We are fools for Christ's sake

Well I had every intention of posting lots of extremely interesting stuff this month, but it just didn’t happen. I will now, however, respond to Jason’s call-out with my thoughts on Dumbledore’s coming-out.

First, I don’t know what possible relevance Dumbledore’s sexuality has to the story of Harry Potter. I was able to read through all seven books and not at one time even think about whether Dumbledore was a tad queer. Looking back now that Rowling has said he is gay, I suppose it fits. I mean, there was never mention of a wife or female love interest. However I don’t think that alone is evidence enough to assume he was barebacking in the broom closet.

Which brings me to my second thought: books are set in stone. Not literally of course, but they started out that way (i.e. ten commandments) and we started setting them in paper just because of weight and cost issues. And this applies almost exclusively to fiction (i.e. ten commandments), but once a book is written and published it should be fairly self-contained. All the information about the characters, settings, and the universe that that book creates should be contained within the pages of that particular book. Some gaps may be left for the imagination of the reader to fill, but that is left up to the discretion of the reader. What Rowling did was fill one of these imagination-gaps with information of her own and since she wrote the books and created the Harry Potter universe we take her words as gospel, as if her words were written in one of the books. But they weren’t. And since Dumbledore isn’t a real person and only exists in the pages of the seven Harry Potter novels then he’s not gay unless: 1) In one of the books it says he’s gay or 2) It’s left up to the reader to assume/imagine he’s gay. Well option 1 isn’t true which leaves the matter of Dumbledore’s homosexuality up to the discretion of the reader and not with Ms. Rowling.

Now, I don’t doubt at all the Rowing had the intention of making Dumbledore gay but it is so ancillary and inconsequential to the story that I really don’t see the relevance other that to cause a stir by revealing Dumbledore as a bender and to maybe trick some anti-gays who like Dumbledore into rethinking their values.

Anyway, enough of that. It’s Halloween and I think I’ve talked enough about gay warlocks.