"The news should help to clear up lots of rumours about Dumbledore’s mysterious past once and for all."

Not to mention inspiring loads of new fanfic.

Posted October 20, 2007 8:26 AM by Debbie

Unless I'm very much mistaken, fanfic will have beaten her to it by several months.

(Ms. Rowling, if you're reading this: Please don't tell us about Aberforth and the goat. I really don't want to know.)

Posted October 20, 2007 8:45 AM by Lila

Several other answers at the same event are transcribed at The Leaky Cauldron, including the answer she gives an eight-year-old (!) who asks about Aberforth's goat charm.

Posted October 20, 2007 9:11 AM by Chris Ashley

Rowling is clearly taking the piss from an audience that takes these books very seriously.

Did I use that colloquialism correctly?

Posted October 20, 2007 9:13 AM by Josh Jasper

Lila @2, indeed I recall comments about the "beautiful Nazi boyfriend" the weekend book 7 was released. I'd be very surprised if nobody had written it yet, although this may spark more interest.

On the subject of things I *don't* want JKR to explain, Hadrid's parents are at the top of the list.

Posted October 20, 2007 9:27 AM by Spiegel

Damn, now there's a bar bet I really should have made.

Posted October 20, 2007 9:42 AM by Tracey S. Rosenberg

Josh Jasper #4: I'd replace the "from" with a "with". Or perhaps you weren't asking a serious question -- not always easy to tell on the internet.

I wonder if Grindelwald was gay too?

Posted October 20, 2007 9:44 AM by Madeline Kelly

Josh Jasper #4: "taking the piss out of an audience", I'd say.

Posted October 20, 2007 9:49 AM by maybecca

#5: there's something wrong about being attracted to tall women? :-)

Posted October 20, 2007 9:54 AM by Jon Meltzer

The nice thing about this is it really helps the understanding of that period in Dumbledore's history, and makes his VERY FIRST extended mention (his Chocolate Frog card) bittersweet (ba-dump-bump).

Posted October 20, 2007 10:15 AM by BSD

VERY clever PR on her part. She waited until the book has been out long enough that everyone's bought it and conservative parents/bullying kid crowds won't have been scared off by 'teh ghey', but now makes the announcement while she's still firmly in the spotlight, so that everyone, now having read all the books, will be saying "Wow, dude! Dumbledore!"

I am always thrilled about the sociocultural aspects of these books and loved the politics in the last couple, even if I was dissatisfied with certain characters' treatment.

Posted October 20, 2007 10:29 AM by A.J. Luxton

Woo-hoo! He really is a poofter!

I'd been seeing Dumbledore fanfic for years, but it wasn't until book 7 that I saw any I would actually want to read. If you get my meaning.

Posted October 20, 2007 10:38 AM by cap

I still think Lupin was in love with Sirius. Tonks always struck me as being too self-assured to have the sort of needy relationship she did with Lupin in the last two books

Posted October 20, 2007 10:39 AM by Sajia Kabir

Fanfic was mentioned in the AP article in the SMH:

Dumbledore's love, she observed, was his "great tragedy".

"Oh, my God," Rowling concluded with a laugh, "the fan fiction."

Potter readers on fan sites and elsewhere on the internet have speculated on the sexuality of Dumbledore, noting that he has no close relationship with women and a mysterious, troubled past. And explicit scenes with Dumbledore already have appeared in fan fiction.

Posted October 20, 2007 10:49 AM by mcz

OMG!!! And he's in charge of a school full of children!! Gotta burn them books!!!

Actually, what we were told about the relationship between the characters, and the lack of any mention of any close emotional relationship for Dumbledore afterwards, did have me wondering, a little bit, if that was being hinted at.

Posted October 20, 2007 10:55 AM by Joel Polowin

Coming soon.. Crossover slash fiction between Dumbledore and Pirates of the Caribbean's Barbossa...

Posted October 20, 2007 11:00 AM by Serge

Is it still "slash" if the characters are known to be gay?

Posted October 20, 2007 11:08 AM by Jon Meltzer

Re: #10: I thought of the Chocolate Frog card too, BSD.

Posted October 20, 2007 11:11 AM by G. Jules

I remember when "slash" meant non-canon pairings, straight or gay.

I think there's still an active argument over whether it means 'all gay pairings, canon or non-canon' now or just 'all non-canon gay pairings.'

Posted October 20, 2007 11:12 AM by A.J. Luxton

Jon Meltzer @ 17... True, as was pointed out in the fanfic thread. But we don't know about Barbossa's proclivities. No matter what, I'd surprised that there is no crossover of any kind between Potter and Pirates.

Posted October 20, 2007 11:28 AM by Serge

I remember when "slash" meant non-canon pairings, straight or gay.

When was that? It has always been my understanding that the term 'slash' meant same-sex pairings, back to K/S. Granted that opposite-sex pairings have also been indicated by the '/' character for some time, which confuses the matter.

Personally, I sort of prefer for 'slash' to refer only to same-sex pairings with characters who aren't canonically gay, but that's just because of when I started slashing (about 10-11 years ago). There still were very few canonically gay or bi characters, and writers and producers would sometimes go to great lengths to establish their characters' "straight cred", particularly the men. (Not that this has changed so much in some cases.) Open same-sex romantic relationships, at least for main characters, were precluded by the text, so slash was an exercise in ferreting out subtext. That became a central part of the slash experience *to me*. Same-sex pairings with canonically gay or bi characters are great, but they just don't have the same feel.

Anyway, I think I'm on the losing side of that argument, and 'slash' is coming to refer to any same-sex pairing.

Posted October 20, 2007 11:47 AM by Jen Roth

I remember Roz Kaveney telling me at the time the book appeared that she read the Grindelward/Dumbledore relationship that way and that she figured Rowling had been careful to write it the way she had to forestall the howls of outrage from the usual far-right/religious reich cretins. Looks like Roz was right.

Posted October 20, 2007 12:21 PM by Rob Hansen

Actually, coming out of the *broom* closet usually refers to someone telling people they are a Witch or Pagan or some related practice. Dumbledore has been out of the broom closet since the beginning. He has finally been outed from the GLBT closet. (Is it outing when an author reveals a character to be gay?)

Posted October 20, 2007 12:24 PM by Magenta Griffith

When I was an undergrad, I went to see a poet named Dana Gioia read. He related a story about driving along a road and hearing a song, and how it inspired a poem he then performed. When it came time for the Q&A, I asked him what song it was.

He replied: "What song do you want it to be?"

I've since thought of that often. That there's something to be said for the story being the story and the book being the book. For knowing that there are probably ten other drafts of the book I'm reading, all with other information than I've got, but this is the one that's the story. For knowing that authors have to know tons of backstory to understand the story itself but never need write the backstory down.

The past few days, I've just wished Rowling would stop talking. She wrote seven books, all of which I read and enjoyed like I've enjoyed few other books over the course of my life. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is among the most satisfying books I've ever read.

It's not that I care that Dumbledore is gay, nor that Harry Potter is a Christian allegory (as I read she said the other day).

It's just that I don't care, nor believe that knowing so contributes a single iota to enjoying the story she told. I'm fully confident in Rowling's abilities as a storyteller that if such information were in any way pertinent to the story she told (indeed, if any other information were pertinent to that story), she'd have put it in.

I suppose I just wished that, when asked such questions, she'd look at the asker and say, in her wonderful brogue, "If I thought that were relevant, I would've put it in. Perhaps one day I'll write another to explore it."

