This morning Jen asked me if I had heard the controversy about Dumbledore. My first question: What's a dumbledore? This tells you how up-to-date I am on the popular culture. That's not exactly true. I was way ahead of the curve on Rock of Love. But really, how can anyone resist a show about skanky strippers who catfight for the affection of an over-the-hill skeezy former hair-band rock star? Exactly. It's impossible. But I digress...
Jen explained that Dumbledore is a character in the Harry Potter books, and, apparently, the author has announced that the character is gay. I also learned that this gayness is nowhere apparent in the text of the actual books. The controversy is that this wildly successful and popular book for children of all ages has a prominent gay character which may make children think that being gay is ok. This is a controversy?
First, lets skip past the whole "being gay is ok" issue. Being gay is ok. Ask any gay person. They'll all tell you they're ok with it. In addition to gay people, you can also ask rational human beings who aren't living in their own little version of the dark ages. They'll tell you its ok too. Yes, I have no patience at all with bigotry. This kind of backward thinking will probably be the subject of future blogs. But there's a smaller, but no less mind-boggling issue at play here.
The gayness isn't in the books! Right, so I haven't read the books. I have read recent articles about the books. Dumbledore discusses a man-crush he had on some dude who later turns out to be evil. But until the author revealed in a recent interview that Dumbledore is gay, no one else knew that he was gay. I'm sure some thought so. But when you read a book, and a character expresses love for another character, you generally figure it's just a strong bond. Like with Frodo and Sam in the Lord of the Rings, who people also sometimes think are gay. Maybe that's not a good analogy. Or maybe its the perfect analogy. The point here is that if there's no explicit gayness in the book, even if the character seems pretty gay, and even if you've got some medieval brain malfunction about gayness, there's still no gayness in the book. How do you get worked up about character in a book being gay, when the character is only gay in the mind of the author and not on the pages of the book.
Seriously, people who are bothered by Rowling saying that Dumbledore is gay, what's wrong with you?
