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!

[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 :)

[todayiamadaisy]

but obviously the woman can't let go otherwise she'd stop talking about it

Is it just her, though? 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 too: adults, kids, hardcore fans, casual fans, even non-fans who just watch the news. As an author, she's in a unique position: no-one else deals with this sort of attention. Possibly Tolkien might but (a) he's dead and (b) Middle-earth was painted on a much bigger canvas so fans' interests are more widely dispersed. The Potterverse, though, is a small, intimate place, and her interviews simultaneously expand canon (with details of how she sees life outside the novels) and contract it (by trying to limit what interpretations the reader can make about the novels). It's quite interesting to watch, really.

[purpleygirl.livejournal.com]

Isn't it interesting to watch like a car crash is interesting, though!? ;P

(I agree with all your points, btw. I wish JKR would stop trying to expand on that bad-enough-as-it-is epilogue.)

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

I think it's rather understandable for the audience not to let go so quickly.
jkr wrote the last book, she had been prepared, she knew it all, while we all had to wait and bite our fingernails. imo, she should not give in like that.
it's done, it's over, and although many fans still demand answers and ask questions she shouldn't just spill everything out. why not let them all guess? I'd rather think about it myself (well, of that what is left. she destroyed the story anyway, imo).

I just can't believe how everything went down like this :\
the last book, her comments about snape afterwards and now the random revelations about characters. wtf.

[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?

[sander123.livejournal.com]

"It's quite interesting to watch, really."

I try to make you my role-model and look at it with academic curiosity and detachment...

Thanks for the advice :)

[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!

[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? ;)

[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!

[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.

[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

[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]

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 :-).

[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...

[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 :-).

[blue-nadir.livejournal.com]

Yeah! What the hell is with the babbling?! Shut the hell up, woman! You've already crushed my enjoyment of the series!

Now... if she said something like "Snape aint dead"... I'd perk right up...

[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 :-).

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately the line she has been taking about Snape in the last few interviews isn't too promising in that respect... :/

Tsk. She really doesn't know what we want to hear, does she? Or she does, but she's being stubbornly perverse :-).

[blue-nadir.livejournal.com]

Put me down for £50 on that last option. ;)

[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 :/.

[veradee.livejournal.com]

Slughorn did appear gay to me, by the way, although I don't quite remember anymore why.

[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!

[nemesister.livejournal.com]

Oops, when I said HBP, I of course meant DH, I'm not that clairvoyant!

Yes, I never expected her to be that explicit either. I don't even know why. I guess I conditioned myself not to think of author's intent when it comes to slash ships - or I just don't care about author's intent when something makes perfect sense in canon anyway and since she never spoke about Dumbles' sexuality or anyone's homosexuality I didn't really expect her to start.

Anyway, awesome.