(please, God, tell me that The Harry Potter Encyclopedia I heard she was considering won't contain an entry on "Christian allegory")

Neil Gaiman's really good at non-answering questions. My favorite was the moment at one Q&A when someone asked, via a small note card, whether he had any religious beliefs.

He said, simply, "Yes."

And then moved right on.

Posted October 20, 2007 12:32 PM by Will Entrekin

#9 It's just unnatural, man. Not like the beautiful Draco/Giant Squid love.

#21 Whereas I started reading slash (and indeed fanfic) in the Vampire Chronicles, so not being canon was never a part of the definition. :)

My impression from other discussions is that some people say that slash meant (in its origins) or should be non-canon pairings (now that there are gay characters in canon), but that's not how the majority saw it back then or now. I don't know if there's any hard evidence, though. Possibly a case of everyone assuming that everyone else was using the same definition?

Posted October 20, 2007 12:42 PM by Spiegel

I didn't think Lupin was crushing on Sirius, but more than once I thought Sirius' reaction to things would make a lot more sense if he were in love with James Potter.

It'd also add some nice symmetry to his relationship with Snape.

Posted October 20, 2007 12:51 PM by julia

25: Draco/Giant Squid

eh,what?

Posted October 20, 2007 12:58 PM by Jon Meltzer

I also object to the notion that Rowling is "the only one who would know for sure". The text is the text.

Now, I haven't read Book 7 yet. Maybe there are some implications in there. And it's true that there's nothing in the other six about Dumbledore ever having had a wife or girlfriend. So it's plausible that he's gay.

But non-textual assertions are ultimately just non-textual assertions, even if they come from the author. I remember Joss Whedon being notorious for saying non-textual things about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and then later contradicting them in the actual show.

Posted October 20, 2007 1:00 PM by Avram

I also object to the notion that Rowling is "the only one who would know for sure". The text is the text.

Then we differ. The view that "the author is just another reader" is one that leads down the path to subtext hunting and similar insanity.

Only the author knows, and if the author's forgotten then no one knows, or ever could know.

Posted October 20, 2007 1:03 PM by James D. Macdonald

yes, very clever of her to mention the "christian allegory" and the homosexuality now. imagine if she had done it two or three years ago. and for some people those things will cancel each other out.

personally, i loved her cleavage shot!

Posted October 20, 2007 1:05 PM by sdn

Favourite comment that I've seen so far:

"It shows that there's no limit to what gay and lesbian people can do, even being a wizard headmaster"

Er...

Posted October 20, 2007 1:18 PM by Sylvia

Does it strike anyone else as a bit of the easy way out, though? I mean, within the text, there are hints, but never any outright contradiction to total heteronormativity. Everyone who officially pairs off does so with opposite-sex partners. There's not even a throwaway reference to some random pair of witches or wizards, accepted or not.

Tossing the "Dumbledore's gay!" information to us at this point seems to me trying to have it both ways - the ones who want to claim it doesn't count because it's not in the books can be happy with the total heterosexuality within the books, and those of us who see the slash get a little bit of "official" backing.

Posted October 20, 2007 1:28 PM by JCarson

After this first twinge of "Hey! That's neat!" faded, I realized that I agree with wokeitten:

"I'm irritated with JK Rowling's recent revelation. Not because Dumbledore is gay; I really like to see these kinds of issues addressed in literature for kids. And that's why I'm pissy. If you wanted to make Dumbledore a revolutionary character, Rowling, why didn't you take your metaphorical balls in your hand and actually reveal him as being a homosexual in the book? Kids listen to what you say and accept your morals. Why have you wasted that?"

Posted October 20, 2007 1:43 PM by Shawn Struck

JCarson: It strikes me that way, as well.

Avram: Buffy is the example I always use when I argue that the viewer is not obliged to take everything the writer says extratextually as canon. At the end of Season 6, when Fcvxr tbrf gb gur qrzba naq fnlf, "Znxr zr gur jnl V jnf" (be jungrire, vg'f orra n ybat gvzr fvapr V jngpurq vg), gurer ner ng yrnfg gjb jnlf bs vagrecergvat jung unccrarq arkg:

* Ur zrnag ur jnagrq uvf fbhy onpx, naq tbg jung ur jnagrq.
* Ur zrnag ur jnagrq gb or gur jnl ur jnf orsber ur tbg gur puvc, naq gur qrzba chyyrq n snfg bar ba uvz.

Gurfr ner ng yrnfg rdhnyyl cynhfvoyr va gur grkg, naq V yrnarq gbjneq gur ynggre vagrecergngvba. Gurer jnf pregnvayl ab jnl gb qrsvavgviryl qrpvqr orgjrra gurz. Gura Wbff fnvq va na vagreivrj gung bs pbhefr, Fcvxr zrnag gung ur jnagrq uvf fbhy onpx. V sryg gung gung jnf purngvat, va n jnl; rvgure ur'q zrnag gb pbairl gung Fcvxr jnagrq uvf fbhy onpx naq snvyrq gb qb fb pyrneyl, be ur jnf qryvorengryl nzovthbhf. Either way, he'd already *had* his chance. So to me, that's not canon -- creators don't get "do-overs".

Posted October 20, 2007 1:55 PM by Jen Roth

#31: O.o That claim isn't substantiated by any of the books that *I* read....

I agree with the "easy way out" crowd. I am reminded of a scene in the Simpsons in which a naturalist looked down on a rhino stampede and smugly said "I *told* 'em that this would happen! No, wait, I didn't. I *meant* to tell 'em!"

It would have been moving to include in the story that destroying Grindlewald affected Dumbledore's heart as much as his sense of right. Let's go farther and assert that Nicolas Flamel was also a lover and Dumbledore took a further hit in causing his death by taking the Philosopher's Stone away from him. My gosh, you've got so much fuel for some really powerful character development there.

This isn't that, this is just outing a dead man. This is reading a fortune cookie and adding the words "in bed" at the end.

And I call dibs on the revelation that Snape is Jewish.

Posted October 20, 2007 2:07 PM by Matthew Daly

#32 and the "easy way out"

I don't blame her for not including it in the book. Not because it would be "wrong" to in a moral sense, but because it would be extraneous; the book already had enough subplots going in it, and I'm not sure Dumbledore in love would have added anything. (The book is, after all, already bloody long enough.)

To whit: Dumbledore needed blacking down, not redemption through love. It was Snape's redemption that needed to be shown, because his character was on the way up.

Much as was revealed about Dumbledore and Snape, the books were always about Harry and his imperfect perceptions of the world.

There are plenty of other interesting subplots that could have been added but weren't---for instance, Dean's missing father would have added quite a bit of poignancy for a minor character. But his story was not as important as Neville's arc, which reflected Harry's, and so Dean remained in the minor cast in the book text.

When you write, you can never include everything in a book. You must always, always, always pare the subplots down until they all cooperate towards some main theme you want to support. It's difficult and it leaves a lot of good stuff out, but such is writing---fiction or non-fiction.

When an author has spent ages constructing their world, I think it would be obvious and respectful to think that any knowledge about the world is theirs. She spent far more than a decade steeped in its history, after all. It is a bit like saying that Tolkien's notes are meaningless until things like Children of Hurin are published after his death.

The sojourn of the author in their world should never be underestimated. After all, some of the undercurrents stir the surface, even if the deep dive tour is never provided.

Posted October 20, 2007 2:32 PM by A.J.

The view that "the author is just another reader" is one that leads down the path to subtext hunting and similar insanity.

Oh, horrors! Creative and intelligent reading! We can't have that.

