Gay Wizards are Gay

NB: Because I know there are some of you who still haven’t read it (naughty geeks!), this entire column is one huge spoiler for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. All whiners will be fed to the basilisk. – JV

So my geeky ones, where were you on the night of Oct. 19? You know, when J.K. Rowling outed Albus Dumbledore?

And no, I checked. It wasn’t a joke.

To recap for those of you saying “huh?” or “didn’t JoSelle already write about this in July?”: Rowling told the world that Dumbledore is Family at a Carnegie Hall reading, when a little girl asked her this question: Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?

“My truthful answer to you … I always thought of Dumbledore as gay,” Rowling responded. When the fans had stopped applauding and screaming with joy (Scout’s honor), she explained that Harry’s mentor had fallen in love with Gellert Grindelwald, a boyhood friend who later became one of the world’s most notorious dark wizards, and Dumbledore’s enemy. You know, the cute blond one posing with a younger Dumbledore in that photograph? Yeah. Your gaydar got tripped for a reason there.

So where were you? Well, when I realized it wasn’t an early April Fools joke concocted by an unholy alliance between Fark.com, The Onion and the same people who brought us that story about Paris Hilton and the drunken Indian elephants, I was kicking myself for not having caught on sooner. I mean, the flamboyant robes, the obsession with knitting, the flaming pet phoenix?

Pass me that dragon steak, ya’ll. I think my face just got bruised by the anvil-sized hints.

I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Actually, despite that “hmm this feels familiar, but why” feeling I got with Dumbledore, he never set my gaydar wailing like a Sneakoscope. And that’s what I found to be so cool about his outing. Despite all the jokes being made about flaming pets and brightly-colored robes and wand-waving, Dumbledore … really never did anything to deserve them. I recall a lot of playful eccentricity, kick-ass duels with Lord Voldemort and fatherly advice to Harry, but lisping, mincing and randomly bursting into renditions of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow?” Not so much. Dumbledore’s one of the more complex, flawed and interesting characters I’ve encountered in fantasy this year. For me, learning that he was complex, flawed and gay just adds more to my appreciation for him.

Of course, not all fans agree with me. For some – particularly those who really, really hoped for an openly gay character in the books — Dumbledore’s closed-canon coming out party seemed cowardly. They also maintain that portraying Dumbledore as a celibate gay (at least, one without a partner who we ever meet) plays into anti-gay stereotypes, even into the idea that gays should be punished with isolation.

I don’t agree with any of this, but I can understand the disappointment. For all its color and diversity, Harry’s world seems to be tragically heterocentric. Harry and his schoolmates (at least the ones we see dating and falling in love) all express interest in members of the opposite sex, and the only adult romantic relationships we see are heterosexual married couples. If you’re a queer reader, especially a younger reader just figuring out your sexuality, this can kinda suck. And yes, outing Dumbledore after the books have been written also gave Rowling a security from anti-gay critics, religious fanatics and other book-banners and book-burners that writing Dumbledore hand-in-hand with another wizard would not have given her.

I can see how this would make Rowling look cowardly, or at least cagey, but I don’t think either is the case. Remember, we’re seeing the world in Harry Potter primarily through the eyes of its title character who begins the series as an 11-year-old and ends it a few weeks shy of his 18th birthday. Harry is clearly a heterosexual teenager, and lots of heterosexual teenagers don’t think about gay people unless the issue is brought to their attention through a gay friend or family member. They’re just too busy with their own sexual issues, and have the social privilege to be preoccupied exclusively with those sexual issues. And really, we’re talking about a kid who didn’t even realize that his two best friends were romantically interested in each other until they pretty much spelled it out for him using short sentences and one-syllable words. If he’s that bad at picking up on heterosexual relationships, why would he be any better at picking up on homosexual ones? I love Harry, but intuition just is not his strong suit. And it would be out of character to write him otherwise.

And as for Rowling being anti-gay just because she didn’t give Dumbledore a boyfriend? Come on, folks. There are many prominent characters of all ages who don’t have visible love interests: Mad Eye Moody, Sirius Black, Charlie and Percy Weasley, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Rita Skeeter, Dolores Umbridge, Rufus Scrimgeour and pretty much all of the Death Eaters to name just a few. And Hogwarts might as well be a Catholic monastery for all of the professors’ husbands, wives and lovers we get to see. Either they were single, or their love lives were simply not something that Rowling thought would contribute to her story.

Ultimately, that’s what we have to remember when it comes to Dumbledore’s outing: authors have a limited time to tell a story. This means that they won’t be able to include everything they know about their world or their characters, no matter how cool these things are to fans. Sure, I wish Harry and friends could have met Dumbledore’s boyfriend or life partner. I’d love to know if Harry’s world is gay-friendly, or if it views gay wizards and witches with the same suspicion as it does Muggleborns. After all, gay and lesbian sex isn’t reproductive, so pureblood bigots might see any pureblood or half-blood who isn’t popping out babies as a blood traitor, right? The Nazis sure felt that way about gays, and pureblood supremacy sure has a lot in common with Hitler’s policies. But I digress. The fact that Rowling didn’t include this information doesn’t make her anti-gay or cowardly. It just means that she probably didn’t think it added to the story, which is ultimately about Harry’s adventures and not Dumbledore’s.

So even though we didn’t get to see Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald holding hands, I’m still thrilled that J.K. Rowling made one of her series’ most interesting, thoughtful, kind and wise characters gay, and that she decided to tell us so we can now re-read her wonderful books with that knowledge in mind. Hooray for her, and hooray for Dumbledore, who would be fabulous no matter who he loved.