Dumbledore is gay!!!

[sigune]

YAAAAAAAAAYYYY! Dumbledore is gay!!!!

...I'm sorry, I should not perhaps be all whoopee about this, it's a bit childish... The thing is that Dumbledore is the one character in canon who has always given off a gay vibe to me. I have read slash with Snape, with Lupin, with Ron and Harry and Draco - just about everyone. But none of these characters ever seemed gay to me. Dumbledore did. He always did. Seriously. I'm not sure I can explain why, but it was just there.

Because I am into Queer Studies, and many of my favourite artists were/are gay, and I actually like to write about gay characters, it troubled me a little that I could never see that in Snape or Lupin or James or Sirius or whoever. I mean, it's sort of my job to detect that sort of thing. But Dumbledore... Ha! What a relief! Finally Rowling said something in an interview that makes me really, really happy. Happy because she did include a queer character, and supremely happy because I spotted it :D.

I wish I could refer you to a post or a comment as proof of my long-standing belief in Gaydore, but I'm afraid I no longer remember where to look for one. You'll just have to trust me to speak the truth :-).

Yay! Yaaaaayyy!!

*goes off to celebrate*

Comments

[purpleygirl.livejournal.com]

I guess it was always there - at least in DH - with Grindelwald. But hey, at least she admits homosexuality exists at last!

[sigune.livejournal.com]

*g*
Yes, I never thought she would say something like this openly.

[todayiamadaisy]

I didn't give Dumbledore's sexuality any thought at all until DH, when it becomes obvious from the text; it was certainly my reading of it. (The two other characters who jumped out of the closet at me were: Karkaroff (with his rather creepy obsession with Krum) and Slughorn.)

But I'm finding myself resistant to JK's interviews in general. If something's so important, Jo, put in the story! Which she did, in this case, so I shouldn't be complaining. But all this jazz about who marries whom: if it's not in the book, it's not canon, it's... it's like with law, there's the idea of precedent, which must be followed, and then there's persuasive precedent, which can sway a legal finding but is not compulsory. Jo's interviews to me are persuasive canon. If they support my own reading of the canon text, great; if not, it doesn't matter to me what her opinion is. So if my reading is that Dumbledore is gay, then he is, regardless of whether Jo says he is or not.

(I'm also resistant because I think she makes a lot of this stuff up as she goes; I think she's got a pretty good handle on Harry's life (and here, on Dumbledore's), but if someone asks what Seamus Finnigan's favourite colour was, she's just going to pull that out of the air.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/phistolemon_/]

I so second what you said.

I don't like how jkr is going out there, rambling about 'new canon' stuff.
the series ended, the last book is written, now let it be, but obviously
the woman can't let go otherwise she'd stop talking about it.

I haven't thought about dumbledore being gay. actually, I've never really thought
about his sexuality at all, nor have I tried to find out who might be gay in the series.
it's never been a topic to me... now jkr says dumbledore is gay. okay, but I have to admit I absolutely don't care (nor do I care about whatever jkr says).

cool for you though sigune that you were right :)

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Ooohh, yes, I can't believe I forgot Slughorn! Karkaroff I never got the vibe from; his keeping Krum so close seemed to me more an instance of a not-very-powerful wizard using a talented student to boost his own reputation and ambition... Slughorn's favouritism towards Tom Riddle seemed rather more homosexually-tinted to me.

Jo's interviews to me are persuasive canon. If they support my own reading of the canon text, great; if not, it doesn't matter to me what her opinion is. So if my reading is that Dumbledore is gay, then he is, regardless of whether Jo says he is or not.
Yes, I agree. The Dumbledore tidbit just stands out to me because I think it fits very nicely with canon. As some people have remarked, the Neville/Hannah thing is quite a different matter because canon never gave any hint in that direction. If I were a Neville/Luna shipper, for example, I wouldn't consider myself bound by the interviews at all.

[bluestocking79.livejournal.com]

Finally Rowling said something in an interview that makes me really, really happy. Happy because she did include a queer character, and supremely happy because I spotted it :D.