Now that I've thought about it some more, Rowling's claim about Dumbledore seems almost like a literary practical joke. First, the entire wizarding world in the Potter books reads like a metaphor for homosexuality. You've got an entire culture hiding itself and its activities from the outside world. Look at how the Dursleys treat Harry, as if they're hoping to beat the weirdness out of him and turn him normal, or at least scare him into pretending to be normal. At the start of the series, Harry's even literally living in a closet.

And on top of this, the series takes place at an English boarding school. Need I say more about that?

Dumbledore is supposed to be the greatest wizard alive. If wizards are queer, that makes him the queerest of the queer, metaphorically. Yet no direct statement is made in the text about Dumbledore's literal, non-metaphoric, sexuality. As Nick Mamatas points out, the common literary practice of "queering" a text generally involves ignoring authorial extra-textual claims about the story and reading presumptively straight characters as gay. In Dumbledore's case, it's people who want to read the character as straight who are going to have to try to hunt through the text for evidence to refute the author's claim.

Posted October 20, 2007 2:34 PM by Avram

On a tangent to the topic, I was watching HBO's "Tell Me You Love Me" last night. This show is specifically about the evolution of and stresses on long-term committments, presented by three married couples at different stages of the relationship, and one unmarried, but entangled, pair. All are heterosexual. After each episode, several interviews with couples who have just watched this episode are shown. Last night, the first interview couple discussed the 30-something couple in the show who are seriously stressed as they try to conceive a child, in the context of their own interest in having children. No special point was made about the fact that the interviewed couple was gay. It was so smoothly done that it looked completely natural, though, given the nature of Hollywood, I am sure several producers writhed in agony for some time before agreeing to it.

Maybe I haven't been watching closely, but this feels like a milestone (however carefully contrived it may have been) in the public presentation of sexual relationships in the US. Shame that it's take so long, but at least a sign of some sort of progress in the normalizing of the cultural attitude towards sex in this country.

Posted October 20, 2007 2:36 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

#37 - the reverse queering amuses me in this case, if nothing else. :)

(sorry about post #36... I'm not the usual A.J. who posts here...)

Posted October 20, 2007 2:53 PM by A. Jericho

I think that if Rowling had put anything about Dumbledore being gay explicitly in the book, no matter how unemphasized it was, that point would have been blown up into a major controversy. And that wasn't the story she wanted to be the focus of attention.

In some ways, yes, it would have been nice if she'd been open about it all along. But I think there's still something to be said for "That character you loved so much? Guess what, he was gay. See, not so scary, is it? (Oh, and those two nice young men, Tom and Carl, who live in that big house on Rose with the tall poplar hedge? Guess what?)

It implies some interesting things about the wizarding world that in all of the nasty things said about Dumbledore by his detractors, including the stuff about his relationship with Grindlewald, there's no hint of comment about his orientation.

Posted October 20, 2007 3:11 PM by Joel Polowin

I have no doubt Rowling knew he was gay. I simply take Umbridge (ha!) with her revealing it outside the books. If it was part of the story, put it in. If it wasn't, shouldn't matter.

Tolkien's notes aren't meaningless; I'm sure they helped him write his book. Whether or not they need to be shared is another story entirely.

Most writers have stacks of notes/materials/etc. (sometimes those stacks are mental) that never make it into the book. Stacks that helped the writers figure out how to tell the story but had nothing to do with the actual story to be told except in very peripheral ways.

Doesn't mean that Dumbledore's sexuality couldn't have been explored in another book. Perhaps a revelation in a prequel.

Posted October 20, 2007 3:11 PM by Will Entrekin

Joel @40: It implies some interesting things about the wizarding world that in all of the nasty things said about Dumbledore by his detractors, including the stuff about his relationship with Grindlewald, there's no hint of comment about his orientation.

Well, not quite. There were some nasty mutterings in some circles about what Dumbledore's interest in Harry really was. Jumping to the conclusion that "gay man mentoring a young boy = pedophile" seems the very model of anti-gay bigotry.

Posted October 20, 2007 3:18 PM by Jen Roth

@ #19

The fanfic trend right now looks like it's a "/" or one of those "smush" names if the pairing is romantic/sexual (regardless of orientation), and "&" or a comma if it's a general story featuring those characters (non-romantic/sexual relationship).

Now the words are different matter all together. "Slash" is same-sex pairings, "het" is opposite-sex pairings, and "gen" mean at least the leads aren't paired off, but most writers usually throw in "mentions of X/Y" if some other romantic relationship is referenced. There's also "pre-slash", which means there's subtext if you chose to read into it. I don't know if there's an equivalent "pre-het" term; if it exists, I haven't seen it.

...And I'm going to stop there.

Posted October 20, 2007 3:35 PM by ML

Doesn't it seem reasonable that an author should have the final say on their own relationship to the text and its contents? Some feel that they've set out a universe and established a framework of characters which establishes a canon, and others are free to play there, as long as they don't try to change the courses of the rivers or move the planets around. To others, each book is sui generis, and anything someone else says about it or does with it has nothing to do with what the author did or intended. And some put so much into what they write that they abhore the idea of someone else using any part of it in a different way. There's no way to say which of these relationships is "better" or "correct", they all involve the way a person feels about the result of their work. The way other people may feel about that work is not relevant to the author's feelings.

OTOH, the author's feelings are not an objective fact. Any thoughts and feelings are subject to change, re-evaluation, and even rejection over time. Much of this discussion was gone over in great detail on the ML thread about Ray Bradbury's attitude towards "Fahrenheit 451".

My conclusion, if I have one, is that there's no reason why J. K. Rowling can't speak out about some point of her work that she didn't expand on in the book as much as she might now like. And while important points probably "should" be in the work, there are often forces external to the work that mitigate against it. In this case, the need for fighting a major PR war with Christian fundamentalists over just the existence of a gay character probably made the inclusion of that particular bit of character exposition considerably less desirable. Maybe politics and religious intolerance "shouldn't" have anything to do with art and writing, but it does, no denying.

Posted October 20, 2007 3:42 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Jen Roth @ 42: There were some nasty mutterings in some circles about what Dumbledore's interest in Harry really was.

I don't remember any of that in the books. Something by Rita Skeeter?

Posted October 20, 2007 3:48 PM by Joel Polowin

#41: She revealed it because somebody asked her in a session which was full of questions about extratextual matters. From your point of view, is she wrong to do these Q&A sessions at all? Or should she have declined to share her answer to that question? If so, what gives it special status?

I've long been frustrated by how socially conservative the wizarding world seemed. Once people leave school, everyone who's in a romantic relationship is either married or planning to get married. I can't even think of anyone who has remarried after being widowed, and in the first Voldemort war you'd think there would be a lot of widowing going on. Nobody has children out of wedlock, not even Merope Gaunt/Riddle. Nobody is cohabiting with a lover. Nobody has extramarital affairs. Nobody gets divorced. And this is in modern Britain where such things are commonplace. I know it probably wouldn't have been relevant to the story, nor is she Jacqueline Wilson, but she could have dropped a few different things into the mix just for verisimilitude. This disclosure about Dumbledore redresses the situation a little.

Posted October 20, 2007 3:52 PM by Eleanor

Jon @27: Sorry, I thought you knew about HP's crazy pairings.

Jen @34:
Either way, he'd already *had* his chance. So to me, that's not canon -- creators don't get "do-overs".

But if there *are* two ways of reading that scene, how can it be not canon? Mind you, I'm not saying that the first option is more canon than the other. I mean that if nobody could have possibly gotten Joss's interpretation or if he was talking about a scene that was cut in the editing (like, say, Methos tossing Kronos down a well in Highlander), then I'd agree that it isn't canon, regardless of what he said.

