Yesterday at Carnegie Hall, J.K. Rowling revealed that Albus Dumbledore, beloved headmaster of Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter books, is gay.
Entertainment Weekly reports:
Responding to a question from a child about Dumbledore's love life, Rowling hesitated and then revealed, "I always saw Dumbledore as gay." Filling in a few more details, she said, "Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald.... Don't forget, falling in love can blind us. [He] was very drawn to this brilliant person. This was Dumbledore's tragedy." She added that in a recent meeting about the sixth movie, she spied a line in the script where Dumbledore waxed poetic about a girl, so she was forced to scribble director David Yates a note to correct the situation.
So gay, but presumably unrequited -- which is one classic mechanic in fiction to make a gay character "acceptable."
Still, good for Rowling for clearly outing her character, and standing up for him in a Hollywood script!
What will this mean to the millions of children around the world who are conditioned by homophobic elders that gay school teachers and administrators are a scary thing, or at best they think it's a "don't ask, don't tell" issue?
It will be interesting to see if just this one announcement leads to the banning (or re-banning, for the anti-witch pitchfork crowd) of the books in schools.
--
Shava Nerad, News and Opinion Correspondent:
Shava’s column, Iconoclasm, published about once a week to Gather Essentials: News, is an examination of the provocative ideas emerging in media and world culture behind the news.
Shava Nerad has been working on the Internet for twenty-five years, at the boundaries of Internet and social issues. She is CEO of Indigenis, a consulting group working at the intersection of virtual worlds, social networking, and gaming communities, and will soon be leaving her position as development director of The Tor Project to help found a youth journalism initiative.
She lives in Somerville, MA with her teenage son, her fiance (a professional magician and fundraising coach), and a corgi/dachshund mutt named George.
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Comments: 8
God Bless
10*
So you can imagine he's straight -- and you can imagine that the Queen of England is a witch (since that's not in the books either).
But the point here is the real-life *social* implications of an author of such popularity stating that a trusted, grandfatherly figure -- and one in charge of an entire school of children which is a bugaboo of homophobes everywhere -- is gay.
I think it's terrific, personally. If she has to tell the movie scriptwriter to change Dumbledore's behavior to fit her image of the character, then I'd say that, yes, it *IS* in the books and movies, if only by intentional omission of information that might lead us to think otherwise.
*giggle*
And yes, berf, if you told me one of the faculty at Hogwarts was declared gay by Rowling, my first guess would be Gilderoy Lockheart, actually, and then Snape, just by stereotypical mannerism. Which makes this even more delightful really, since we didn't have to have a mincing gay guy on the faculty, but a wise, steady, calm, dignified type -- which is certainly more my real life experience of my gay friends "of a certain age."