I think that's sort of how I feel as well. I always read Dumbledore as gay, and I thought that the subtext in DH was not particularly subtextual, but I don't think I ever expected JKR to come out and admit that she had created some queer characters. (Personally, I feel like Lupin is at the very least bisexual, but that might just be me reading too much into the Werewolf metaphor.)

I understand where people are coming from, in wondering why she didn't put in explicitly from the text, making it canon-canon instead of off-canon. To me, though, it is in canon, on a subtextual level if nothing else, so to me, this isn't the same as coming out of nowhere and proclaiming that, say, Neville married Hannah Abbot, a twist that is completely arbitrary and unsupported by textual evidence.

So, hooray for Grindelwald/Dumbledore! Or should we call it Grumbledore?

[sigune.livejournal.com]

To me, though, it is in canon, on a subtextual level if nothing else, so to me, this isn't the same as coming out of nowhere and proclaiming that, say, Neville married Hannah Abbot, a twist that is completely arbitrary and unsupported by textual evidence.
Exactly. It was totally unnecessary for her to make the statement about Dumbledore's sexual preference, but at least it doesn't come out of the blue. Some thing in actual written canon were much more unfounded, such as (as far as I am concerned) Percy's sudden return to the fold, and Dudley's suddenly caring about Harry.

Lupin - yes, I could agree. He didn't specifically strike me as gay or bi, but I have no problems accepting that he might be, and as far as I am concerned his marriage to Tonks certainly doesn't rule the possibility out. Funny enough, I have always had trouble seeing Snape as gay or even bi, though. I even have a tendency to write him as homophobic. I'm not sure I can explain why.

[sander123.livejournal.com]

It was pretty easy to decipher at least a strong attraction to males from DH. But before! I'm very impressed with your deciphering skills...
Congratulations! and would like to learn something from you!

Was it just a general feeling or evidence? Perhaps it's hard for you to tell because it's one of your favourite lit-theories (I'm into intertextuality and in German texts I see them everywhere and couldn't explain how, it's a feeling of "I read that before" so I would understand it when you are not able to give "queer-advice").

But when you have evidence before DH that's list-able I would appreciate that very much!

(part 1)

[sigune.livejournal.com]

First off, I have to say that, as in the case of Slughorn, the things that strike me as potentially signifying that Dumbledore is homosexual do not have to mean that he is indeed that. They just gave me indications in that direction, so that JKR's statement didn't come as a surprise.

Second, the elements I am about to quote are to a certain extent stereotypical or clichéd. I can very well imagine a gay character not displaying these characteristics.

Third, Dumbledore, like Slughorn, has the right age to fall within the period that I am accustomed to study. It's possible that I find them easy to recognise as homosexual because they fit the patterns that I happen to have been studying closely, and my modern gaydar might be a bit less accute :-).

Dumbledore then. Let's start with the most stereotypical things: he is self-consciously eccentric, flamboyant, and unconventional. He has a particular style, a manner and a sense of humour (absurd, ironic, a mixture of formality and odd elements of vulgarity, saying/doing the unexpected) that make homosexuality plausible to me. There are straight men who display a similar style (off the top of my head: Casanova is probably one), but of a character pictured this way, I won't be surprised if I am told he is gay.

He is brilliant, he knows it, and he doesn't hide it. He has a particular sort of vanity and immodesty that I associate with gay geniuses. That's probably because of my Wilde thing; I can't be sure that straight male geniuses aren't liable to it :-). The ones that I have read about aren't, but there are many that I have not read about, so...

Dumbledore profiles himself as a young man's mentor. Now that is a great classic of homoerotic relationships, of course. Nothing carnal has to happen for it to be, well, gay. Also, there was never any hint of Mrs Dumbledore or Dumbledore Jr. The gay man as a celibate tutor, shaper of young minds, is - well, as I said, a gay stereotype. Again, not every celibate tutor has to be gay, but it is a fact that homosexual men, especially in a not-so-tolerant past era, often sought refuge in positions that required celibacy, such as Catholic priesthood or becoming a university don (back in the old days, the dons were not allowed to marry).