Posted October 20, 2007 4:07 PM by Spiegel

Oh, no, she's not wrong. I just wish she'd chosen to answer the questions by not doing so, like the two authors I mentioned upthread generally do, and maybe, I don't know, putting it in another book where it has something to do with the story. I'd be happier going by the books/story. I don't care that Dumbledore is gay anymore than I care that Neville married Hannah Abbot: makes no difference to Harry's story. Not to me, anyway.

If she danced around it in the books, I don't see why she couldn't dance around it at the Q&A.

I'm fairly certain I've read several authors muse about the feeling that, after they've published their books, the stories aren't solely theirs anymore.

To me, the revelation is akin to a spoiler. Which is why all the headlines irritate me. Just because it's not in the book doesn't mean that revealing Dumbledore is gay or Neville marries Hannah is less a spoiler than revealing the fate of Harry (which, you'll notice, I'm not actually stating, for the people in this thread who haven't read Deathly Hallows). Because I respect readers' right to experience the books how they wish.

The way to fight Christian fundamentalists is not to cow to their ideals.

Posted October 20, 2007 4:11 PM by Will Entrekin

Eleanor #46: I've long been frustrated by how socially conservative the wizarding world seemed.

I wasn't so much frustrated by that is intrigued, and disappointed that there wasn't more tensions between old-fashioned wizard-culture conservatism and modern liberalism. All we got was the horrible SPEW sub-plot with Hermione and the house elfs.

Nobody has children out of wedlock, not even Merope Gaunt/Riddle.

Could be that anti-conception magic is very common, easy, and effective. You might still get some teen pregnancy, since pre-grads aren't allowed to cast spells outside of schools, and muggle-borns won't have parents who can do it for them.

Or maybe there's anti-sex magic. I can see it now -- a couple of sixth-years sneak off to a quiet corner of the castle, strip off their ropes, and just as they're getting past the heavy petting stage, the door slams open. It's McGonagall, wand drawn. "Coitus Interruptus!" she shouts....

Posted October 20, 2007 4:31 PM by Avram

#48:If she danced around it in the books, I don't see why she couldn't dance around it at the Q&A.

I don't think she danced around it in the books. Or, at least, I don't recall anyone in the books explicitly asking about Dumbledore's love life. Given the point of view used in the books, I'm not even sure how Rowling could have plausibly brought up Dumbledore's sexual orientation. Dumbledore was secretive about everything. When we finally do learn something about him, it's always from some source clearly tagged as non-authoritative in some way so we can't trust it completely.

What I don't understand is why the "Oh, she should have just been coy" response is coming now. JK Rowling has been dropping little bits of info like this ever since the release of book 7. So why didn't this response come when she revealed that Harry becomes the head of the Aurors, for example?

Posted October 20, 2007 4:32 PM by John Chu

"Fb jul qvqa'g guvf erfcbafr pbzr jura fur erirnyrq gung Uneel orpbzrf gur urnq bs gur Nhebef, sbe rknzcyr?"

Npghnyyl, V unq gur fnzr erfcbafr gura.

Naq orfvqrf gung, vg'f n cerggl znwbe fcbvyre, vfa'g vg? V zrna, abgvat gung Uneel orpbzrf gur urnq bs gur Nhebef vaqvpngrf dhvgr vapbagebiregvoyl ur fheivirf Qrnguyl Unyybjf, ab?

(rot13ed)

Posted October 20, 2007 4:43 PM by Will Entrekin

Since no one else has mentioned it, I wanted to thank Jim Macdonald for the title of this post. It has many resonances that I like, not least the fact that it's based on the title of a story by a writer who was not afraid to have gay and bi characters in his stories 30 years ago, whose orientation was completely irrelevant to the story, just a part of their characters.

Posted October 20, 2007 4:58 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Will Entrekin @ 48: The way to fight Christian fundamentalists is not to cow to their ideals.

It's possible that fighting Christian fundamentalists is not currently one of JKR's priorities.

Re: 51, some non-encrypted indication of what the encrypted stuff is about would be helpful in deciding whether or not one should decrypt it. :-) ("Spoilers for Deathly Hallows", frex.)

Posted October 20, 2007 5:02 PM by Joel Polowin

Yeah, it's spoilers re: Deathly Hallows, so I encrypted it, like #50 should've done. In fact, I couldn't decide whether the rest of this post was spoilers, either, so I erred on the side of safety. It mentions the Rowling revelation I howled most over (which wasn't Dumbledore, actually).

Nyfb, V'q yvxr gb abgr gung jung V guvax zbfg obguref zr nobhg jung Ebjyvat'f orra "erirnyvat" yngryl vf gur "Puevfgvna nyyrtbel" fuvgr, juvpu, gb zr, vfa'g nyy gbtrgure Puevfgvna (orpnhfr nalbar jub xabjf gubfr fgbevrf xabj gurl rkvfgrq ybat orsber Wrfhf rire tbg uvf oybbql zvggf ba 'rz). N sevraq bs zvar bapr gbyq zr gung P.F. Yrjvf ehvarq uvf Puebavpyrf bs Aneavn sbe ure jura ur gnyxrq nobhg gur Puevfgvna nyyrtbevpny ryrzragf, orpnhfr vg erqhprf gur inyhr bs gur fgbel, nf vg znxrf vg zreryl gur irffry ol juvpu gur nhgubef qrpvqrq gb qryvire gurve zrffntr, engure guna ivpr-irefn.

Posted October 20, 2007 5:19 PM by Will Entrekin

Will Entrekin #54:
Xabjvat gung gur nyyrtbel jnf gurer ghearq zr bss bs Aneavn orsber V ernq vg (jryy, xrcg zr sebz obgurevat gb trg bire zl yvggyr-xvq ungerq bs jung unccrarq gb Nfyna, naljnl). V'z tynq gur fhccbfrq UC nyyrtbel guvat qvqa'g pbzr bhg orsber abj, be V jbhyqa'g unir cnvq nggragvba gb gur obbxf. Nf vg vf, V'z tbvat gb or vtabevat gur cbffvovygl, uneq.

(Ha! This one is weird, because I'm saying I wouldn't have wanted to know one of the things Rowling is now saying if I hadn't read the books, but I'm not spoiling the books any more than Rowling already has.)

Posted October 20, 2007 6:10 PM by R.M. Koske

Joel @45: I don't remember specifically. It was in the papers, so yeah, I assume it was Rita Skeeter either starting or passing along a rumor.

Spiegel @47: The way I see it, neither possibility is canon; canon is simply ambiguous on that point. (Unless of course it was addressed directly during S7, which I haven't seen in its entirety.)

Posted October 20, 2007 6:17 PM by Jen Roth

#51:I didn't intend to talking about you specifically. I haven't heard anyone say that she shouldn't answer questions about her books until now. But it's good to know that you took a stand about JK Rowling even at the point of her first revelation, and I merely didn't hear it.

As for your rot-13ed question, the answer is no. The head of the Aurors could be a picture on the wall, someone along the lines of Nearly Headless Nick, or a living flesh and blood wizard or witch. Any conclusion anyone might draw from his or her job is mere speculation.

Bs pbhefr, crbcyr jvyy qrevir rkgen vasbezngvba sebz lbh univat rapbqrq gur grkg naq erfcbafr.

V guvax vg bayl ybbxf yvxr n fcbvyre jura fbzrbar cbvagf gb vg naq gntf vg guhf.

