We'll Have A Gay Old Time

For the one person out there just emerging from a month in their Sensory Deprivation Tank, author JK Rowling, of Harry Potter fame, recently 'outed' one of the characters from that series of books. I read the first Potter years ago - on a 'book exchange' deal with young Tammy, who read War of the Worlds for me - and thought, "Yeah, nice enough for a kids' book but give me Neil Gaiman any day of the week" and haven't picked one up since. So I wouldn't know Dumbledore from Rumpelstiltskin, personally. But apparently he is a homosexual, according to the one person in the world who would authoritatively know: the woman who created him from whole cloth.

Which, I read today, has caused a furor in various circles. The Harry Potter books are among the most-read stories in the history of the universe - my having not read most of them notwithstanding - and so the number of people potentially impacted by this revelation is pretty significant. Millions and millions of readers are possibly re-examining their feelings on the character, in light of this new information.

What I love about this story is that Rowling is making a statement, whether she intended to or not (I suspect that she did, but I'm only guessing). She's saying, in a way that most people couldn't, "This old fellow that many of you adored... he fancied other men!" She's able to say that because she owns the rights to all of the HP characters outright, and has been very smart about controlling them every step of the way. If she says one of them is gay, there's not a person in the world who can contradict her... no matter how much some of them might want to! I applaud her for this, and she actually rose in my estimation by using her unique position to put a friendly face on a segment of the population who still take a lot of shit, despite in-roads having been made in the form of shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Will & Grace. Good for her, I say!

Of course, on the other hand, maybe Rowling simply did it as a poke in the eye to all the conservatives who complained about the un-Christian nature of all that magic stuff!