Come Out, Come Out

Dumbledore has tumbled out of the closet.

That's right, J.K. Rowling's wonderfully wise, wand-wielding wizard who captured the hearts of millions is, in fact, gay. News of the post-mortem outing of the fictional father fixture in Harry's life was blogged about and even mentioned on CNN. The Leaky Cauldron, a Web site devoted to all things Harry Potter, discusses it. Heck, even The New York Times has devoted words to the revelation. I have no qualms with the literary genius that is the Harry Potter series, however, my question is simply this: How is Dumbledore's sexuality relevant? Furthermore, why on earth has it become so prevalent a part of the discourse?

The best article I've found comes from Salon, and is definitely worth the read. Rebecca Traister writes:

Dumbledore's gayness is one of the pieces of bonus information about her characters that she's been dispensing steadily since the publication of her magical swan song, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Thanks to Rowling's loose lips, the Potter universe continues to make news even after its end. In her desire to control and describe it, she's turning a modern assumption about what authorship means inside out. Whoever said the author was dead sure hadn't meant Joanne Rowling.

Rowling outed Dumbledore at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 19, in response to a fan who asked her if Potter's powerful mentor, who believed so mightily in the power of love, had ever been in love himself. "My truthful answer to you," Rowling said, was that "I always thought of Dumbledore as gay." According to reports, this sentence drew an immediate ovation from the crowd. Rowling continued by explaining that Albus had, as a young man, fallen for the talented wand-wielder Gellert Grindelwald. Rowling's discussion of their bond, an important plot point in her last Harry Potter novel, was incisive and moving; she told the audience that Dumbledore's youthful passion for Grindelwald blinded him, as it does so many of us mere muggles, to Grindelwald's flaws, leaving him shattered when he discovered Grindelwald to be seriously evil. Rowling further revealed that at a recent read-through of the script for the sixth Harry Potter movie, she'd had to nix a line of dialogue about Dumbledore's affection for a young woman. She said she'd passed the screenwriter a note reading "Dumbledore's gay!"

My next question, then, is whether Richard Harris or Michael Gambon were let on to Dumbledore's little secret before they played him in the films. Traister continues:

I am a devoted reader and admirer of J.K. Rowling, and it honestly pains me a bit to say this, but from a literary perspective, she's out of control here. Her abundant generosity with information is surely a response to a vast, insatiable fan base that does not have a high tolerance for never-ending suspense, ambiguity or nuance. As she told the "Today" show's Meredith Vieira back in July, "I'm dealing with a level of obsession in some of my fans that will not rest until they know the middle names of Harry's great-great-grandparents."

Rowling naturally wants to provide answers for these heartbroken obsessives who perhaps are too young to know the satisfying pleasures of perpetual yearning and feel that they must must must know how much money Harry makes and whether Luna has kids.

It would also be understandable if, after more than a decade of telling stories about this world and these characters, Rowling is unable to stop. She has been a great and comprehensive builder of a fictional universe, and she's famous for keeping reams of folders containing the back stories and astrological signs of every major and minor character ever to appear in her pages. One of the things that made the Potter books so good was the sense that Rowling had utter mastery over every corner of her realm. Who could blame her for wanting to keep the kids happy by doling out bits of it? It's not as though Rowling would be setting a precedent: J.R.R. Tolkien spent much of his post-Middle-earth life tinkering with the details of the world he created, and delighting and gratifying his adherents by providing them with additional information about it.

But when too much of the back story (and, more disconcertingly, the future story) gets revealed –- especially in an age in which an author is not simply sending letters to readers as Tolkien did, but making utterances that will be disseminated and analyzed by a global network of Web sites -- it seems to have not so much a gratifying effect as a deadening one.

I, for one, don't understand the relevance of Dumbledore's sexuality to the text. I suppose one could argue that it offers readers a more thorough understanding of Dumbledore's relationship with Grindelwald, although after having read the books I was not left in need of such an affirmation. Perhaps it would be better to leave certain things to the imagination.

The word dumbledore is actually a 1787 Old English word for bumblebee, I learned on an episode of Who Wants to be a Millionaire last year (it so happened to be the $250,000 question). It's no surprise that Dumbledore's gayness has made headline news, but now that we all know, I'm sure he'd just as soon like for us all to buzz off. Or maybe J.K. Rowling herself should leave well enough alone.