Rowling's New Row

I'm sure you've read by now that J.K. Rowling has outed her senior wizard as a friend of Dorothy.

But John Mark Reynolds says, "Dumbledore is not Gay." He has a point:

Recently, J.K. Rowling announced to the world that one of her characters, the heroic mentor of Harry Potter, Dumbledore, was gay.

Nonsense. There is no evidence of it in the books and the books (at this point) are all that matter. I have always thought the books deeply Christian not because Rowling told me so (which she recently confirmed), but because the text is full of Christian images and ideas. She had a chance to give Dumbledore a boyfriend, but she muffed it. I refuse to denigrate friendship by reading every close one as sexual . . . and she gave us nothing else.

No offense to an excellent author, but Dumbledore no longer belongs only to Rowling. He also belongs to her readers who have been given a series of books in which Rowling was free to say what she wanted to say. She wrote about Christianity openly by Book Seven, but if Dumbledore was gay, she decided to hide it. She hid it so well that there is no evidence of it.

At this point it is too late for Rowling to change the text. She cannot decide to kill Harry now . . . or announce that Harry is actually a vampire, a member of the Tory party, or antidisestablishmentarian. She wrote what she wrote and now it belongs to us.

Reynolds says this objection doesn't have anything to do with his Christian views of homosexuality:

Lest one think that I say this only because homosexuality bothers me, then let me compare it to another situation. Suppose that Rowling now claimed that Dumbledore and Minerva McGonagall had a passionate relationship. Since there is no reason in the text to know this is true, or to find it relevant to the story arc as we have it, Rowling’s opinions of the headmaster’s heterosexual affairs matter very little in terms of understanding the books as they are. There is as much evidence of this (after all) as of Dumbledore’s homosexuality.

Likewise, John Cloud at Time isn't at all happy with this revelation. To him, a gay man, the fact that Rowling failed to make Dumbledore's sexual orientation sufficiently clear in the book means that he is not a sufficiently acceptable role model:

When J.K. Rowling announced at Carnegie Hall that Albus Dumbdledore—her Aslan, her Gandalf, her Yoda—was gay, the crowd apparently sat in silence for a few seconds and then burst into wild applause. I'm still sitting in silence. Dumbledore himself never saw fit to come out of the closet before dying in book six. And I feel a bit like I did when we learned too much about Mark Foley and Larry Craig: You are not quite the role model I'd hoped for as a gay man.

. . .

Why couldn't he tell us himself? The Potter books add up to more than 800,000 words before Dumbledore dies in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and yet Rowling couldn't spare two of those words—"I'm gay"—to help define a central character's emotional identity? We can only conclude that Dumbledore saw his homosexuality as shameful and inappropriate to mention among his colleagues and students. His silence suggests a lack of personal integrity that is completely out of character.

Rebecca Traister at Salon laments that this Dumbledore "revelation" by the author after the books have been completed is just one more sign of how Rowling has become too "chatty" about her book's characters. Traister says she's leaving nuance behind and eliminating any room for readers to imagine for themselves the backstory (and future developments).

Rowling herself says that she "outed" Dumbledore because no one was catching all the hints about his sexuality in the books. This is frustrating. She wrote about Dumbledore's past friendship with the man who became his nemesis--a friendship so deep that it blinded him to his friend's evil.

Um, that's the hint? The sexual orientation of Dumbledore was so, well, not obvious, that the LA Times printed a tongue-in-cheek report of the "clues" we all should have seen, including "Albus Dumbledore" being an anagram of "Male bods rule, bud!"

Seriously, it's disturbing for anyone to think that descriptions of a really intense same-sex friendship serve as sufficient descriptions of homosexuality. It's hard enough for guys to build friendships as it is in our culture: is everyone now to assume that every really deep friendship is evidence of gay attraction?

Sigh.