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Geeks gone wild by Linda Rodriguez
contributing writerThursday Oct 25, 2007 The Harry Potter series is over. We already know that Harry lives, Voldemort dies, Ron and Hermione get married and Tonks and Remus don’t live long enough to raise little Teddy. But last week, JK Rowling, author of the single most popular children’s book series in history, dropped another bomb: "Dumbledore’s gay!"
Rowling’s revelation came during a question and answer session at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 19, following a reading from the series’ final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Sue Upton, senior staff editor from The Leaky Cauldron, one of the biggest and most respected Harry Potter fan sites, was in the audience that night.
"There was literally a, ’Oh,’" she said, taking a sharp breath in. "And a split second, ’Was she joking?’ and then it just erupted, just exploded, ’Whoo hoo!’"
An explosion is a pretty apt description of the world outside of Carnegie Hall in the days after the revelation - if you didn’t know who Albus Dumbledore was before this weekend, you probably do now. Since that night, the Harry Potter fandom has been abuzz with Gay Dumbledore, the blogosphere has pretty much exhausted the topic, and virtually every major - and minor - media outlet has featured extended Dumbledore coverage. Already some quick-thinking businessmen have staked their claim on the gay-themed Dumbledore T-shirts market ("Dumbledore’s Army: Don’t ask, do tell" and "Wizards are gay" are two notable examples - "Over 7000 already sold!!!"). And Halloween’s on its way - the world might just be ready for the lavender-colored robes of Gay Dumbledore.
Dumbledore hasn’t so much opened the (broom) closet door as blown it off its hinges. And as far as anyone knows, it’s a coming out that’s entirely unprecedented: Few children’s books, or books of any genre for that matter, have been as successful as Harry Potter. And few if any authors have outed their characters outside of the actual books.
Reading between the lines
The reaction from the fandom (those fans thoroughly immersed in the "Potter-verse") and general readers of the books has been fairly positive, according to reports and fan site moderators.
"My initial reaction ... I was ecstatic, I was completely excited, not just because my favorite character was gay ... but because someone with such a visible series, especially a children’s series, could make a character that’s so important, even a teacher, gay, was baffling to me. I don’t know of any that have done that," said Aziza Aba Butain, a Potter fan and one of the organizers of Portus2008, a Harry Potter symposium being held in Dallas, Texas next year. "I find it fantastic, and I’m so excited that the fandom reaction has been so overwhelmingly positive."
But perhaps there’s a good reason for the fact that people deeply immersed in the fandom seem to be all right with a gay wizard headmaster with a penchant for purple robes and high-heeled boots: For years, slash fiction has done an excellent job of inserting gay characters where it seemed there were none. Slash fiction is a subgenre of fan fiction (stories set in the Potter-verse written by fans) that deals specifically and exclusively with male homosexual relationships - often in tales that can border on softcore gay porn. In the Potter-verse, that means Harry making out with Draco, Ron or even Snape, or Remus and Sirius being longtime lovers. It also means that well before Rowling’s revelation, Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindlewald, the dark wizard Dumbledore was so smitten with in the seventh book, have been enjoying a complicated infatuation in LiveJournal.
"Knowing this [that Dumbledore is gay], I think it can do nothing except create like a little mini explosion in the fandom. I don’t think it will affect pairings, because people will always pair who they want, but it kind of gives validation to fan fiction writers, especially slash fictions writers," said Butain, who doesn’t write fan fiction. "I don’t think slash fiction writers have ever had their pairings validated before."
Still, it hasn’t been all one big coming out party. Interestingly, The Leaky Cauldron, which published a full transcript of the Carnegie Hall question and answer session, has made it clear that it is deleting "hateful or intolerant" comments that appear on the site in response to the transcript. Upton says that the homophobic comments have been relatively few, but they’re certainly there - and that while most people were cheering Rowling’s revelation at Carnegie Hall, "There were some horrified faces."
Certainly those who already thought the Potter books were the work of the devil see Dumbledore’s outing as further confirmation of that. Laura Mallory, a mother of four from Georgia who has petitioned her county to remove the Potter books from the public schools because they indoctrinate children into witchcraft, told ABC News that the books have "an anti-Christian agenda" and that "this only further supports that."
"A homosexual lifestyle is a harmful one ... That’s proven, medically," she said.
