Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling has announced that Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts School in the mega-popular children’s book series, was a homosexual. E! News reports:
Dumbledore was gay. . . .
"Falling in love can blind us to an extent," Rowling explained Friday in front of a packed house at New York’s Carnegie Hall, where she capped off her first U.S. book tour since 2000.
Which explains why the brilliant wizard was briefly blinded as a young man by the charm and skill of Gellert Grindelwald, his companion turned arch-nemesis who turned out to be more interested in the Dark Arts than a three-bedroom craftsman in Hogsmeade.
After Dumbledore was "horribly, terribly let down," Rowling explained, he went on to destroy Grindelwald in what is considered in the wizarding world to have been the ultimate wand-toting battle between good and evil.
That love, she said to raucous applause, was Dumbledore’s "great tragedy."
"If I had know[n] this would have made you so happy, I would have told you years ago," Rowling said.
It’s very interesting that the Manhattan audience responded with "raucous applause." Their delight at finding out a character in a children’s fantasy book had homosexual urges is certainly worthy of intense psychological investigation.
Neither Rowling nor the producers of the Harry Potter movie adaptations has said whether this revelation will affect the characterization of Dumbledore in forthcoming Potter films. Also, Rowling apparently did not tell whether Dumbledore was supposed to have been an active homosexual.
However, every scene involving Dumbledore in the forthcoming movies will unavoidably be colored by this revelation, and the refreshing avoidance of irony in the books and films will surely be no more.
In any case, this certainly falls into the More Than We Needed or Wanted to Know category.
I think that you’re absolutely right, Bob, and that you express it superbly here. Her action in this regard is utterly unnecessary. Which makes it immensely meaningful, of course.
I’ve never read any of the Potter books, though I did recently read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time–a beautiful story. I often go back and read stories that I missed as a child, and in a way I’m sorry that I’m just a little too old now to look back nostalgically at the Rowling books.
The incident on which the revelation was based seems to be a little ambiguous. Are men not allowed to have close male friends without imputing homosexual urges to them? Otherwise, is there anything in the books that would lead anyone to suspect that Dumbledore is gay? If not, this seems to be just a politically correct gesture on Rowling’s part–something that perhaps someone had encouraged her to do for the sake of “fairness.”
I don’t understand why it was necessary to “out” a fictional character–a fictional character, mind you–since his sexuality one way or another is not an issue in the books. Perhaps in the future Dowling will identify another character as a bedwetter, another as a sufferer from attention-deficit disorder, another as a former drug addict. She might as well throw in all the unfortunates, as long as she has started down this road.
Bob Champ
Psychological explanations diminish the power of characters’ choices, instead of strengthening them, because they make the motives too particular and impede identification with the character (and not by choice of the audience but simply as a result of particularizing the motives). Hence, not knowing this aspect of his motivation makes for a stronger story than knowing it does.
Why is that something you wouldn’t want to know?