I HEART JK ROWLING.
Hotsauce84
8,450 Posts
This is awesome.[i]Outing Gives Potter Passages New Meaning[/b]By HILLEL ITALIEThe Associated PressSunday, October 21, 2007; 2:06 PMNEW YORK -- With author J.K. Rowling's revelation that master wizard Albus Dumbledore is gay, some passages about the Hogwarts headmaster and rival wizard Gellert Grindelwald have taken on a new and clearer meaning.The British author stunned her fans at Carnegie Hall on Friday night when she answered one young reader's question about Dumbledore by saying that he was gay and had been in love with Grindelwald, whom he had defeated years ago in a bitter fight. '"You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me,'" Dumbledore says in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the seventh and final book in Rowling's record-breaking fantasy series.The news brought gasps, then applause at Carnegie Hall, the last stop on Rowling's brief U.S. tour, and set off thousands of e-mails on Potter fan Web sites around the world. Some were dismayed, others indifferent, but most were supportive."Jo Rowling calling any Harry Potter character gay would make wonderful strides in tolerance toward homosexuality," Melissa Anelli, webmaster of the fan site http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org, told The Associated Press. "By dubbing someone so respected, so talented and so kind, as someone who just happens to be also homosexual, she's reinforcing the idea that a person's gayness is not something of which they should be ashamed.""'DUMBLEDORE IS GAY' is quite a headline to stumble upon on a Friday evening, and it's certainly not what I expected," added Potter fan Patrick Ross, of Rutherford, N.J. "(But) a gay character in the most popular series in the world is a big step for Jo Rowling and for gay rights."Gellert Grindelwald was a dark wizard of great power, who terrorized people much in the same way Harry's nemesis, Lord Voldemort, was to do a generation later. Readers hear of him in the first book, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," in a reference to how Dumbledore defeated him. In "Deathly Hallows," readers learn they once had been best friends."Neither Dumbledore nor Grindelwald ever seems to have referred to this brief boyhood friendship in later life,'" Rowling writes. "However, there can be no doubt that Dumbledore delayed, for some five years of turmoil, fatalities, and disappearances, his attack upon Gellert Grindelwald. Was it lingering affection for the man or fear of exposure as his once best friend that caused Dumbledore to hesitate?"As a young man, Dumbledore, brilliant and powerful, had been forced to return home to look after his mentally ill younger sister and younger brother. It was a task he admits to Harry that he resented, because it derailed the bright future he had been looking forward to.Then Grindelwald, described by Rowling as "golden-haired, merry-faced," arrived after having been expelled from his own school. Grindelwald's aunt, Bathilda Bagshot, says of their meeting: "The boys took to each other at once." In a letter to Grindelwald, Dumbledore discusses their plans for gaining wizard dominance: "'(I)f you had not been expelled we would never have met.'"Potter readers had speculated about Dumbledore, noting that he has no close relationship with women and a mysterious, troubled past."Falling in love can blind us to an extent," Rowling said Friday of Dumbledore's feelings about Grindelwald, adding that Dumbledore was "horribly, terribly let down."Dumbledore's love, she observed, was his "great tragedy."
Comments
HARRY WAS ABUSED
BILLIONS CRY
Blah blah blah.
I posted this 'cause I think
the worldthe children of this fucked up, twisted, racist and homophobic world of ours need this kind of stuff, you know?Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.
what? a collective, giant brainwashing machine?
Shut up.
Shut up.
HERMIONE IS A LESBIAN
I thought this was an interesting story but I would have been a lot more into the whole thing had she actually written this into the books rather than "reveal" it later.
Of course, this will get all the anti-Potter zealots into a tizzy and that's always fun
Yeah, I read an article in the paper where she mentions that it'll give them one more reason to hate her. I love it.
I was thinking this too, but could you imagine the uproar had she written it in during its' run? How many parents would've stopped their kids from continuing? It's sad that kids need to be "tricked" (for lack of a better term), but adults would've ruined the whole thing and ended up shaming the character for his homosexuality.
It kinda works this way, no?
- "Let's see, no new book, no new movie. We need to increase sales for the Christmas season..."
- "How about a gay character announcement?"
- "I soooo love you. Brilliant. Let's make this happen, people."
- "Hey, did they fix the bending machine?"
At the end of the day, Dumbeldore's sexuality wasn't integral to the plot of the series (though one could say it's pretty damn integral to any character development). But seriously - how badly would the series had suffered if, say, in book 6, he's revealed as being gay?
Like the franchise REALLY would have suffered that badly relative to how insanely huge it was?
That said, if she ever writes a prequel...maybe covering that early history....
dammit!
I think she did write it into all the books. To the same extent that many gay literary characters have been written. Holden Caulfield? I thought the literary world was in agreement that he was gay, even though it is never stated.
I think in all future readings it will be obvious at every turn that Dumbledore is gay. First thing that comes to my mind is the way he dressed when he was a young man trying to pass for a muggle.
I've never read any Potter books.
Second that.
Genius