While not exactly in concert with Mallory’s extreme perspective, other comments posted on blogs and Web sites across the country have evinced a kind of in-the-closet homophobia. The blog Cinematical, which discusses movies and television, put it to their considerable readership: Does a gay Harry Potter character tarnish the series? Many comments were positive, but many were not.
"I am pretty sick of this in your face homosexuality. Does every freaking show have to fag out on us, honestly? It’s their choice and I respect that. I don’t agree with it, but it’s on them, not me ... The author is probably missing the limelight due to no more books coming. Office visits for Harry will never seem the same again," wrote one commenter, who added, "Just to clarify, disagreeing with homosexuality and saying I’m sick of it doesn’t make me homophobic. That’s just a cheap ass counter to people’s disdain for the lifestyle."
Another posting, in response to a New York Times report about the media coverage of Rowling’s revelation, read like this: "Kudos to JK Rowling for ruining a perfectly good children’s series. She probably knew that doing this before the series was finished would have hurt sales. I guess it is the same all around the world, you can take the person out of the ghetto but can’t give them class." Another read, "Perfect reason to use the books as fireplace fuel. Kudo’s [sic] to yet another defective teaching our children that being gay is ’ok’."
Ouch.
"There is a one small, very vocal contingent, there is some dissension, a certain amount of people who are unhappy with it," explained Upton. "But I think the majority of the fans are like, ’Okay, great!’ I think the people that are more upset are trying to say that this changes the books, but it doesn’t change the text at all ... It just makes the back story more tragic, really."
Even those who were pleased with the outing were a bit perplexed as to why Rowling had waited until after the books were completed - and already a billion-dollar industry - to out a character she said had been gay in her head from early on. More than that, some have said that it does change how they read the text.
"It’s like any gay person coming out to their family. You’ve been this person for so long, but you reveal to them ... that you’re the same person you’ve always been, but with some difference. It’s kind of the same reaction that fans have if your brother or sister or cousin comes out, you almost feel like you’ve been lied to ... it’s almost as if you didn’t know them at all," said Butain, who said that she’s been rereading the books lately and is almost distracted by the fact that she now knows Dumbledore is gay. "Looking back now, I’m seeing things in a new light, I feel like I’m getting to know this person all over again, and the series."
Rowling has since reconfirmed that indeed, she meant it - Dumbledore is gay. On Oct. 23, at a news conference in Toronto, Rowling said she felt the revelation was a positive thing, especially since, she said, it helped another (non-fictional) man come out after the Carnegie Hall reading that night. Rowling also said then that she hadn’t felt the need to out Dumbledore in the books, preferring to concentrate on character and plot development. In an Oct. 22 post on his own blog, author Neil Gaiman essentially defended Rowling, saying that, "You always wind up knowing more about your characters than you can get on the page."
Many fans, including some who are gay, are more than willing to accept that Rowling always knew that Dumbledore was gay, but chose not to insert that into the text because it would have taken away from the plot.
"I think that that’s not actually a bad way to go because when it comes down to it, it doesn’t define who he was. When it comes down to it, who he was was the most brilliant wizard of his age who happened to be gay," said Barbara Purdom, a Potter fan and the author of an academic paper entitled "Metaphorical Queerness in the Harry Potter books" that she presented at the 2005 Harry Potter symposium in Salem, Mass. "I think the fact that she didn’t have it in the books was so that it didn’t distract from the main story, which it could have. The main story was about Harry.
"Would I love for there to be more books for young people with positive gay role models?" she continued. "Of course, but I don’t think that’s the purpose of what [Rowling] was writing."
After Dumbledore
Whatever Rowling’s motives, Dumbledore’s being outed does offer a unique opportunity for parents of children hooked on the series. It is, in the parlance of our day, "a teachable moment." It’s just a matter of what, exactly, they want to teach their children.
"I’m the Mom on staff," The Leaky Cauldron’s Upton explained, "and I have a boy who has some idea what it [Dumbledore’s sexuality] is, but is really not quite sure yet, and the thing is, when he’s reading the book, that’s not in the book. Maybe later on when we have that talk, he’ll be more interested ... It might be forcing the hand of some parents who felt like they weren’t ready to have that conversation ... [but] I hope that it would encourage parents to be more open."
Butain agreed, saying, "I think this is going to be a very good doorway for talking about these issues with kids ... the books themselves have such a huge message of love and love conquering all and I think having a gay character only augments that."
Of course now, she added, laughing, those people who tended to burn the books without having read them, well, "Now they actually have a reason."
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