Posted October 20, 2007 6:28 PM by John Chu

Jen Roth@34, Spiegel@47

The key point is that while (if one is limited to only things that aired before the scene in question) there are two possible ways of interpreting the scene in question, it was clearly indicated in later episodes of both Buffy and Angel which interpretation was correct. And the correct interpretation was the one consistent with Joss's statements.

Posted October 20, 2007 6:37 PM by Michael I

Responding to Will's question in #51:

Vg'f n xvq'f obbx - vg arire va n zvyyvba lrnef bppheerq gb zr gung Uneel zvtug qvr. Fcbvyvat zr gb gur snpg gung ur qbrfa'g vfa'g ernyyl cbffvoyr haqre gubfr pvephzfgnaprf.

Posted October 20, 2007 6:41 PM by R.M. Koske

As to whether this should have been in the books, do kids in school really wonder about the sexual orientation of their teachers? I sure didn't. I might have fantasized about my French II teacher since she was a gorgeous 25-year-old blonde, but I didn't worry about whether she was gay or straight.

'Course, this was 1964, too. Presumably neither I nor too many of my fellow-students in Northern Virginia knew too much about homosexuality.

Posted October 20, 2007 6:48 PM by Linkmeister

I caught this around 1 a.m or so this morning. It torqued me off and I guess I'm still quite agitated by it.
It's PR. Shameless PR IMHO.
If you're going to write a gay lead character, then write a gay lead character. Make it GREAT gay lead character and give the GBLT-Team something to celebrate.
Don't come out in some post-series forum and mention it as a "by the way" seeking additional sales from controversy.
If it wasn't intrinsically important enough to plot and character development while the series was unfolding why is it important enough to mention now? A: Sales.

Posted October 20, 2007 6:53 PM by JKRichard

Matthew Daly@35: And I call dibs on the revelation that Snape is Jewish.

Sorry, but fandom's been speculating about Jewish!Snape for years. Back in 2002, when I ran the Hogwarts Online RPG, Snape being Jewish was an important part of my backstory for him.

I don't mind that she didn't tell us Dumbledore was gay for two reasons:

1. The series is from Harry's POV. There would be no reason for him to think about DD's sexuality at all, so no reason for it to come up.

2. Everything after PoA was, IMO, at least a hundred pages too long. DD's sexuality would have been yet another extraneous subplot.

Posted October 20, 2007 7:17 PM by Darkrose

I don't think sales is the driving force here. I don't think controversy is either. I think it was simply an author answering a question about a character in a finished series, a question that she wasn't willing to answer before the books were done and that didn't figure into the plot line in a way that made it germane to put into the books themselves. It's the sort of thing that writers do all the time, and the only reason it's news is because of the scale of Rowling's success.

Posted October 20, 2007 7:18 PM by Kelly McCullough

Linkmeister @ 60

Even then, even then. In 1963 and 1964, my last 2 years of high school, one of the English teachers, who was also my coach on the fencing team*, was gay, in a long-term live-in relationship, and not in the closet. It wasn't even a big item of gossip.

* Private school, the only real alternative for someone who planned to go to a good college, living in a primarily agricultural area.

Posted October 20, 2007 7:22 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Bruce Cohen @ 64: Your high school may have been slightly unusual. My experience eavesdropping from the other side of the desk is that students will speculate endlessly about their teachers' sex lives . . . but in the end don't really believe that their teachers have lives outside of the classroom. I know I didn't, as a high school student. (Believe that my teachers had private lives, I mean. I knew they all left the building at the end of the day, but I wasn't entirely sure where they went--and I didn't especially care, either, though that may have been my own lack of curiosity speaking.)

One thing that many high school students flatly don't believe is that their teachers weren't always "old" (and may not even be that "old" now). I base this understanding on the discovery that most of my students during my first year of teaching were absolutely convinced that I was in my forties. The few who held out for a "younger" age thought I was maybe in my late thirties.

I was in my early twenties. For me, one of the more enjoyable bits if Deathly Hallows was when Harry & Co. were forced to face the idea of a Dumbledore who was the same age they were--that, I suspect, might actually have been a more difficult (and, in context, more relevant) concept than his sexual orientation.

Posted October 20, 2007 7:54 PM by Mary Frances

What's all this about Christian allegory?

I've read an article about how Rowling's Christian faith informed her writing of the books, but that's not allegory.

Posted October 20, 2007 8:03 PM by Avram

Mary Frances @ 65

Yes, my high school was a little unusual*, but I suspect the reason that a gay teacher wasn't a big target of gossip was because the senior math teacher** was in the process of a messy divorce from another teacher at the school, involving allegations of him sleeping with a (female) student. Much juicer than some old gay guy who couldn't even be bothered to flounce around like a real queen, and was a good person to boot.†

Oh, yes, and our student body was atypical. I was a day student; we were mostly upper-middle class‡ kids living in a semi-rural area to get away from the noise and busyness of the city††. The boarding students, on the other hand, were often kids who weren't academic enough to get into one of the well-known prep schools‡‡ or who got into a lot of trouble and often bounced from school to school. The children of lesser celebrities or of messy upper-class divorces. They had lots of their own gossip to monger.

Funny thing: thinking back on it, I think I socialized with the teachers as much as I socialized with the other students; most of the friends I had who were my age lived in Philadelphia or New York. I'd go to visit them most weekends.

* We had an awful football team. I say that even though two of the players were at least sort of friends of mine.
** That is, the math teacher with the most seniority, who would have run the math department if there'd been one.
† Between the divorce and a serious ulcer, the math teacher was most emphatically not a nice guy. I think one of the hobbies he put in his CV was "Bites off the heads of students for fun". This was in the days before we called anyone outside the carnival a geek.
‡ In my family's case, just recently.
†† Frex, one student in my graduating class, who was a neighbor of mine, was French; his father had retired from Paris after making a name and a fortune for himself designing jet airliners, and preferred rural Pennsylvania to the southern Loire valley for reasons I never understood.
‡‡ The ones who always beat us at football.

Posted October 20, 2007 8:26 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Whatever you can say about Rowling as a writer, she's a damned GENIUS at marketing.

Just as the hoohah and the hullaballoo about The End Of Potter is dying down after that frantic summer that we had - here she comes, slyly lobbing another little explosive device into the mix.

I mean, this gives the Christian right MORE to kvetch and whine and complain about, as if they didn't have enough before with all the "oooooh look WITCHES" fingerpointing that was going on, and ensures that controversy and lively interest continues to surround the Potter franchise.

And lively interest sells books.

There you have it. Marketing coup.

I have no strong feelings about Dumbledore's gayness one way or another - I haven't read HP past book 3, anyway, so I have no clue what anyone is talking about half the time with all these "past relationships". But good GOD, ROwling's good.

Posted October 20, 2007 8:31 PM by Alma Alexander

There's a problem with the argument that Dumbledore didn't need to be openly gay in the books because Harry would neither know nor care about his sexuality.

It's true that Harry is spectacularly uninterested in other people's love lives. Despite that, however, he manages to be aware of the opposite-sex spouses, partners, dates, crushes, and pin-up pictures of probably a hundred people over the course of the books. He even knows that Aberforth did something he shouldn't have with goats. He's oblivious, but he's not *that* oblivious. If there are no open same-sex relationships in the books, I don't think you can blame Harry's POV.

Posted October 20, 2007 9:19 PM by Jen Roth

Snape Jewish! The person I always wondered about was Anthony Goldstein, whose name popped up in lists of young wizards whenever Rowling felt like showing that they were a diverse lot. He was such a cipher, living in name alone; I am curious whether any Jewish mysticism would have entered into his wizarding.