(part 2)

[sigune.livejournal.com]

The elements I mentioned so far were present from book one; but I guess I got my confirmation in book 5. There is something about Dumbledore's discussion and confession to Harry at the end of OotP that made me think, "yep, I knew it." It's Dumbledore's attitude towards and feelings for Harry. Don't get me wrong: I don't think Dumbledore is in love with Harry. What I do think is that in this passage, and subsequent interactions between the two of them in HBP and DH, show that Dumbledore's relationship with Harry is - well, let's say that he doesn't behave like a general towards a soldier (because he cares too much about Harry for that); but neither does he behave like a father or a grandfather (because he does not care the way a parent or surrogate parent would; I think the difference with Sirius is striking), who would refuse to sacrifice their (grand)son, like Lucius and Narcissa will do everything to keep their son alive. Harry is dear to Dumbledore as a young, plucky, and reasonably good-looking stranger. He's Dumbledore's type. And it is clear to me that Dumbledore doesn't understand how Snape (whom I perceive as a little effeminate, but very straight, as opposed to Dumbledore, whom I don't think effeminate at all) can look at beautiful, spirited Harry and not like him.

I am not at all sure that when JKR created Dumbledore, she thought, "Well, he's gay and I'm going to write him like that"; I think it quite probable that she wrote him with all his quirks and his strange affection for Harry and no family life and then thought, "Hey look, he's actually quite gay." Dumbledore's feelings for Harry seem to be to a large extent JKR's own, and she is a straight woman who said in the same interview that she married Harry - her husband is like him. Dumbledore's attraction to Harry is JKR's attraction to Harry; therefore Dumbledore is homosexual. The point is, for me, that homosexual Dumbledore is on the whole plausible. The characteristics she has given him didn't need to point at homosexuality, but Dumbledore's homosexuality is not hard to believe in view of how he has been pictured.

Re: Dumbledore gay

[sigune.livejournal.com]

I, too, didn't find Dumbledore quite as likeable after DH as I had before; he was too ruthless for me to think him the good person that Harry appears to think him. But to be quite honest, I don't think that JKR's characterisation of him is at all gay-bashing. I am not even sure what came first: her characterisation of him, or her thinking of him as gay.

Personally I am not at all bothered about the fact that the one character who is confirmed as being gay is not perfectly wonderful. I am allergic to gay-bashing, but I roll my eyes at the idealisation of homosexuality as well. Homosexuality is human, and human beings are flawed. Dumbledore as a character is interesting, and possibly more so because it turns out he was flawed and could be pretty ruthless. The important thing to me is that unlike other twists in canon and the interviews, the revelation of Dumbledore's homosexuality does not strike me as contrived or unexpected. It has, as far as I am concerned, a firm foundation in the text.

As for the goat sex, it is not the only instance in which JKR treads a fine line in the books ("Hey Lavender! I can see Uranus!" did make me frown at Ron's, er, interests, but that was only a mild instance). Surely I cannot be the only reader who thinks that there are very strong hints at Fenrir Greyback being a pedophile? The series is, to me at least, a very odd mixture between adult and children's material.

These last few interviews seem almost manic in a way.
Yes, I agree. I wish she would stop giving them. She doesn't seem to be able to leave well enough alone. I mean, not that I think she did a particularly brilliant job tying her series together, but interviews are not a remedy to everything she neglected to do in her text.

[ook.livejournal.com]

JKR gave us a closeted gay character, so it's a bit of a hollow victory. :P

Who knows? Perhaps all this media and fan attention might fire her up to write another HP book? ;)

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Well, of course he's closeted! He was traumatised by the Wilde trials, which were all over the papers when Albie was a fourteen-year-old budding "homosexualist"/"Uranist"/"pederast"/"unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort"! ;-)

Umm - would she please not write another HP book? She's had her chance. I wish she would leave the rest to us instead of killing all our fantasies :/.

