Saturday, January 12, 2008

Albus Dumbledore Is Gay?!?

...Now Harry, grab my "wand"...

Suddenly strains of Sinatra’s “Come Fly With Me” started playing in my head. “Once I get you up there, where the air is rarefied, we’ll just glide, starry eyed…” Please hold while I shake myself. Whew!

With closure of her phenomenally successful Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling tells the world that the beloved Headmaster of Hogwarts is homosexual. What?!?!?! What do you mean, “what?” It’s called alliteration. Not that, what do you mean Dumbledore is gay? She meant gay as in happy, right? No, silly, she meant as in he loved another man. Like a brother, then? No. You get the picture? Yeah, but it’s not something I really want to visualize.

I thoroughly enjoyed all the books in the series. When Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows was released in July, I re-read every book so my mind would be fresh on all the details. Yes, folks, six books in less than two months. Maybe I skim read them, missing important clues as to Dumbledore's sexuality. I simply do not recall any veiled, obscure, or completely disclosed references to Dumbledore's preference for men. Perhaps my gaydar was malfunctioning.

Why now? A couple of media reports referenced this sentence from The Deathly Hallows: '"You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me.'" Dumbledore was speaking to Harry about Grindlewald; discussing how he was inflamed by Grindlewald’s idea of wizard domination and muggle subjugation. Somehow I am supposed to extrapolate being inflamed about these ideas to being flaming? That Dumbledore was in love with Grindlewald?

Let’s think about this. If you are a single male, inflamed and passionate about another man’s ideas, you’re gay? Ponder that for a moment. How many men would be homosexual if that was the case?

If Ms. Rowling knew, from the beginning, that she wanted Dumbledore as a gay character, why not “out” him in “The Sorcerer’s Stone”? Or, why out the character at all? Shouldn't it have been obvious to the reader?

I am not in a dither about it. Whether a fictional character is gay or not, has no meaning to my life. Wait, let me take that back. I’m wrong after all. I am blogging about it; and it has offered me some humor in the last couple of months.

In the end (to pun or not to pun), who cares? Does it really make a difference? Are the books any less meaningful to the reader because in the 11th hour of her fame, Rowling says Dumbledore is gay?

1 comment:

In Russet Shadows said...

I find it absolutely amazing that gay activists congratulate themselves on this like they've just bagged another big game trophy. "Heh heh, we got the head of JK Rowling." It's immature and pointless, and Rowling is gutless. Why do it at all? Who's seriously going to believe her except the idiots who think that anytime anyone is "outed" as being homosexual that it's some glorious event, no matter how fake it is?