” rather than just be a part of it the way relationships between heterosexual teens are allowed to be.

So Harry Potter fans hoping for something undeniably queer may not quite get their wish with this one, but maybe we at least won’t have to squint quite so hard to read the subtext.