[nemesister.livejournal.com]

Yay yay yay! I called Albus/Gellert canon ever since HBP and it was only ... a quarter in jest. No idea if I ever cared for Dumbles' sexuality before, but right now I can't imagine that I ever saw him as straight, because that's just all kinds of wrong!

[sigune.livejournal.com]

I was really frightened for a while that in DH Rowling would tell us that Dumbledore had (had) a wife and offspring. That would be so off, somehow. I just knew he was gay; I would have hated her to prove me wrong XD. But truth to tell, I never expected her to be so explicit the other way around!

This isn't going to make me write Dumbleslash. It's just one of these things I like to have at the back of my head :-).

[prelud.livejournal.com]

Congrats!

I am hopeless in recognizing homosexuality in people/characters. Usually it`s because it`s unimportant to me, I guess, but I also have a knack for making friends with closeted homosexuals (or perhaps I`d better say had, because it`s likely that even my younger friends all already came to tems with what they are) and having no clue until they tell me. This includes close friends, people I slept with in one bed, a girl that was in love with me, people I knew for years, since I was 15...

Perhaps the fact that I prefer gen has something to do with it.

[sigune.livejournal.com]

I'm a gen person too, really; and my gaydar, such as it is, only ever works when it comes to literature. In real life I'm quite hopeless, especially with regard women. Maybe one reason is that I don't care about people's sexual orientation. I like them as a person or I don't; whether they love men or women or both or neither is just not important to me.

I guess that in literature things are simpler than in life. The signals are easier to pick up, and a writer composes a character with a degree of deliberation. In the case of Slughorn (whose existence seems to have slipped my mind when I wrote my post), he appears gay because the historical person on whom he was modelled was gay too. With Dumbledore I had a hunch because he showed several characteristics that I have previously encountered in books and study - very simple things like the fact that he is a flamboyant, eccentric, unmarried scholar who in his position as a mentor to a young boy/man appears in a classic pattern of Greek love. He didn't have to turn out to be homosexual, but he certainly fits some typical (perhaps clichéd) patterns.

Is this important? Well, no. I just have a big grin on my face because at least one of my pet theories got confirmed :-).

[blue-nadir.livejournal.com]

Now don't get me wrong - but I never really viewed Dumbledore as a sexual being, yanno? So him being confirmed gay (or hell, even straight!) is downright nauseating to me because I just canNOT imagine him getting his freak on without going "eeeew". XD

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Well, that's unfair to the elderly!

;-)

...No, I know what you mean. She really didn't have to give us that information. But she seems unable to stop babbling at the moment, and for once she said something that doesn't crush one of my favourite theories...

[veradee.livejournal.com]

I didn't pick up on that at all, although I suppose that one could have read it this way. I don't really care about Dumbledore anymore in the first place, but I don't see why she now felt the need to mention it. If it was important to her, she could have made it more obvious in the book. And the "revelations" about Neville et al are just completely at random. I really wish she would just shut up.

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Well, I totally agree, there is no need for her to throw these bits of info around. She's told her story; she can leave the rest to us now, kthxbai. Dumbledore's sexual preferences are clearly not an important issue in the story. It's just a fun detail for me because JKR unexpectedly confirms a hunch I have had all this time :-).

[sophierom.livejournal.com]

Yay for being right !

I'll be honest and say I had no idea. ;-D But I like the angst of a Dumbledore/Grindelwald pairing!

Hope all is going well for you!

[sigune.livejournal.com]

All is going reasonably well, thanks, though by now I am heartily sick of the job :P. I'd much rather be writing fic and meta about Snape and Dumbledore, and draw my snape_after_dh picture! *g*

[venturous1.livejournal.com]

bluenadir says "I never really viewed Dumbledore as a sexual being."

I've concluded that Jo was bound by adherence to the genre of children's lit to depict adults as sanitized and sexless. Who's intimate life do we know anything about? Ron & Hermione's unstated longings, Harry and Cho's chaste kiss. Hmmm, something missing?

