Christopher David Harris grew up expecting to spend his life in church music. An Air Force brat from a southern church music family, he spent part of his childhood in a divided Europe in the 1980s, where the only English-language TV station available fed a growing obsession with sci-fi, fantasy, action, and animation. He loved stories about people discovering that the world was bigger, and considerably stranger and messier, than they’d been told.

Still, the plan was music ministry. So at the behest of his family, he headed confidently off to college and into seminary, where he plowed straight into the conflict between the faith he was raised in and his sexuality. Coming out meant questioning the institution that had shaped his identity and the future he’d spent years preparing for. That experience still finds its way into characters who must decide what to keep, what to leave, and who they’re allowed to become.

Naturally, his next stop was musical theatre. Performing offered another way to tell stories and a chance to imagine a life beyond the one he’d inherited. Broadway was the dream. The military was emphatically not.

Then a chance phone call led him to the US Air Force Singing Sergeants and the hardest audition of his life. He won the job and spent nearly a decade performing in Washington, D.C., and across the country.

Serving as a gay man under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell brought another complicated relationship with belonging: meaningful work, extraordinary colleagues, institutional absurdity, and rules that required him to conceal part of himself. It also taught him how a performance could matter to someone for reasons the performer might never anticipate.

During the pandemic in New York City, he discovered screenwriting. New possibilities opened for him and gave him a place to bring it all together: the fantastical worlds he’d always loved, the contradictions he’d lived, and the amazing people he’d met along the way. His journey often leads him to characters who want to belong somewhere badly enough to overlook what belonging costs. Until they can’t anymore. Whether they’re facing a religious regime, a fractured family, or literal demons, their struggles are personal, even when their worlds are fantastical.

More than that, writing gave him a way to tell the stories he’d wanted to see as an eight-year-old gay boy, even before he had the words to explain why. Stories where people like him could have the adventure, fall in love, talk back, and find somewhere they didn’t have to hide. After years of trying to fit into worlds with very specific ideas about who he should be, he could create worlds of his own—and give his characters room to figure it out for themselves.

Christopher is a 2025 Writers Guild Foundation Veterans Fellow. His first produced sci-fi short, TRACERS, premiered on DUST in December 2025.