Get Herald RSSNot me. Like most Harry Potter fans I know, I was pleasantly surprised to read J.K. Rowling's recent disclosure that she had always pictured the beloved, near-omnipotent character of Professor Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, to be gay. I was disappointed that the information wasn't openly revealed within the series, but that made me wonder: Could this be Rowling's attempt to compensate for the stereotypical 1950s-style romance that characterizes most of the relationships in the novels?
Rowling stated in the question-and-answer session in which she outed Dumbledore that "the Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry." Accordingly, many fans' first inclination, including my own, was to wonder why she hadn't made Dumbledore's sexuality explicit if she was so concerned with conveying messages of open-mindedness. She certainly advocated for acceptance through other themes; the magical world's social class system of "pure-bloods," "half-bloods," Muggle-borns (or the pejorative "mudbloods") and Muggles is an innovative proxy for real institutions of discrimination.
Of course, there's the obvious possibility for why she didn't spell out Dumbledore's ill-fated love for rival wizard Gellert Grindelwald within the books: to avoid criticism and book bans, presumably largely from religious groups like those that protested the series for supposedly promoting witchcraft. Fair enough - she wanted to sell books. More altruistically, she could also be making a calculated political move by forcing homophobic readers who had grown to love the headmaster to confront their intolerance. Much like unexpectedly finding out a close friend is gay, they need to reconcile their conflicting feelings in light of the new information and hopefully recognize that what drew them to care for the character/friend hasn't changed.
It's also possible (though I find it unlikely) that Rowling simply never considered Dumbledore's sexuality to be something important enough to reveal. She has said that she writes backstories even for minor characters and knows all sorts of information about them that's never published. The revelation did come out seemingly inadvertently, when an audience member asked her if Dumbledore had ever been in love. But whether she intended it or not, the disclosure has political implications, and what strikes me more than the fact of Dumbledore specifically being gay is the sudden acknowledgement of homosexuality at all in the magical world.
For all of the progressive themes and messages of the Potter series, their relationships were always presented as absurdly heteronormative and traditional, approaching a level of convention that could belong in 1950s dating manuals but probably not in today's world. Consider these recurring characteristics of the romantic relationships in the novels (spoilers ahead): Almost everyone marries their high school sweetheart straight out of Hogwarts and immediately starts having children (Lily and James Potter, Arthur and Molly Weasley, Harry and Ginny, Hermione and Ron.) The women all assume their husbands' last names. No one ever gets divorced. There is no interracial dating, with the brief exception of Harry and Cho Chang. (Of course, only a token handful of characters of color appear in the books at all.)
Furthermore, with the exception of Snape, every Hogwarts teacher is presented as entirely asexual - none of them are married or given the slightest reference to a romantic past. That isn't necessarily a flaw - as the whole series save for several chapters are written from the perspective of a student, the professors' asexuality can be read as the students' realistic ignorance to the reality that teachers have lives outside of school. The fact that Hagrid is the only teacher we see dabble in dating, when he also has a personal friendship with Harry, supports this theory. Of course, Harry had something of a personal friendship with Dumbledore as well, though with very different dynamics.
The point is that it feels contrived to reveal Dumbledore's sexuality after the fact, when all of Rowling's characterizations of non-deviant relationships are firmly reinforced time and time again. The strict heteronormativity of the series never made me think to search for hints that there might be something else going on under the surface. I have read and loved the books for almost 10 years, and I always disappointingly chalked up the lack of queer characters as something Rowling was simply going to avoid. The disclosure at this point feels like a cop-out - if she wanted to send an overarching message of tolerance for non-traditional sexualities, couldn't she have normalized it by casually mentioning Seamus Finnigan's crush on Dean Thomas or pointing out two Ravenclaw fourth-year girls dancing at the Yule Ball?
Of course I ultimately have to give Rowling at least some credit, since I never thought queer people would be acknowledged as a reality in Harry Potter's world. And again, perhaps the revelation at this point really will have a more effective impact among homophobic readers than knowing all along about queer characters in the books would have. A late plea for tolerance is undoubtedly better than no plea at all. Still, the bottom line is that while outing Dumbledore now is a step in the right direction, a casual approach in simply making homosexuality an unremarkable part of the magical world would have been a far more effective way to actually convey normalization and acceptance.
Lily Shield's '09 Patronus is a gay penguin.
