Three months, one day, seven hours, and thirty-seven minutes since the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and...

...JK Rowling has decided Dumbledore is gay.

Ok.

I can see it. I guess. I didn't see it while we were reading the books. Probably didn't see it because Rowling forgot to put it in.

But she forgot to put a lot of stuff into the books that's supposed to be there and she put a lot of stuff in them that she promptly forgot about later just to cover holes in her plots made by the stuff she forgot to put in in the first place.

But if Ray Bradbury can decide fifty-odd years later that his most famous book isn't about censorship, Rowling can decide within a few months of publishing her last Harry Potter novel that one of her main characters had an intense homosexual love affair when he was in prep school.

Oh, you didn't realize the whole young Dumbledore and Grindelwald subplot was a retelling of A Separate Peace?  Me neither.

I thought it was the story of Dumbledore's temptation to go over to the dark side. I didn't pay much attention to Grindelwald himself because he's not much of a character. He's an attitude, and it's the attitude that Dumbledore is shown to be rejecting, not the young man.

I also thought---think---it's the story that explains why Harry is the greater hero than Dumbledore. Like Aragorn and Luke Skywalker, Harry is never seriously tempted by power. That's because he has something the young Dumbledore did not, the example of Dumbedore himself. Dumbledore faced and overcame that temptation for both of them.

Again, this reduces Grindelwald to an abstraction and a plot device, neither of which things in a story are ever very interesting in and of themselves.

But Rowling now says Grindelwald was the great love of Dumbledore's life.

That would be a romantic and tragic story, but it's not one that Rowling wrote.

Maybe she plans to. Maybe she's going to do what Tolkien did with Middle Earth and write her own  Silmarillion that will give us the entire mythology behind the Potter books.

As it stands though, the only way you would "know" Dumbledore is gay, based on what Rowling actually wrote, is if you "know" that the default setting on all intense friendships between adolescent boys is homosexual.

Which raises some questions about Ron and Harry and, possibly, about Harry and Draco Malfoy.

I know I've often treated the Potter books as if they bore as much analysis as the works of Charles Dickens, but really this is too much subtext for what are essentially adventure tales for children.

Still, I kind of like it that Dumbledore is gay. Mainly because having an out and out gay character (sorry about the pun) as one of the heroes may put an end to all the Lupin is gay because he's a werewolf nonsense.

Now it may be that as a werewolf Lupin is in the same position that gay people have often found themselves in, forced to hide their true natures from their employers and colleagues.  But the fact is that in the world of Harry Potter there are werewolves and they are dangerous and Lupin is a werewolf.  There is a very good reason why if they found out even the most tolerant and understanding parents wouldn't want him teaching their children.

If you want to read Lupin's lycanthropy as a metaphor for homosexuality, that's your business, but it's not a metaphor that goes very far in a direction gay people should like---homosexuality as a deadly and contagious disease, homosexuals as predators barely in control of their urges?---and that's all it is, a metaphor, and it's your metaphor, not the books'. In the books, being a werewolf is not a metaphorical condition. In this particular case, it is Lupin's tragic flaw, just as carelessness is Sirius Black's, and arrogance was James Potter's---or might have been had he not fallen in love with Lily.

There is a reason the wizarding world needs Harry Potter to come along and save it from Tom Riddle and it's that the heroes of the previous generation weren't up to the job.

The story of the first war against Voldemort hasn't been written yet either, so there's no way of knowing, but it does seem that if James, Sirius, Lupin, and Lily were all as gifted and brave as they're portrayed, that the four of them working alongside Dumbledore and aurors of the likes of Mad-eye Moody should have been a match for Riddle and his Death Eaters.

That the weren't suggests that they had flaws that weakened them. Lupin's was, and continues to be in the present war, the debilitating effects of his being a werewolf.