The married Weasleys, the Dursleys, not even they had a whiff of erotic life.

[sigune.livejournal.com]

I have to say that whenever Rowling did deal with sexual attraction, especially in HBP and DH, I snorted because I thought it was badly done. Her way of writing this kind of attraction just didn't work for me. She is (IMHO) much better at writing friendships like Harry-Ron and Harry-Hermione, or a relationship like Harry-Dumbledore. So I guess that if she had tried to be more explicit about Dumbledore I wouldn't have liked it XD.

I thought of the children's lit thing too, and I can't say I was ever bothered by the books' lack of eroticism. It's a bit puzzling to me that she starts to throw out things like Dumbledore's sexuality. I can see no reason for it. I'm not annoyed by it, just because it confirms one of my pet theories, but I think she would be better off leaving her books alone...

[zefla.livejournal.com]

A smart intelligent funny gay man? That smacks of Stephen Fry to me. Maybe thats why they got himto read the books!

[sigune.livejournal.com]

I thought it was because he has a beautiful voice :-). The only fault I can find with him is his pronunciation of the name of Severus, but most people disagree with me *g*.

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

congratulations on your prescience (sp?)!

I have to admit that I'm not terribly surprised, but, like Cardigirl, I'm not entirely sure this is a positive development. After all, Dumbledore, after DH, seems extraordinarily cold, manipulative, self-absorbed and, in his treatment of Severus, downright criminal. It does seem a bit like gay-bashing that he's homosexual as well.

The person my sister and I had pegged as gay was Sirius Black, because he seems extremely aware of his own prettiness, as some gay men can be, and also a bit self-absorbed. And he has that thing for James, which he seems to have transferred to Harry. OTOH, none of the others of that generation ever struck me as gay. Slughorn, like Dumbledore, does seem likely, though.

It's also true that Rowling's interviews seem to be getting steadily weirder. I'm glad you are happy about this, but it's not information we really needed to have, is it? I really think she just said this for the shock value and to keep people talking about her books.

[sigune.livejournal.com]

After all, Dumbledore, after DH, seems extraordinarily cold, manipulative, self-absorbed and, in his treatment of Severus, downright criminal. It does seem a bit like gay-bashing that he's homosexual as well.

I find I can't agree with you there. Dumbledore lost lots of credit with you and me and several other readers, but I am sure that if Rowling viewed him the same way that we do now, she would not have had Harry praising him quite so much, and neither would she have called him "the epitome of goodness". I don't think she realises how he comes across - she doesn't seem to be aware of the unspeakable cruelty of Dumbledore's treatment of Snape, for example. She seems to think it is justified, or something. We are supposed to see Dumbledore as flawed, not inhumane. And I don't think his being gay, or her thinking of him as such, has anything to do with gaybashing or demeaning his character further. Apart from that, I don't think that having a gay character who is not all nice and kind and lovely and perfect is gaybashing. If it seems silly to picture gays as worse than anybody else, it seems equally silly to picture them as better than anybody else.

The person my sister and I had pegged as gay was Sirius Black, because he seems extremely aware of his own prettiness, as some gay men can be, and also a bit self-absorbed.

Sirius always struck me as a macho with a lot of self-esteem. Straight men can be pretty vain too! I never thought of Sirius as possibly gay, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything :-).

it's not information we really needed to have, is it?

No, not at all. I have no idea why she said it; she really didn't have to.

[elphaba-of-oz.livejournal.com]

At fisrt I was thrilled to hear that Dumbledore is gay. That's sure to upset the bible-thumping fundies who think Harry Potter is a gateway drug to hell.

Now that the news has settled in I'm a bit angry at JKR over it. If she was really interested in promoting tolerance she had every opportunity to do it. If the wizarding community is anything like human populations all over the world, then %10 of wizards are gay. Show me a Hogwarts staff lounge with 20 professors sitting around in armchairs and 2 of them are almost certainly homosexuals. If Slytherin house has 200 sutdents, 20 of them are likely to be gay, whether they have come to terms with it or not. A number of the students on the hogwarts express were seen off at platform 9 3/4 by two mommies or two daddies or two mommies and a dad. The black family tree very likely has a few unmarried, homosexual dead ends.

