Midwestern Gothic

I guarantee you didn’t read it here first. Albus Dumbledore of the critically acclaimed Harry Potter series is gay. Oh my!

I find it convenient J.K. Rowling announced this information after the series is completely published. Fans are no longer speculating future plot developments, and stores are no longer forecasting upcoming book sales. Buzz sells books. The buzz was over. Until now.

…he was gay and had been in love with Grindelwald… “You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me,” Dumbledore says in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in Rowling’s record-breaking fantasy series.

Nothing in the above statement definitively implies his character was homosexual. I’ve read all the books, multiple times, and I never got the impression he was gay. Rowling made it up to get Harry Potter back in the headlines.

Statement from Melissa Anelli, webmaster of www.the-leaky-cauldron.org:

“Jo Rowling calling any Harry Potter character gay would make wonderful strides in tolerance toward homosexuality. By dubbing someone so respected, so talented and so kind, as someone who just happens to be also homosexual, she’s reinforcing the idea that a person’s gayness is not something of which they should be ashamed.”

If she’s reinforcing the idea that gayness is nothing to be ashamed of, then why was Albus Dumbledore in the closet for seven books worth of prose? Why wasn’t the Headmaster (brings new meaning huh?) sitting down with Seamus Finnegan and teaching him “It’s alright to be gay.”?

If J.K. Rowling wants readers to sympathize with Dumbledore as a homosexual character, then he should be an acknowledged gay character in the novels. If you want to make a “statement” about homosexuality, have the guts to publish it. It’s too convenient to make this announcement in hindsight and expect people to believe you tackled issues like homosexuality in your novels.