Maybe they were up to the job. I'm still not clear on it. My impression is that the forces of darkness were in retreat by the time Voldemort found the Potters and it was only thanks to the perfidy of Peter Pettigrew that Voldemort came as close to winning as he did. 

What is clear in The Prisoner of Azkaban is that Lupin's lycanthropy came close to destroying him.  It was something terrible about himself he needed to be saved from by the intervention of his friends, which again is not exactly a flattering metaphor for being gay.

And if being a werewolf is not meant to be taken "literally" but "figuratively" (this is, as if within an imaginary work it's not to be seen as what it appears to be but as standing for something real outside the work) then it is the only allegorical aspect of the whole series, unless you think it's all an allegory.

I don't think so, but that's my interpretation. I think Rowling herself has dismissed allegorical readings of her world.  She means the magic to be magic. But it now appears she's given herself permission to write and re-write her books outside their covers.

Which brings me to the real question here, which isn't whether or not Dumbledore is gay, but whether or not he is just because his author says he is.

If an artist paints a picture that everybody sees as a bowl of green apples but then after the painting is hung in a museum she comes along to tell us that it's actually a bowl of pears, does that make it a bowl of pears or does that make it a bad painting?

What if the artist says, Yes, it's a bowl of apples, but one of those apples is rotten, it's just that the rotten part is hidden behind one of the other apples, does that make it a painting of a rotten apple?

What if she says there's also a peach in the bowl, but it's underneath the apples?

If something isn't there on the canvas, then it's not there, is it?

But what if it isn't on the canvas in itself, but is there in effect?

The painting of the apples may include a bad apple. although not one in the bowl, if there's also a boy holding his stomach and grimacing, but how do we know that it was a bad apple that gave the boy a stomach ache?

What if the painter writes a letter, twenty years after painting the picture, claiming that the boy had actually been punched in the stomach by another boy who stole his apple?

If a thing isn't on the canvas, how can it be there?

If something isn't in the book an author wrote, can she put it in afterwards without actually going back and rewriting the book?

And if she does that, isn't it a whole new book?

Same question goes for movies now that studios are in the habit of releasing as "the director's cut" on DVD. Which is the real Apocalypse Now?  The movie that was released thirty years ago or Apocalypse Redux?

If Shakespeare's spirit were doomed to walk the earth and could a tale unfold that for the last few centuries we've been completely missing the point of Hamlet, the melancholy Dane's dying of a brain tumor and the ghost and all his suspicions about his uncle and mother are symptoms of his disease, would that mean that in all future Hamlets the Prince should be made-up to look as though he's undergoing chemo?

Or, since we are scholars like Horatio, might we be within our rights to question it and demand to know, "Just where in the text did you bother to tell us that fact, Bill?"

What if Shakespeare's ghost told us that Hamlet was gay?

That might give actors playing Hamlet and Ophelia, Gertrude and Claudius something new and interesting to work with (although I'm sure there have already been productions that made Hamlet's homosexuality a subtext), but I'm not sure what it would actually add to what we see on stage since like Hamlet's presumed heterosexuality his being gay would seem to beside the point at the moment, unless like Olivier you believe he really does want to sleep with his mother and that's his main motivation. It's always seemed to me though that Prince has more important things on his mind than whether or not and how and by whom he's going to get laid.

Where in the books is Dumbledore shown to be gay?

Rowling may have intended Dumbledore to be a gay character, but his gayness does not seem to have mattered to her when she has him onstage. The one scene in which he's shown with Grindelwald (shown as in "show don't tell"), is not a love scene; it's the scene in which one of them kills Dumbledore's sister. Their great duel is summarized and if there was any left-over sexual tension between them when they faced off, Rowling didn't put it in the summary.

So here's the second part of my question:

What does Dumbledore's being gay add to the books as books?

Not what does it do for your appreciation of the books? Not what good might it do for gay adolescents struggling to come to terms with their sexuality?

What does it mean artistically?