Posted October 20, 2007 9:37 PM by Jonathan Cohen

I base this understanding on the discovery that most of my students during my first year of teaching were absolutely convinced that I was in my forties. The few who held out for a "younger" age thought I was maybe in my late thirties.

This reminds me of a Yale professor of Ancient Greek whom I had when I was 19. He was probably in his first or second year of teaching, and, going by LOC information on the copyright page of his books (which were published later), only 26 or so. I didn't pay any attention to the hierarchy of professors at that time; he was probably a lowly Visiting Assistant Professor. To me then, he was a Professor of Greek, and owned the entire Loeb Classical Library at his apartment. He was a young-looking little guy, when I look back, but the requirement that male Yale professors wear a suit coat and tie helped. I am now older than he was then.

We recall also that Rowling's Snape was (contrary to Rickman's age in the films) quite young, especially when he began teaching at Hogwarts; it helps explain, though doesn't excuse, his put-downs of the students. He had to establish his authority immediately, and did so in the harshest manner.

Posted October 20, 2007 10:08 PM by sara

Jen Roth @ 69: Dumbledore is a teacher. Teachers don't have sex.

Well, not at Hogwarts, anyways, nor any relationships of any kind, at least as far as textev goes.

Posted October 20, 2007 10:15 PM by Joel Polowin

Teachers don't have crushes on your mother, either, but Harry knows about that one. :)

Posted October 20, 2007 10:18 PM by Jen Roth

Also, come to think of it, Hagrid was at least trying to get together with Madame Maxime, and travelled with her for a while talking to the giants. Whether or not anything came of it, he was clearly shown to be interested in the opposite sex.

Anyway, my argument is not so much about the fact that Dumbledore isn't openly gay, and is more about the fact that *nobody* is. Like I said, I don't think Harry's POV is solely to blame for that.

Posted October 20, 2007 10:26 PM by Jen Roth

The only manifestation of Dumbledore's sexuality that we've been told about is that as a young man, he fell in love with Grindelwald (whose degree of reciprocation remains mysterious). We have no idea what (or who) he may've been doing throughout his adult life since then, esp. in his world-weary old age; if his personal life was essentially celibate by the time the story opens, does Harry really have any way to know what sort of sexual partners Dumbledore happened to be abstaining from?

Posted October 20, 2007 10:36 PM by Julie L.

Bruce at #67

See you and raise. When I was in high school my driver's ed teacher was doing things that later earned him (posthumously) a starring role in an Ann Rule book (A Fever in the Heart).

Mind you, I was totally oblivious to all this, until my dad asked me Christmas morning why I'd shot my driver's ed teacher. (Although looking back, it makes some stuff I put down to weird adult stuff make sense.)

Posted October 20, 2007 10:37 PM by Margaret Organ-Kean

Margaret @76:

If you were oblivious to it all, why did you shoot him?

Posted October 20, 2007 10:47 PM by Juli Thompson

Dumbledore was gay. So what?

It was irrelevant to Harry Potter's story. So it didn't need to be brought up in the story. I would note a great many of the instructors at Hogwarts do not come with any sort of sexual history attached to their backstory. Because their sexual orientation and history were irrelevant to Harry's story.

When she was a student, young McGonagall would transmutate into a cat and... oh... never mind. The point is that her sexual past is just as irrelevant as Dumbledore's.

As for those complaining that she mentioned it just to increase sales, then you should curse all the people who bought the books only after learning big D was gay. YOu know, the people who are thinking, "No, I don't like Harry Potter, Sam I am... It's been years in the making and I have no interest in buying any of the books... Oh wait, Dumbledore is gay? Give me the leather-bound* edition."

er, no.

*stop that thought right there.

Posted October 20, 2007 10:59 PM by Greg London

My instinctive reaction was, 'No he isn't. He isn't straight, either. He's never shown having any kind of romantic or sexual relationship with either a man or a woman. If it's not in the books, it's not in the books.'

As AJ said, you can never include everything in a book. To me, that means that you include everything that's important - everything that you need the reader to see. If you leave something out because you don't consider it important enough to be included, that does NOT make the book incomplete. The book is complete, and if it isn't, you should've taken that up with your editor. Going back later and saying, 'Oh, by the way, this character is gay and that one hated her brother all through their childhood and...' - that implies that the book isn't complete in itself. To me, there's something deeply offensive about that. It belittles the book - it belittles books in general.

I'm trying to work out why I feel so passionately about this - about the wholeness and sacredness of the text. Partly it may be because, back in college, I developed an allergy to the kind of argument that begins 'Just because there's no Marxism in Green Eggs and Ham doesn't mean it's not a Marxist text,' and four hours later you're still sitting in the student cafe arguing and every other word is 'post-post-structuralism' and AAAIIIEEEEE. To me, this is the same thing: claiming that what's actually in the book is less relevant than what people say about the book. Even in college, this made me want to whap my forehead off the formica cafe tables.

And partly it's because I've been getting a lot of reader e-mails asking me to answer a specific question about my first book. While I can see exactly why some readers would want this question answered, I'm never, ever going to answer it outside the confines of book covers - because the book is the book. If that answer were an organic part of it, it would be in the book. Since it's not an organic part of the book, it doesn't belong in the reading process at all.

I'm not sure if I'm making sense - it's late here...

Posted October 20, 2007 11:02 PM by Lili

Bruce Cohen @ 67: I think I'm going to have to erase the "slightly" in my original comment. Wow. Sounds like a good place to go to school, though, all things considered. Was it?

Joel Polowin @ 72: Yes, pretty much--"teachers don't have sex" about describes the attitude of many (not all, obviously) high school students, so far as I can tell. Even if the teachers in question are married and have children, in some cases. The thing is, I think that most students do notice marriages and otherwise permanent relationships; they just don't necessarily pay much attention, even then. If Rowling were now claiming that Dumbledore had had a current lover in the books and Harry just hadn't noticed, I'd be shaking my head and going "huh?" too. But a long-ago tragic love affair that not many people knew about even at the time, leading to (apparently) a lifetime of celibacy? I can believe that that didn't appear on student radar, all right.

Jen Roth @ 73: About Harry's mother . . . you know, I think that sort of fits, really. Harry almost has to be hit over the head with it before he notices that particular "past" relationship; up until that point, he's more or less viewed events in terms of his father, not his mother. Or am I remembering wrongly?

Anyway, I'm not really disagreeing with people who argue that Rowling is trying to have it both ways, so to speak--it just doesn't strike me as false to the milieu she was writing in that Dumbledore's sexual orientation wasn't an explicit topic of conversation in it.

Alma Alexander @ 68: With you all the way, on that one . . .

Posted October 20, 2007 11:11 PM by Mary Frances

Bruce Cohen @52: By the way, I've been meaning to ask--what short story (and by whom) does the title of this post remind you of? Because I think it's a great title, too, only I flashed back to Whitman when I read it. If there's a good story out there with the same, or almost the same, title, that I have somehow managed to miss . . .

Posted October 20, 2007 11:24 PM by Mary Frances

Lili@79: that implies that the book isn't complete in itself. To me, there's something deeply offensive about that. It belittles the book - it belittles books in general.

No book is ever "complete" if by "complete" you mean it includes ever fact no matter how irrelevant it might be the protagonist's point of view and the story being told.

And saying that all books are incomplete doesn't belittle any of them. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a story is little more than a series of markers or signposts from the author with the reader filling in most of the details in between.

Posted October 20, 2007 11:26 PM by Greg London

Greg on 82: No book is ever "complete" if by "complete" you mean it includes ever fact no matter how irrelevant it might be the protagonist's point of view and the story being told.

