A Gay Potter Character?

[Lexa_C]

No: HPFGUIDX 178237

David Gunn wrote:
>
> I, for one, am less than thrilled about Rowling's announcement that
> Dumbledore was gay.  

You are not alone. My reaction and that of many (though certainly not all) other queer fans 
I've seen can most politely be summed up as "Whatever, lady. Too little, too late. 
Particularly with the trunkful of questionable baggage you've hoisted onto his back."

To out Dumbledore at this point drags in a whole lot of problematic issues including 
making him several types of ugly cliche: the Dead Gay Character, gay love as wrong, 
doomed and tragic, the "good" gay man who lives an asexual life alone. Add to that, I'm 
extremely disturbed that the single instance of gay love we see in the books is destructive 
and something to be disavowed, rather than protective/transformative/redemptive, the 
way love is more generally set up to be in the Potterverse cosmology. 

Plus, it will LITERALLY kill your family members (not just figuratively, as in "This will just 
KILL your sister/father/grandmother/Aunt Myrtle if they find out").

Do I think JKR actively set out to give those kinds of messages about gayness? No more 
than I think that many books/movies/television with questionable racial issues set out to 
be racist when they're attempting the well-meaning "colorblindness" that many people 
have been taught is supposed to be a virtue. "It doesn't MATTER that he's black/Latino/
gay/whatever. It's just a storyline we wanted to do. And isn't it great that we gave the 
black/Latino/gay/whatever guy such a great storyline?" Well. No. And it does matter. 
Because you're not writing in a vacuum. And when you do THAT particular storyline with 
THAT particular character, the cultural and historical baggage that comes along with his 
blackness/Latino-ness/gayness/whateverness makes the result questionable and 
potentially offensive. 

I realize that the Doomed, Tragic Teenaged Love of a Lifetime aspect of Grindelwald gives 
even more resonance to Dumbledore's interaction with Snape, and that they now share the 
Doomed Tragic Teenaged Love of a Lifetime .. thing - the difference is that Snape is not 
the only heterosexual we see in the books and he doesn't have to carry the weight of all 
heterosexuality in the wizarding world on his shoulders. There's plenty of other 
heterosexual characters, so Snape acts out merely one facet of a complex view of 
heterosexuality. (Well, nominally complex. I'm not going to get started on that, right now.)

> I think Rowling is throwing the gay community a bone,
> and then expects us to be grateful for it.

She's going to have a while to wait, at least from my perspective. The way this was done 
makes it look cheap and manipulative, IMO, and not terribly sensitive to some very real 
issues of gay character portrayal. My reaction is to want her to stop. patronizing. me.

David:
>> Why can't there be a main character who just happens
>> to be gay?

Petra, with an evil grin:
>There is. See Albus Dumbledore. His being gay just happens to
>be a footnote in the Harry Potter canon.

His being gay as a footnote is not the same as him just happening to be gay. If he just 
happened to be gay, he would BE gay in the books, not merely as an apocryphal 
afterthought - it's just that he would be gay without his character being ABOUT him being 
gay. Just as Dean is black without his character being about being black. But we know he's 
black. It's in the books. We're told he's black by JKR's descriptions of him. She doesn't 
leave it up to us to guess that he's black, because the fact is, when you don't actively show 
a character's race or ethnicity - or sexuality - the general assumption becomes that he's 
not-black, not-gay, not-"Other." As a case in point, I give you Blaise Zabini (thank you, HP 
fandom, for providing me with the best example, ever, of why "colorblind" writing doesn't 
work).

If Dumbledore being gay is truly supposed to be a non-issue, why isn't he openly gay 
anywhere in the books? And I don't believe the arguments that it's not relevant to the plot 
or that Harry wouldn't notice. We know that Ron is heterosexual, that Hermione is, that 
Ginny is, Dean, Lavender, Percy, Bill, Fleur, Remus, Tonks, Hagrid, Snape, Sirius, that 
Teddy freakin' Lupin is, for god's sake. What's the relevance of all that? And Harry notices 
it all, or we wouldn't know it. All those charcters, and more, get to BE heterosexual in ways 
that Dumbledore does not get to BE gay - nor does any other character. Nowhere in these 
books can she have a single out queer character, Dumbledore or anyone else? Nowhere AT 
ALL, does Harry ever notice any kind of queerness? Sorry, I'm not buying the argument 
that Dumbledore's sexuality isn't in the books or shouldn't be there because it shouldn't 
matter. Not when there's an entire litany of characters who are shown being heterosexual 
while queerness is invisible, and the single face of gayness that we're given - after the 
fact, in an extra-textual interview - has his queerness so elided within the text that it can 
be written off as eccentricity. Not when Dumbledore was outed in such a way that allows 
people to pick and choose whether they want to believe it or not, in a way that some 
readers might never even know about it.

Too little, too late, too questionably portrayed.

-Lexa