If JKR really had wanted her books to model tolerance she could have shown us old Aunt Muriel Weasley arriving at Bill and Fleur's wedding with her lifelong companion Esmerelda. She could have shown Madame Hooch and Minerva McGonnagal holding hands and dabbing away one another's tears at Professor Dumbledore's funeral. In other words, she could have shown us ordinary gay couples doing the same things that heterosexual couples do.

Instead of giving us little glimpses of this particular flavor of otherness, JKR has chosen as her solitary homosexual the one character in the series who is as far removed as possible from the act of sex. He's past his prime. He's cerebral. He's grandfatherly. He's so clean that you can eat off of him. In his position of power and responsibility at a school full of young children his behavior is always circumspect. Nothing about Dumbledore says "sex" of any flavor.

Instead of showing us happy, loving, fulfilled, stable gay partnerships or families JKR chooses to hand us an elderly, closeted, celibate, male. More to the point, that elderly, closeted, celibate male's one great love was both unrequited and tragic. In JKR's wizarding universe homosexuality equals tragedy, solitude, sterility and sorrow.

How do we even know that Dumbledore is gay? We know because Jo told us in an interview. Very few of us came up with Gay!Dumbledore from the JKR's text. You noticed some subtext, but it wasn't very obvious. I didn't notice it at all. It's a problem that the one gay character in the Harry Potter books is gay only because the author told us so in an interview.

Look, Jo, if you want to put something in your work, put it in your work. Don't just prattle on about it in interviews. You should be able to show us, so you don't have to tell us.

Thanks JKR, for outing Dumbledore. That will really do a lot to help gay youths come to terms with their identity. That will really promote tolerance amoung your readers for generations to come. Yup, you bet it will.

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Now that the news has settled in I'm a bit angry at JKR over it. If she was really interested in promoting tolerance she had every opportunity to do it.

To be honest, if her books were to be everything JKR likes to say that they are, or wanted them to be, JKR had to be a much better writer than she is. My own impression is that she means well, but lacked the skill to live up to her ambitions, and she doesn't seem to have had decent editors who could point out to her that she did not quite create the effect that she aimed for.

I don't think that GLBTQ rights were high on her agenda; they are very clearly outranked by racism, for one. It would be difficult (and wrong, IMO) to read her books and conclude from them that she is pleading for intolerance; but on the other hand, the tolerance which she seems to think she has been pleading for is in some cases pretty muddled, mainly, I suspect, because of lack of skill on her part. For example, I doubt she would have expected a reader to go lose their esteem for Dumbledore after DH. I think he comes across as far more cynical and manipulative than she intended him to be. Likewise, she thinks she redeemed Slytherin to a large extent, whereas many readers were severly disappointed because all we got was Slughorn ruining his pyjamas, Snape dying by snake, and Draco being slightly unwilling to kill Harry.

Thanks JKR, for outing Dumbledore. That will really do a lot to help gay youths come to terms with their identity.

I think this is very unfair towards Rowling. Surely it must be obvious that the books are not about helping gay youngsters deal with their sexuality? I think her message of tolerance is reasonably clear, even if it doesn't say anything specific about gay people. I do agree, though, that her revelation of Dumbledore's sexual orientation is a bit of a throwaway thing and the purpose pretty unclear. In fact I doubt that there is a purpose. If she wanted to make a point of it, she should have done it in the text, and if it wasn't important, it was pretty pointless her mentioning it. I don't think she thought twice about it when she answered that question. She's throwing around tidbits like these all the time; only now we all make a big deal of it...

[authoress-susan.livejournal.com]

It makes sense with the whole Grindlewald subplot too.

*waves* It's actually me, SIW. Please friend my alternate journal.

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Oh, a new journal? Eeks! Are you leaving fandom?

... You have just been friended, by the way :-).