No, that's not what I mean by 'complete' at all! (I told you it was late here...) On the contrary: my point was precisely that a book doesn't have to include every detail in order to be complete. The book is by definition complete; any detail that isn't included is extraneous.

I'm going to bed...

Posted October 20, 2007 11:38 PM by Lili

See, I just think it's kind of a big coincidence that the only gay character happens to be a teacher who has been celibate for decades, and therefore has built-in excuses for his orientation not becoming known to the POV character. Again, out of all those hundred or so people whose love lives we know about.

I also can't help thinking that if Grindelwald had been a woman, and Dumbledore had been spending all that intense time with her in their youth, the possibility that he was in love with her would probably have come up in his biography, and would have thus come to Harry's attention. Granted, that's supposition and not proof of anything.

Posted October 20, 2007 11:47 PM by Jen Roth

Juli @ #77

Because I purely loathed driver's ed and I was flunking it -

So you can really wonder about me, I'll mention my response, which was, "Which one?"

(For the people who believe everything they read (I don't think there are any here) this was a joke answer - I didn't shoot my driver's ed teacher.)

Posted October 20, 2007 11:54 PM by Margaret Organ-Kean

Jen Roth @ 84: Oh, I think you're probably right--and I hadn't really thought about it, but you've also got a good point about the possibility of the Grindelwald/Dumbledore affair being in Dumbledore's biography, if Grindelwald had been female. Actually, I was kind of surprised even when I read that bit that Rita Skeeter didn't think of at least speculating on a possible Dumbledore/Grindelwald affair--I suppose because it was enough of a "shock" that Dumbledore had even met Young Grindelwald, let alone been friends with him, maybe? But I'd have expected a bit of titillation on her part anyway, whatever the wizarding world's general attitude towards same-gender relationships might be.

In other words, I imagine that Rowling walked a very fine and careful line, indeed. Personally, I don't entirely blame her, all things considered, but it was apparently her choice and no one else's, so she gets whatever kudos or condemnation is going for it. However, and giving her the credit of assuming that she thought of the character as gay and needed to know that about him in order to write him--that's a large assumption, I know--I do think it's . . . pleasant? something relatively positive . . . refreshing, perhaps? . . . that she answered a question about Dumbledore's love life honestly. Brilliant marketing ploy or not. So long as she'd decided to answer any "outside the books" questions at all, that is.

Now, whether or not she should be answering "outside the books" questions, or why she has chosen to do so, is a whole 'nother set of issues.

And some of those sentences are getting completely out of control, so I think maybe I'd better get some sleep, too . . .

Posted October 21, 2007 12:37 AM by Mary Frances

Lili said "And partly it's because I've been getting a lot of reader e-mails asking me to answer a specific question about my first book. While I can see exactly why some readers would want this question answered, I'm never, ever going to answer it outside the confines of book covers - because the book is the book. If that answer were an organic part of it, it would be in the book. Since it's not an organic part of the book, it doesn't belong in the reading process at all."

I think she just said everything I was saying more succinctly (not to mention: better) than I did.

I'll note that, for Book 7, I ordered a copy of the British adult hardcover, which to me just looked shinier, than the American version. The overseas shipping took an extra four days, and so I actually avoided everything for a solid week. No television, no Internet, nothing where I could read anything about any aspect of the book. All of which I say to note that I guess I'm a little sensitive about spoilers, and the avoidance thereof.

On another note: When I was in sixth grade, my classmates and I speculated about the sexuality of one of our teachers. He was the first male we had ever encountered in the education system to that point (partly due to my attending a Catholic school. The teachers weren't nuns, but the principal was).

I'm rot13ing the rest of this post, part of which is a response to Avram, the rest to John Chu:

Nienz, gung jnf cerpvfryl gur cntr ObbxAvawn yvaxrq gb haqre vgf cbfg urnqyvarq "Wrfhf Cbggre." Fb V jnf ernyyl whfg tbvat ol gurve qrfpevcgvba bs vg.

Naq Wbua, qbrfa'g fnlvat gung Uneel jrag ba gb orpbzr na Nhebe arprffnevyl vzcyl gung ur fheivirq gur riragf bs Obbx 7?

Posted October 21, 2007 1:15 AM by Will Entrekin

Will, I read that article, and I think a whole lot of people don't know what an allegory is.

Posted October 21, 2007 1:23 AM by Avram

Margaret Organ-Kean @ 76

Remind me not to get you mad ...

Mary Frances @ 80

It was a good school. The classes were small; there were 33 students, including myself, in my graduating class. The teachers were mostly pretty good, some of them pretty great*, and at least 4 of them left me with interests and skills that I still follow. I had hoped to go back there for my 40th class reunion a few years ago, but the weddings of my niece and my son left me with insufficient time and money to do so. Maybe the 50th.

Mary Frances @ 81

The story is "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting", by Sir Arthur Clarke†, published in 1959 IIRC. It's not long, and somewhat a minor work, compared to stories such as "The Songs of Distant Earth" or "A Meeting with Medusa"††, but I love the title.

* One of the saddest things I've had to do is hear about the deaths of several of them in the last few years. I just can't think of them as getting older; they're fixed in my mind as they were then. The one who died about 6 or 7 years ago, who was the person who really turned me on to film** was even a distant relative by marriage.
** I planned to be a film maker for some years. It didn't happen for a lot of reasons, but it's still something I love.
† He's one of the few recipient's of that honor that I can think of who really earned it and deserves it. Elton John? Well, maybe. Though I think they gave it to him to appease Diana's ghost.
†† Which was published in 1971, but by a roundabout chain of reasoning was the inspiration for a paper I wrote for a workshop on distributed systems in 2000.

Posted October 21, 2007 1:39 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

This comment would have been much longer, but Jen Roth beat me to it all, for which I thank her.

So: what Jen Roth said, absolutely.

Or, put another way: no-one ever has to justify talking about/knowing an opposite-sex partner/involvement/interest.

Posted October 21, 2007 8:46 AM by Kate Nepveu

#87: Wil, how does my response in #57 not answer your question such that you need to ask it again?

#84,86: I agree that, ultimately, it's a bit convenient that JK Rowling created a world where Dumbledore is perhaps the only gay wizard ever. (I don't know if Grindelwald ever requited Dumbledore's love.) Maybe the rationalization is that this is a world where all the gay wizards and witches are so closeted that Harry never sees them. That doesn't seem very satisfying though. I wonder if maybe she didn't realize this about him until she saw the script to the movie version of book 6.

Someone, somewhere, also mentioned that this could still make it into the canon via the upcoming movies. (I haven't seen any of them after the first one. I'm just assuming that they maintain continuity with the books.)

Posted October 21, 2007 9:36 AM by John Chu

For me,it seems that the whole Dumbledore thing would be irrelevant TO HARRY. One of the things I found most interesting about the books was how much like a regular teenager, male variety, Harry was, in spite of all his power and responsibility and fate and everything else. Harry spends at least one book being an utter silly git, at about the same time that most teenagers turn into silly gits. He sees his mother only through the spectrum of her sacrifice, and his father as an ideal heroic adult; Sirius is the link to his parents, and another heroic figure. His views of the adults around him fits his internal narrative,until he is forced to truly understand in order to survive, and for Harry, growing up means understanding the flaws and human-ness of those he idealized.

To me, it was always a growing up story and how, if you are lucky, you change from the self-absorption of immaturity to the full responsibility of adulthood. Harry just needs to grow up faster, because someone very nasty is coming to kill him; but that doesn't mean he gets to skip the steps. IHMO, a very realistic view of the matter.

