(note: kyra and megan both use queer as a blanket term for LGBT+; maybe we’ll discuss this in a post sometime)
megan
(i was going to do something more hefty than this but again i took too long getting myself together, so…next time).
i’ve been thinking about this the last few days since it came up in our class, and then i saw this post (the gif of jk is almost laughable to me) and i was…confused. i mean i think you and i have talked about this before, but my take on dumbledore has always been that he is never portrayed in any kind of romantic relationship (i mean you can talk about grindelwald, but a. canonically it’s represented as a friendship, b. it happened when he was very young and then as far as we know he was never involved with or interested in anyone ever again. and c. grindelwald was kind of not a great person, so, you know, that’s troubling). so while dumbledore might be a gay character, he’s certainly not representation, and when rowling divulged that particular nugget of information, i felt more angry than anything else.
Kyra
I am still angry about that whole thing. For one, it really does just reek of JK trying, after the fact, to include some diversity in her world. If she was looking to include queer characters, she had an entire school full of children who, at any point, she could have made gossip about so-and-so being in a gay relationship with so-and-so, or casually mention that girl A and girl B were walking down the stairs holding hands or any other minutia of subtly and easily including a diverse range of gender identities and sexualities. It would have been so. Fucking. Easy for her to include queer characters in other, subtle, canonical ways, if that was her intention in revealing Dumbledore as a gay character (after all, the demographic she would have lost from having queer characters already wasn’t reading the books because of the witchcraft).
As that post points out, the teacher’s love lives are not discussed, and it would have seemed very awkward for Dumbledore at any point to stand up and say, “Sup. Homo, right here”. As you say, for the Grindelwald thing, it is canonically a friendship, and even I, with my magical ability to find the gay in absolutely every fictional work ever, did not read it as anything other than that. However, the fact that he doesn’t act like a flaming stereotype does not discount the fact that he might be quietly gay, or that JK could have always thought of him as gay. And if she had revealed his homosexuality through a Q&A (fan: I’ve always read Dumbledore as being gay. How do you see him? JK: Yes, I’ve always thought of Dumbledore is gay) I would have been like, cool, and moved on with my life. But the fact that she made a big announcement of it makes it seem like a contrived effort to place some diversity in an otherwise very hetero world. Honestly, if she said that to me, I might very well have wanted to slap her. If the queerness is not canonical to the books, I’m sorry JK, but it quite frankly isn’t good enough.
Dumbledore is gay. Fine. Great. Whatever. However, that is not canon to the books, is not mentioned or indicated in the books, and thus he does not function as queer representation because, quite frankly, if his queerness is so incidental to his character that the majority of readers didn’t even know about it, he might as well be straight or an blob of anti-sexuality like the majority of elderly people are portrayed.
megan
okay, i thought i remembered it being in response to a fan question, so i went looking and apparently it partially was. this article says that it was after she was asked whether or not dumbledore found “true love”, and jk herself mentions grindelwald. (pretty much every quote by rowling in that article makes me wince though).
the weird thing is, i wasn’t really upset when it seemed that there were no queer characters in the books. it’s something i kind of expect, sadly. but once dumbledore is gay, and there was (supposedly) some thought put into including queer characters, it’s a different question.
first, as you point out, there are so many other characters in harry potter (there’s about 150 listed on wikipedia). things like the yule ball would have been great opportunities to include some queer characters. but all the boys (dutifully wearing their dress robes) go with girls (dutifully wearing their dresses), and vice versa. (i feel like it could have lost her additional readers, although i’m not sure, don’t really understand people).
then there’s the fact that dumbledore is a powerful old white dude, and has one known romantic relationship that turns into his Big Dark Secret. i’m not saying that you have to slather on the diversity just for the sake of diversity, or that queer characters have to be perfect people, but when it’s your only queer character, and his only queer relationship is basically portrayed as a mistake? questionable.
finally, i totally buy that there is no reason to bring up dumbledore’s sexuality in the context of hogwarts. but even when all the dirt about dumbledore’s past is being brought up so harry can go through his crisis of faith, no one brings up that dumbledore is gay, or that he was something other than friends with grindelwald. and if you’re a wizarding writer and you’re trying to cause a furor by revealing that dumbledore was friends with grindelwald, you’d think you’d just go the whole nine yards and paint them as boyfriends. unless, of course, dumbledore is so closeted that no one makes the connection(again, nothing wrong with that for a queer character-but if it’s your only queer character, and you want to claim that it’s representation?) and/or, homosexuality is so taboo in the wizarding world that it would never be directly spoken of, which. you know.
i mean i guess what really bothers me is rowling or fans thinking rowling has Done Something, when really she’s just slipped us a queer character consolation prize on the side.
Kyra
EXACTLY. Bam.
Queer consolation prize. Thats all he is.
And I wasn’t upset when I first read the books that there weren’t any gay characters, nor did I really think about it, but as soon as she put it out there that Dumbledore was gay it became glaringly obvious that that was the only character that she put in, and even then never explicitly stated his gayness.
I don’t really have anything else to add, because I basically just read what you wrote shouting YES, yes, this. What she said.
It does really bother me when authors or their fans are giving themselves huge props for what is basically an after-thought of a representation, that doesn’t really do anything for anyone, isn’t operating as a representation of that community, and is so far in the closet that the majority of the fandom would never have guessed the queerness was canonically intended by the author. Whenever an author reveals something like this after the fact it reeks of self-promotion (look at me! so inclusive! so diverse! go me!) not to mention condescendingly giving a last-second, half-assed consolation prize to a group which is largely ignored and marginalized, especially in fantasy.
Forever side-eyeing JK because of this.
megan
(and then there’s all the other problematic stuff in harry potter, but that’s another story…)
rhubarbing 