That sounds like an exam question.  Part One: Using only evidence from the texts, show that Dumbledore is queer.  Part Two: Show how Dumbledore's sexuality is important to the themes/narrative.

And that brings me to my last question, another two-parter.

Do the Harry Potter books support this much critical attention and if they do why are they worth it?

Related:  Dumbledore may or may not be gay, but Jon Swift is certain of one thing. Harry Potter is a brat!

Comments

[MBunge]

Rowling's comments bring to mind the idea that great writers (and I think she has to be considered a great writer, at least within the fantasy genre) are like great athletes. They both put in a tremendous amount of effort perfecting their skills, but what ultimately separates them from the not-great is something even they don't understand and can't express.

Mike

[Stu]

You know what I was thinking? That the Harry Potter books needed more flashbacks with the Pensieve, and maybe more newspaper articles and letters for characters to find and read, to adequately explain every facet of every character.

This is really a missed opportunity on Rowling's behalf. She could have had a much more fleshed out book, if she'd only come up with this earlier.

[Ken Houghton]

Uh, the parallel with Knowles's A Separate Peace was actually obvious on the first read-through.

And citing McMegan on things "[Rowling] forgot to put in" is laughable (especially when dealing with The Price of Magic, since the entire series revolves around that, starting with the Opportunity Cost of going to Hogwarts, particularly for Muggles--think telling the world that Harry goes to St. Brutus's, for instance; or the choice after Hogwarts of having to live in a world where most of your peers don't know what the purpose of a rubber duck is--not to mention that the presence of Squibs (Filch, the neighbor, etc.) makes it clear that magic is A Scarce Resource, in the same way that water or sunlight is.

I'll specifically address the questions later, when I have a chance actually to look at the books; for now, suffice to say, the "revelation" wasn't surprising.

[sfmike]

1. Using only evidence from the texts, show that Dumbledore is queer: Absolutely no evidence I can think of pointing in one direction or another, but that's also part of the character's narrative arc up until the very end. Dumbledore is a Wise Old Soul who is also a tortured Mystery Man and finding what that's all about is part of Harry's quest for knowledge.

Part Two: Show how Dumbledore's sexuality is important to the themes/narrative: It wasn't, which is probably why the fact wasn't in the books themselves.

And that brings me to my last question, another two-parter. Do the Harry Potter books support this much critical attention and if they are why are they worth it? Yes, definitely, and I'd say for the political subtexts alone. It's hard not to read about the Deatheaters without thinking of the Bush/Cheney regime and their worldwide partners in crime.

[merciless]

Andrew Sullivan answers part one like this:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/10/dumbledore.html

As far as part two goes, I don't think Dumbledore's sexuality matters at all (except that it makes me happy). My guess is that Rowling just wanted to give a big fat middle finger to all the fundies who rail on about her books being the work of the devil (and now they're REALLY howling).

Your point about the first generation of the Order is interesting, though. One of my problems with the wizarding world as Rowling wrote it is that they're, for the most part, lazy and naive. Their gifts have made it possible for them to become eccentric children who couldn't tie their own shoes without magic. My theory is that, when Voldemort came to power, they just didn't know how to fight, what to fight, or when. When Voldemort entered the Potter house, James didn't even have his wand in his possession. Neither, apparently, did Lily. And they knew they were marked.

Harry, who was raised by the worst sort of muggles, knew at least how to take care of himself. If he'd been raised by wizards, he'd have been a goner like his parents.

[Ken Muldrew]

"Which is the real Apocalypse Now? The movie that was released thirty years ago or Apocalypse Redux?"

Seeing America getting schooled by the French 30 years ago just wouldn't have worked. Now, however, it is delicious. But I'm still not ready for that weird surfboard scene.

[Violet Mannion]

I was having a talk with my friend Irene the other day. I asked her what she thought on the matter, and she said, "Oh my gosh! It all makes so much more sense now!!!"

I kind of just looked at her and nodded. "Sure.....Except...no, not really."

