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

[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.

[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!

[zefla.livejournal.com]

Yeah but people did that with Larry Nivens Ringworld and he wrote about 3 books off the back of what the audience said and also defended the Ringworld to scientists who didn't think it would work. Maybe she's trying that approach. The series is done- maybe focus on another character and see what falls out of the tree.

(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.

[ellecain.livejournal.com]

There's a huge demand for it, so it's also the audience who is not letting go; and it's such a wide audience

Exactly, it's not just her. Even if I decide not to read her interviews, I see ten posts on my f-list discussing how Dumbledore is gay. There's a huge demand for these answers and for the upcoming encyclopedia.

It's quite interesting to watch, really.

It is, it's very interesting! On the whole though, I feel that these answers limit canon more than they open it up - mostly because it tends to stick to her interpretation of her own books which is heavily slanted towards Harry. So if one asks a question about Harry's life or the people he loved one can generally get coherent answers, but when it comes to those characters she doesn't care about the answers rarely fit with the existing canon, making the fans go WTF? Where did that come from?

Re: (part 2)

[ellecain.livejournal.com]

Dumbledore's attraction to Harry is JKR's attraction to Harry

Oh, please, please write a psychoanalytic reading of this? A la Taming the Price? You know you want to... She even said Dumbledore's detachment was a quality of her own that her ister pointed out to her. And the part about Dumbledore -as -author pulling the strings of the plot and standing in for JKR's exposition half the time. I think it's ripe for a psychoanalytic reading. :-)

[sigune.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.

Re: (part 2)

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Aww. Well, to be honest, I don't really have the right background to do Freudian readings. I'm not really into that angle; mostly I avoid it. In the case of Rowling it definitely strikes me as useful, but I don't think I could do it myself... Sorry!

I do remember that quote of JKR's sister's very well, and it does fascinate me. It may explain a lot of my problems with the Potter books. To me many of the principal characters seem cold, insensitive and even a little inhumane. If JKR is as 'cold' and reserved as her sister said she is, it goes some way towards explaining why she doesn't feel the need to somehow mend or explain the 'unnatural' (to me) detachment of a Dumbledore, a Harry or a Hermione. She just doesn't see it that way. To her that detachment is probably a mark of strength, or something.

[bluestocking79.livejournal.com]

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.

Hmm...I can actually easily picture Snape being uncomfortable or unsettled by homosexuality. I think that might be because of his background. Coming from Northern England and being working-class, I think he'd have been raised in a culture that views homosexuality with a certain degree of suspicion, if not outright hostility.

I can see Snape as possibly being bi, but I think it might also be something that he wrestle with, if he chose to acknowledge it at all. I suspect it would unnerve him.

Re: (part 1)

[sander123.livejournal.com]

First of all: thank you very much for your efforts! I appreciate it very much and I'm loudly cheering about the merits of the internet: I asked a humble silly question and got a elaborate scholarly answer! :D

Your answer lessened a certain degree of my dismay with the Dumbledore-outing. I was judging it more with modern homosexual way of live (I'm at my mothers place, my brother watches telly, this moment they sing YMCA ;)) You are putting it back into the right historical frame it belongs to.

You really taught me something with it. I would like to encourage you to make a post on its own about it!

I'm now reconsidering all the (academic) rumors about the probable gayness of 19th and early 20-century-writers I love and study. I have to reconsider a lot of things. First of all the attitude towards their own geniality.

"The gay man as a celibate tutor" that's a very interesting point. One I'm very jealous of men, unfortunately it rarely happens that a female-female-relationship evolves to a mentor-mentée-one (there's often the jealousy). (And my attempts to coax elder men into a mentor-relationship got completely havoc, after months or years, sexuality kicks in :( and I had to end it.)

Re: (part 2)

[sander123.livejournal.com]

Very intersting thoughts about love - Dumbledore makes now more sense to me. I was clinging to tight on the grand-father-concept - and judged by that he was too cruel, but I couldn't see him as the cold-hearted general some like to see him.

"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."

Fascinating! They speak completely different languages in the "Prince's-tale" then. I try not to start again about Snape. But it's very important for me, that effeminisation (and I completely agree about that, concerning Snape) has nothing to do with gayness.

Thank you very much again for spending so much time in writing out your thoughts for me! :)

[todayiamadaisy]

I've been thinking about it, and what I think is happening is that Jo and (parts of) the audience are continuing the relationship they had between books. Between books, people would be trying to guess what was going to happen and Jo would give out little tidbits and hints and everyone had a great time. But that doesn't work now, because canon is closed and there's nothing more to guess.

(shrugs) This is weird, because I normally don't get involved in fandom stuff, I just ignore it. Basically, Jo's happy saying this stuff and I'm happy ignoring it... everyone wins! :-)

[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.

Re: (part 2)

[purpleygirl.livejournal.com]

Dumbledore doesn't understand how Snape can look at beautiful, spirited Harry and not like him.

I'm sorry, but that is just so insightful and clinches it for me! I think deep down I wondered why Dumbledore was unfriendly toward Snape for him not liking Harry... even though Dumbledore accepted that Harry had to die. It's not fatherly, neither is it overt attraction as in paedophilia. It's just kind of... blinkered admiration, I guess. Which really could explain why he treats Snape like dirt sometimes for his stubborn Harry-hate.

You know, I wonder if this is one reason he was so tolerant to the Marauders? Because they did attempt murder ...

God, I'm freaked out that this all makes a kind of sense. *g*

[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.

Re: (part 2)

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Hee! I'm really glad you found this helpful :D.

I do think Dumbledore's tolerance towards the Marauders was mainly due to the fact that he was really conducting a war and couldn't be bothered with 'trivial' problems like a couple of Gryffindor berks bullying a Slytherin. But yes, I wouldn't be surprised if the fact that Snape is unappealing didn't help matters. Snape never at any point charms Dumbledore. Dumbledore takes him back because he thinks it is the right thing to do and because he recognises a useful tool when he sees one, but he never seems feel for Snape the way he feels for, and connects to, Harry. This last thing is something that I wouldn't have guessed until "The Prince's Tale", though. Previously I thought that Dumbledore really cared about Snape and understood him.

[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*

[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...

[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...

Unfair to JKR

[elphaba-of-oz.livejournal.com]

I'm not feeling terribly charitable towards Ms. Rowling right now. I'm tired of her pointless revalations about characters (especially Snape) that have nothing to do with what she wrote in the books. There is nothing more to guess. Canon has been set in stone. I want her to just shut up and let us all live happily ever after with the characters as they have come to life in our imaginations. I would like to slap her.

[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*.