Tags: culture arts, Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, LGBTQ, literature
For those of you who haven’t finished the Harry Potter books but plan to, be warned that you’ll find spoilers in what follows.
Yesterday The Philosopher’s Magazine posted a nice essay by Tamar Szabó Gendler about authorial authority, in which Gendler exhumes the debate on J.K. Rowling’s declaration in 2007 that she had always thought of Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series, as gay:
Responses [to Rowling's revelation] fell into three categories. Some readers were delighted by the news. Others were dismayed. But the most interesting type of response was the third. These readers responded to the declaration by challenging Rowling’s authorial authority. “Unless she decides to write Book Eight, Ms. Rowling has missed her chance to impart any new information about any of the Harry Potter characters. If the series is truly at an end, then the author no longer possesses the authority to create new thoughts, feelings, and realities for those characters,” wrote one reader.
The essay reviews several theories of “truth in fiction,” turning over the ways that Rowling’s ex post claim about Dumbledore’s sexuality might or might not be considered to be true in the world of Harry Potter. But what interests me more than those theories is the way that Rowling’s declaration was received.
Personally, I was originally a little miffed at the news. At the time, I believed this wasn’t because I cared one way or another about Dumbledore’s sexuality, but because the declaration seemed so ad hoc. Rowling always struck me as someone who liked to drop provocative hints and revelations in her interviews, and this seemed to me yet another instance of the same phenomenon. I felt like she said it for the shock value, and because of that I wasn’t much inclined to include it as a truth in the world of Harry Potter.
But a passage from Gendler’s essay made me rethink why I held my stance:
[F]or most Potter fans, Rowling is the patented owner and creator of the Potter universe. When she told the audience at Carnegie Hall that Neville went on to marry Hannah Abbott, or that Petunia “almost wished Harry luck when she said goodbye to him” at the beginning of Deathly Hallows, no one wrote in to say that that those things didn’t happen.
Which is true! Those revelations didn’t create nearly the stir that “Dumbledore is gay” did, but Rowling’s mentioning them seems equally ad hoc. You might say that they have less of an impact on our interpretation of the plot than Dumbledore’s sexuality, but I don’t buy that. The key feature of, say, Dumbledore’s relationship with Grindelwald is its intensity; whether or not it was sexual isn’t essential to how we see the plot. If anything, Petunia’s nearly realized well wishing seems more significant to how we understand her character.
So why did I (and others) react more strongly to the Dumbledore comment in particular? My first thought is to think of the IAT, a psychological test that demonstrates that we often have unconscious prejudicial tendencies that may even conflict with our consciously held beliefs. So while I wouldn’t profess to have any prejudiced beliefs about alternative sexualities, my response to the “Dumbledore is gay” remark shows that homosexuality still has an emotional valence for me that other things just don’t.
But I think there’s another, equally good explanation. When we look at Dumbledore’s relationship with Grindelwald, we find it to be intimate and intense. Based strictly on textual evidence, I don’t think it would be a stretch to call it passionate, or even sexual. But to invoke the word “gay,” as Rowling does, is to call to mind certain assumptions and associations that may not be appropriate to apply to Dumbledore. “Gay” is a social label that implies (fairly or not) all sorts of related personality traits and social practices, and it often implies a certain self-identification as well. So while we can read Dumbledore’s relationship with Grindelwald through a sexual lens, it doesn’t follow that Dumbledore possessed these other personality traits or self-identified as a gay man. Perhaps the main reason that Rowling’s revelation bugged me was that it simplified and thereby obscured the more nuanced dynamics behind Dumbledore’s relationship with Grindelwald.
(Image from Wikipedia used under the fair use rationale provided on its Wikipedia image page.)
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6 Comments
(Sorry, the quick-quotes-quill link has gone bad. Here’s the Internet Archive of the page, if the site is not too busy: http://web.archive.org/web/20061015180457/http://www.quick-quote-quill.org/articles/2000/0900-ew-jensen.htm )
It amuses me to assign to Rowling a different motivation for how she wrote about Dumbledore, and how she revealed his sexuality. I’d like to think that she “outed” him deliberately, after the end of the series was written, in order to reveal to many homophobes that a character who they had come to admire and respect was homosexual.
This would not be without precedent in British history: many people in Great Britain and elsewhere can come to admire Oscar Wilde or Alexander Turing, and only later discover that these great men were gay. Turing strikes me as being particularly as a possible inspiration, as he was quite brilliant, was essential to the success of World War II, and of course was tortured and hounded to suicide after his sexuality was revealed.
(See for example
http://www.care2.com/causes/civil-rights/blog/alan-turing-apology-petition-for-the-gay-british-war-hero/ )
As Rowling has stated that bigotry his the thing she hates most (see Rowling, Joanne Kathleen. 2000. “Entertainment Weekly interview.” Madame Scoop’s Index to JK Rowling Interviews. The Floo Network. 12 Dec 2005. http://www.quick-quote-quill.org/articles/2000/0900-ew-jensen.htm ), it doesn’t strike me as implausible that the woman who could weave the intricate plot of the Harry Potter series together could also weave together this plan: to make a generation of readers come to respect and admire Dumbledore, and then inform them all that the character was a homosexual.
For many children, Dumbledore may be the very first person they ever discover who is known to be homosexual. How many children has Rowling gifted with a positive idea of what a homosexual person can be, if this is the case? How many homophobic parents will have to have reconsidered their attitudes upon discovering that one of the heroes about whom they have been reading aloud to their children is gay?
This is the woman who had Peeves break a vanishing cabinet in book 2 so that Malfoy could repair it in book 6. I think my amusing speculation is not implausible.
Hm. I don’t think JKR was intentionally trying to be sensational. She has boxes upon boxes of backstory for each and every character, even for those random ones. Like Dean Thomas…
But anyways, I think the reason we see so little of the “personality traits” or how he “self-identified as a gay man” is because it’s supposed to reflect Harry’s (lack of) knowledge of Dumbledore. The book is meant to be seen through Harry’s point of view and Harry certainly didn’t ascertain much of the true Dumbledore until the final book towards the end. But I agree that her revelation was kind of cursory and I wish I had more backstory/information given to me about it.
I guess I wasn’t trying to suggest that Rowling made up that tidbit about Dumbledore on the fly or anything. It may well be something she’s known about the character for a long time, and the more I think about Sara’s comment, the more I think that using the word “gay” in this case is probably fine, if only for lack of a better word. But something about the _way_ she disclosed Dumbledore’s sexuality is what bugs me, and, like you, I’d like to know a little more about the backstory and the details of how Rowling understands Dumbledore’s sexuality. It would be interesting to see if there were any conflict between an elaboration on that and the way Dumbledore is portrayed in the books(!)
“Gay” only implies “related personality traits and social practices” because of a set of problematic stereotypes – ones which may not even exist in any given fictional world – and we should not allow those stereotypes to prescribe or limit our use of the word, any more than we should say “Othello isn’t Black” simply because his character doesn’t conform to stereotypes of Black people in the modern world.
I agree with that completely. My point, though, is that Rowling used that word in the real world, where those problematic stereotypes do exist, and her use of the word has a real impact on his we understand Dumbledore’s character. Maybe we _should_ be able to use the word “gay” to describe Dumbledore, but given the associations it does carry in the real world, I think that Rowling’s use of the word distorts how we textually analyze Dumbledore’s personality and actions. We can’t rely on people listening to her to make that distinction, and we can’t rely on Rowling herself to dissociate sexuality from gender when she calls Dumbledore “gay.”