A Gay Potter Character?/Remus and Tonks/Trouble with Being Gay/JKR shut up

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 178251

Susan:
> So who does the homophobic mocking? Dudley who is a
> bully and who
> uses any weapon he can against Harry...
> and Rita Skeeter...gosh she's someone I think we all
> want to
> emulate...BUT she is not accusing DD of being gay,
> she's accusing him
> of being a child sexual abuser, which is probably one
> of the worst
> things any human being can be. (If we assume which I
> think it likely
> that that is the meaning of "unnatural".)

Magpie:
It doesn't matter who does the mocking, because I'm not claiming 
that these characters speak for the author or that we're encouraged 
to be like them (or that Ron is particularly homophobic). I was 
listing all the times there were *explicit* references to same sex 
relationships in the books, and these are it, along with the Nancy 
Boy comment. It's too roundabout to make these things a statement 
against homophobia. Is Dudley's line funny because he's being 
homophobic, because he suggested Harry could have a boyfriend or 
because he suggested Cedric was his boyfriend? I think a lot of 
people might just read it as the second.

Carol:
To bring in a romantic attraction would, IMO, take away from DD's 
true desire or true temptation--power.

Magpie:
I hadn't thought of that, but that's a good point. I disagree with 
all the claims that it shouldn't be in the books because it would 
somehow be distracting or there's no way to put it in easily, but I 
do think you have a point that it muddies things. She compared them 
to Bellatrix/Voldemort which I think shows this could be done just 
fine if you connect the attraction to the power of the other person. 
However, since she didn't do that it's not canon, period, that I can 
see. I might thing they had an affair but the affair is like the 
friendship--the important part is the temptation of Grindenwald's 
ideas.

That said, I do *not* understand the leap (not that Carol is making 
it) that Dumbledore being gay makes him attracted to teenagers. He's 
been a single man who's headmaster for years--why does it suddenly 
become more sexual because of his orientation? He could have placed 
himself there to be near pretty young girls as well as boys, and all 
the teachers we see are single! (Actually it's Slughorn who pinged 
me as liking to be around the pretty boys among many other types.) 
Dumbledore placed himself with teenagers because he decided to be a 
teacher and this is pretty much the only school there is in this 
world. He has a lot of relationships outside the school as well.

Catlady:
I, however, *am* disturbed by it, because what is on the page looks 
to
me like Lupin never loved Tonks except as a friend, never wanted to
marry her or live with her, never wanted to have a child, and got
dragged into all those things against his (weak) will. He never 
seemed
particularly happy to be with her in public, gave no impression that
he was happy to be getting laid regularly, tried to run away with
Harry as an excuse to run away from her pregnancy.

Magpie:
That's how it came across to me too. I know that Lupin was supposed 
to be finally taking a chance in letting himself be happy (once 
Harry set him straight) but it came across to me as just a sad, fake 
marriage. I never saw S/R as canon *until* DH, at which point I had 
to laugh when Lupin wound up appearing with Sirius in the afterlife, 
finally having gotten away from Tonks. (Ironically Tonks and Lupin 
were two characters many people felt were "coded" as gay, so their 
being married seemed like one more "everybody should be straight!" 
message.) The only time Remus is in a scene with Tonks where they 
seem basically on the same page is at Dumbledore's funeral, and 
that's pretty weak.

Lexa:
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.

Magpie:
I agree with this. Since the announcement the main thing I've read 
is all the reasons why it was good she kept it out because gay 
people and same sex romance just can't be put into a story the way 
straight characters and straight romance can--arguments that are imo 
completely untrue. The people who don't want a gay character 
still "win"--they've got a book totally without any gay characters 
at all. Harry goes through adolescence with all his peers and none 
of them are gay that we see. 

LCJ:
She was able to "go on her merry way" because she made the statement 
in a relatively limited forum and few people are aware of her 
comments. If she had made DD explicitly homosexual in the pages of 
the canon, it WOULD have generated a great deal of controversy, and 
she would have been forced to defend her decision.

Magpie:
Okay, she would have to defend it the way she defends everything 
else in the books which includes everything from murder to 
implications of bestiality. But it's hard for me to believe this 
would be particularly daunting to defend--no more so than R/Hr and 
H/G, since it seems like she has the most trouble with H/Hr 
shippers. She'd just be joining a very long list of ordinary 
authors, including many YA authors, who include gay characters in 
their books. However controversial that might be for some it's 
nothing groundbreaking in publishing, and she's got a lot more power 
than they do. And I don't think it would have dominated the reaction 
to DH if it were in the text.

I'm not sure what you mean about "few people" being aware of her 
comments, though. It's been all over the TV. Yeah there's probably 
many more who don't know about it, but it's not like by only 
announcing it at Carnegie Hall she's safe from any group that might 
attack her for it.

Magpie:
> it does still kind of surprise me that she'd be put off including
> a gay character because she feared defending it.

LCJ:
If not her, then the publisher, who WOULD fear losing book sales.

Magpie:
If that's true I'd really feel badly for Arthur Levine. It would 
break his heart to be told he had to cut gay characters from a book 
in his imprint because they were gay--and he'd probably fight tooth 
and nail to get them in there. Not that I accept this is what 
happened. It's hard for me to think that Harry Potter's book sales 
would be cut into that much because there was one gay character. 
(Meanwhile Pullman's happily writing gay angels in his best-
sellers...)

Magpie:
> I'm just saying that including a gay character in a book is a
> pretty common thing nowadays,

LCJ:
I admit I'm not intimately familiar with the modern state of 
children's literature, but I'd be surprised if homosexual characters 
are "common" occurence in children's books. That's not to say there 
are *no* children's books with homosexual characters, but I doubt 
they represent (percentage-wise) a major segment of the market.

Magpie:
They don't have to be a big percentage of the market, I'm just 
saying it's totally not unusual to have a gay character in a 
juvenile book. There's lots of them. Many YA readers are gay 
themselves or their parents are, and it's just not remarkable to 
have a gay character. 

Re: JKR "shutting up" count me in the side that thinks that she 
should. Of course she has the right to say anything she wants about 
her characters, but for many of us what she says does make our 
reading experience less pleasant. I think the way she does it makes 
it even more unpleasant, actually. There are authors who can discuss 
their works in a way that doesn't sound like they're telling you 
right from wrong, but she's not one of them. Stop telling me how to 
react to different things, don't explain characters to me in terms 
of how I should judge them, don't tell me everything that happened 
to every character for the rest of their lives. I know there are 
people who actually like this stuff and they ask questions that she 
then picks and chooses to answer (no, I don't believe for one second 
she was caught off guard by this question--didn't she pick it 
beforehand?), but there are those of us who don't at all--and there 
are authors who share our pov too. This type of thing goes totally 
against the way I read books and it doesn't add to the experience it 
damages it.

-m