The fuss over Dumbledore

Full disclosure: I am gay, but I am also not a Harry Potter fan. I have seen all the movies, but quit reading the series after the first book. It was a good young adult book, and I might have become a follower if the series had come out when I was 13, but I really don't get the huge popularity of the series among adults.

At any rate, the current fuss over J.K. Rowling's public remark that the character of Dumbledore was gay is astonishing. The audience who heard her at Carnegie Hall applauded her, but many columnists and bloggers are up in arms about it. At a public reading, an audience member asked her if Dumbledore had ever been in love, and Rowling replied, "I always thought of Dumbledore as gay," and said he'd been in love with a wizard named Grindelwald. Barbara Kay, in the Canadian National Post, says that kids shouldn't have to be confronted by issues of sexuality in their literature. Except I believe that Harry himself handles such issues in the books and movies, not about his sexual orientation, but about sexual attraction. (And, honestly, the Potter books wound up having more adult readers that kid readers.) Jeffrey Weiss, in the Dallas Morning News, says to Rowling, "If you didn't put it in the books, please don't tell us now." Except then he backtracks and says it's OK if she talks about some things, like how she came up with certain characters or ideas.

The critic who has the most interesting point, Chauncey Mabe in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, says what bothers him is that Rowling has besmirched the "integrity of the implicit compact between author and reader" by making such comments about her work after the fact. He points out that making Dumbledore gay in the books would have strengthened her theme of tolerance, but that making a casual remark about it later is an easy out. He does have a point here; an openly gay character in the Potter series would have made an unmissable statement, even though it might also have increased the book burnings.

But frankly I think all of these commentators are overreacting, possibly out of various levels of discomfort with gay people. Rowling softened her revelation by saying she's always thought of Dumbledore as gay. She did not describe him engaging in sex (as I imagine he has in some of the fan fiction out there), she didn't give him a political agenda based on his being gay. She didn't even say, "Yep, he's gay!" In the same way that many readers have imagined fuller pasts and futures for literary characters, she imagined a fuller past for Dumbledore. Somehow, I think that if she had said, "Dumbledore was a cannibal," or "Dumbledore murdered helpless old ladies," or "Dumbledore was an existentialist," the commentators would have kept silent. It isn't really the encroaching of an author on the "integrity" of a work's relationship to its audience that truly bothers these people. A reader can always say, "Well, I've never thought of Dumbledore as gay," and let it stand at that. The real problem here is homophobia--it's still OK to express your dislike for gay people in public discourse as long as you don't use the word "faggot." Even though I think that Mabe has an interesting point, I wonder if he would have bothered to bring it up if the issue had been vegetarianism rather than homosexuality.