A coming-out party for Harry Styles and fans, at opening night at the Forum

It was Harry Styles’ show, but Serena almost stole it. There’s no rush.” Well trained by this point in Styles’ touring career, a cameraman found a close-up of Serena to feed to the giant video screens above the Forum’s stage, where the 17,000 or so in the room could see her nod in assent; Styles, having solicited a feather boa from a fan in the front row, reminded everyone how the bit works — “When this boa is raised above my head, you’re out,” he said — then requested a drum roll. A Harry Styles gig, as he told the crowd not long into his 90-minute set, is a place to “feel free to be whoever it is that you’ve always wanted to be”; fans have taken his words as encouragement to express a range of sexual and gender identities — sometimes, as with Serena, for the first time in public — even as his own reluctance to clearly delineate his sexuality has led to accusations of queerbaiting. And indeed to compare “Harry’s House” to the just-released “Midnights” by his onetime romantic partner Taylor Swift is to admit that you know exceedingly little about Styles’ real life. But as he described her pain, the empathy in his voice was strong and true — stronger and truer than in the assured flirtations of “Watermelon Sugar” and “Late Night Talking” and the cryptic introspection of “Sign of the Times” and the chart-topping “As It Was.” That last tune, which rides a tidy synth groove on “Harry’s House,” got a serious bulking-up here, as though Styles had the venue’s classic-rock history on his mind.