Originally posted 10/29 – please see update/link added below
The news has spread throughout both the wizarding and Muggle worlds by now:
In an author talk/reading/booksigning event at Carnegie Hall on October 19, the true Headmistress of Hogwarts “outed” Albus Dumbledore as gay. J.K. Rowling revealed this little detail in response to an audience member’s question about the great wizard’s love life. She also mentioned that the makers of the Harry Potter movies are aware of this, but weren’t until recently, when she had to send a note to the screenwriter to make a change in some lines in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince because they would have been out of character.
The announcement has been greeted with acceptance by most fans, despite their surprise. But should it have been a surprise? The LA Times features seven signs that, in hindsight, should have told us that Dumbledore was gay. A couple of them are pretty silly, and overall I think the list is quite a stretch, although the Leonardo da Vinci analogy is interesting.
Dumbledore is a great fictional creation, regardless of his sexual orientation or anything else, so this revelation doesn’t make much of a difference in my opinion. I think it’s good that this never came out – no pun intended, I swear! – before the series was finished, though; I think it would have been a distraction. But considering how many thousands of pages Rowling has published about Harry Potter and company, this really makes me curious about how many thousand more pages of backstory and notes she probably has stored somewhere, never to be seen until the eventual auction of her personal papers. I’ve got a few questions about Minerva McGonagall…
(UPDATED 11/1 to add a link to a thoughtful discussion of this revelation, and Rowling’s possible motives for making it, in Salon. Apparently she’s been passing along quite a few nuggets of backstory during her book tour for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.)
I think Dumbledore being gay bears no relevance to the stories whatsoever.
I also think this little nugget of information will only “bother” the exact same people who thought the entire series was Satanic and godless.
Sunshine – My husband said the same thing, and y’all are probably right. Even though they’re too offended to actually read the books, they’ll still be bothered.
love the books, and I don’t care about this one way or the other… But i wonder, wasn’t the actor who played the first Dumbledor Gay? Do you think that this is something (now) which is said in honor of him???
that was my first thought.
Oh, for heaven’s sakes. Sunshine is absolutely right: as if it matters at all. Oh, I suppose unless you’re the kind who equates homosexuality with pedophilia, then you’ll be seeing all sorts of nasty things in the books.
But nasty minds see nasty things. Thankfully, most of them are refusing to read the books…
Personally, I always saw Dumbledore as asexual. He’d moved beyond the physical, to a world of spirit and wisdom; I kind of see his sexuality as irrelevant not only to the plot line, but to Dumbledore himself.
Misty – I’m not sure about whether or not Richard Harris was gay. Now, if we were talking about Ian McKellen (Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movies) – well, no question about that. But the alleged homosexual subtext of LOTR is a whole ‘nother conversation.
MaryP – No argument.
What’s actually interested me about this isn’t the fact of Dumbledore having any particular orientation – I think we all agree it doesn’t matter story-wise – but the fact that Rowling had all this mapped out behind the scenes. It does make me curious about other untold backstories.
Rowling has said she plans to write an encyclopedia of the Harry Potter world and so we may just find out other interesting trivia we hadn’t considered before. 🙂
Literary Feline – I’m sure she’s already got all the notes for it. I would definitely read that.