Posted October 21, 2007 10:41 AM by Emma

Bruce Cohen @89: Thanks! I had missed that story of Clarke's, somehow--I'll look for it.

Posted October 21, 2007 12:43 PM by Mary Frances

About "completeness" and authorial intent, in general:

Maybe this is why I have written so little, as opposed to how much I've worked on, but every piece of fiction I've written has been a garment made from a much larger whole cloth: there is character back-story, especially, that is not "story" but is necessary for me to know for the story to exist. Whether it is wise for an author to show the public the scraps left after the story is cut out is another question.

Posted October 21, 2007 12:44 PM by JESR

If you're going to write a gay lead character, then write a gay lead character. Make it GREAT gay lead character and give the GBLT-Team something to celebrate.

Why? Why not just make the character GSW (gay -- so what?). At this point, \either/ extreme is likely to weaken the story, IMO.

Sara@71: That was how old Snape was when he started teaching. When Harry entered Hogwards, Snape would have been at least 31 (age at graduation, plus 12 years to get Harry to age 11) and probably older -- I forget any text clues about how old James and Lily were when the Voldemort mess happened. That's somewhere in the indistinct middle, depending on how the individual approaches life; Snape is permanently bitter, which IMO makes him look/behave crotchety/old. Rickman didn't use any of the usual markers for age -- no grey in his hair, moved very fast when he had to -- but conveys some of what it's like not to have been young.

Posted October 21, 2007 1:30 PM by CHip

James and Lily died Halloween, 1981 and both were born in 1960.

Harry was at least a year old when they died. (both pieces from Book VII), which means he might have been born in 1980 or 1979 (less probable).

Since he was 18 when the events in Book VII took place, that would mean Snape was 37-38 when he died, with 39 or 36 as lesser probabilities. Book VII took place in 1997 or 1998.

Snape would have been about 30 when he met Harry.

Posted October 21, 2007 4:10 PM by Margaret Organ-Kean

Will #24: The past few days, I've just wished Rowling would stop talking.

There is that aspect.

Regarding archetypes of heroic SF/F, the wise old mentor never has a visible sex life, does he? Did Obi-Wan Kenobe?

Regarding social commentary, social conservatism in the wizarding world, etc.: Dumbledore was born in 1881. His attitudes toward sex and sexuality were formed in the last decades of the 19th century. Gay or straight, people of that era were mostly reticent about their sexuality.

Posted October 21, 2007 4:20 PM by Brenda Kalt

Regarding archetypes of heroic SF/F, the wise old mentor never has a visible sex life, does he?

I suppose that the couplings in late-period Heinlein are not heroic.

Posted October 21, 2007 6:39 PM by Joel Polowin

Archetypes and sex: Yoda.

I cringe at the thought.

Posted October 21, 2007 6:48 PM by Linkmeister

Puts a rather different spin on the whole using Dumbledore's wand malarky...

Posted October 21, 2007 6:49 PM by Neil

I suppose that the couplings in late-period Heinlein are not heroic.

Truer words...

Posted October 21, 2007 6:50 PM by vito excalibur

Snogging -- feh! Nookie -- feh! A Jedi craves not these things.

I found one item in the Deathly Hallows text referring negatively to the relationship between Harry and Dumbledore. It's part of an interview with Rita Skeeter about her forthcoming biography of Dumbledore, in Chapter 2. "'I devote an entire chapter to the whole Potter-Dumbledore relationship. It's been called unhealthy, even sinister. Again, your readers will have to buy my book for the whole story, but there is no question that Dumbledore took an unnatural interest in Potter from the word go. Whether that was really in the boy's best interests – well, we'll see. It's certainly an open secret that Potter has had a most troubled adolescence.'" I don't think we ever saw any text from that chapter of the biography.

Posted October 21, 2007 7:51 PM by Joel Polowin

Linkmeister @ #99:

mumblemumble google 'yoda estrogen brigade' mumble

What? Who? Me?? Never heard of it...

Posted October 21, 2007 8:13 PM by totally not Lila at all

Lili @79: To me, this is the same thing: claiming that what's actually in the book is less relevant than what people say about the book.

I wouldn't go so far as to claim that the book is less relevant, but I do think that hearing what people (author included) say about the book can be interesting. It doesn't necessarily affect or replace how I view the book; it's a different kind of enjoyment. So I don't have a problem with Rowling making these statements, except that knowing the characters' jobs 20 years from now isn't what I'd call interesting (although I imagine it pleases the younger audience).

A datapoint on students wondering about teachers' sex lives: when I was 16, one of my classes took a nose-dive in quality and I remember wondering if the teacher wasn't getting any. I'd have guessed he was in his 30's, but he was probably younger. Then there was the time (same year, iirc) when we found a picture of a porn star who looked exactly like one very serious, former seminarist teacher.

Posted October 21, 2007 8:42 PM by Spiegel

totally not Lila at all @ 103

No fair! How can I breathe when I'm laughing so hard?

Uhat yvxr n Uhgg, V nz. ahhahhahahahah!

naq gurer'f n Eltry KIV Rfgebtra Oevtnqr, gbb!

Posted October 21, 2007 8:54 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Brenda @97: Regarding archetypes of heroic SF/F, the wise old mentor never has a visible sex life, does he? Did Obi-Wan Kenobe?

The Sith Academy someone has not read, hmmm? (Although that aspect isn't a major factor throughout the early portions, e.g. Darth Maul Earns His Master's Degree.)

Posted October 21, 2007 10:49 PM by Julie L.

Yeah! to Emma @ 92.

I think it would have been quite the challenge to introduce Dumbldore's sexual preference into the storyline.

We are looking at this world through Harry's eyes. Harry spends much of his time idolizing Dumbledore, and, on occasion, demonizing him. Harry is also a naive boy struggling with his own adolescence; the emotional and romantic needs of others are almost entirely beyond him.

Frankly we really don't get a deep background on Dumbledore, himself, until DH, and then we get more than enough material to chew on; in particular the revelation that Albus had made at least one terrible error in his past which he carried with him every day. Indeed, in light of that particular revelation it might have proved a *bad* time to introduce Dumbledore's orientation; it might well be construed by some as a ding on gay folk.

More to the point of this argument --and as Greg @ 78 notes -- an in-story revelation would be largely irrelevant. Dumbledore's sexual orientation would be meaningful to the story only to the extent that Dumbledore were presented as a sexual being... or even a person with a romantic interest. Should Jo want very much to make such a reference in story, it would be terribly difficult to justify unless it would *forward* the story. And I suspect that if it *were* revealed in-story, then it would in many ways subsume other critical storylines.

It's not as though Jo never touched on how the Wizarding world dealt with people who were "different". That Lupin was ostracized for being a werewolf is telling: Wizards were revealed to be every bit as capable as Muggles of being insufferable gits in their interaction with folks of a different stripe. If I understand correctly, it was just this sort of in story dialog about acceptance and dealing with differences that inspired the Q&A we're all talking about.

Neat, that.

Posted October 22, 2007 12:41 AM by deCadmus

And to think people were giggling over this line from Rita Skeeter:

After they've read my book, people may be forced to conclude that Grindelwald simply conjured a white handkerchief from the end of his wand and came quietly.

Not so funny now, is it?

Posted October 22, 2007 1:24 AM by rm

Bruce Cohen @ 44: "Doesn't it seem reasonable that an author should have the final say on their own relationship to the text and its contents?"

Absolutely. An author has just as much of a right to determine their relationship with their work as any reader does.

Lili @ 79: "Going back later and saying, 'Oh, by the way, this character is gay and that one hated her brother all through their