It brought fast and major publicity back to the books, a series which just ended and won't get much attention until
the 6th movie comes out. But all the same, I thought it was completely unnecessary.

Perhaps it helps with the "fan-base", it makes homosexual fans more interested and adoring of the series. The thing is, many of them probably already were, for the simple reason that they're good books.

Perhaps it was to get back at people who shunned the series already on the basis of it being devil-worship and the like. But if so, this wasn't a recent major news story, just an ongoing kind of thing. You think she'd pull a stunt like that while she was getting penalized for it. ("it" being devil-worship or antisemitism or anti-catholicism or something sac-religious)

It is very much like the apple painting.... I like that analogy. I think that announcing something like that to the viewer of the painting would end the mystique behind it. Take away from the fun or the element of awe and wonder. Instead of telling a story and wondering what happened to the boy, it shows a very obvious picture and leaves no chance to read between the lines.

It reminds me of The Little Prince, actually. The scene, near the beginning, where the Little Prince is unhappy with the sheep drawing until the pilot simply draws a crate, which pleases the Prince because he can imagine what kind of sheep is in there.

The only thing that "makes sense" about his character now that he's apparently been gay all this time is that he never got married. And the only reason we suppose he never got married? J.K. never mentioned it. Would it have been remotely important to the plot? Probably not. And then again, she never mentioned any of the teachers' personal lives, save for the friendship Dumbledore had with Grendewald and his siblings. So, by that logic.....Professor McGonagall is therefore a lesbian. And Professor Binns (history of magic) is heterosexual, and Quirrell must've been as well. Not to mention Filch, who, for all we know, may have been madly in love with Mrs. Norris, anyway.

Really, the only two 100% definitely heterosexual teachers that come to mind right away are Hagrid, who had a crush on Madame Maxime, and Snape, who was in love with Lily.

Maybe when he looked into the mirror of erised, what he really saw was an intense and passionate session with his old buddy Grindewald. And then again. Maybe he just likes wool socks. It could've been 1001 things.

And then there's the whole "let's assume they're gay because they were good childhood friends". Therefore, Sirius and Peter are also gay, James and Lupin are most likely bisexual, and Harry and Ron...well. Let's just claim she didn't detail every night they spent together in the Gryffindor common room to enough extent to satisfactorily prove them "straight".

Dumbledore's coming-out-of-the-closet was completely irrelevant to the plot, and I think his character was better off without it. I could see one of the other characters, perhaps....maybe his brother. But Dumbledore is supposed to be a wise old man, or, perhaps by the 7th, wise old fool. He's a mentor to Harry. I'm not saying gays aren't smart, or wise, i'm only saying it seems to clash with his character stereotype. (trying hard to word this without offending anybody, it's difficult. lol.)

I'm not against a gay-Dumbledore, i just don't see the point. (the point that is, artistically or for good writing.)

---- oh, and on the subject of Lupin's lycanthropy. It never crossed my mind that it could be an allusion to being homosexual. I always thought- and still do- that the idea being conveyed in that case was more of a "personal-demons" kind of situation or battle.

[Jim]

Rowling said the reason Dumbledore's sexuality came up was because one of the movies was going to depict him as once having a crush on a girl. So she corrected the director, but didn't need to make his sexuality explicit in the Canon.

[Violet Mannion]

Correction for clarification purposes:

"And Professor Binns (history of magic) is heterosexual, and Quirrell must've been as well." <<--- supposed to say "homosexual".

And another thing I believe I forgot to mention:

I like that she added a gay character to the books, but she should've actually written it in, and made it a character that makes sense. Or at least, more sense than Dumbledore.

[Kyle Bosby]

"Maybe she plans to. Maybe she's going to do what Tolkien did with Middle Earth and write her own Silmarillion that will give us the entire mythology behind the Potter books."

Just like to point out that the Simarillion was written BEFORE the rest of the Lord of the Rings books, so your anology does not work.