[HPforGrownups] Canon citation requested (was Re: The problems with DD being gay

[k12listmomma]

No: HPFGUIDX 178445

> Skipping the whole pedophile/teenageboyophile (whatever it's called)  > 
> bit--which I find
> completely nonsensical, as I see not a shred of evidence in canon that 
> Dumbledore's
> leniency with certain students is anything other than mere  fondness of an 
> adult for a
> child under his guidance--a lot of posters are arguing that there was 
> never any canon
> that supported Dumbledore being gay. My question to those who protest 
> based  on this
> argument is...Please state the canon that supported Dumbledore being
> straight.
>
> Seriously, I want to know. And I honestly don't consider "no evidence that 
> he's gay must
> mean he's straight" a reasonable argument. Some percentage of any 
> population is gay
> (don't recall the actual number, maybe 10 percent?), so *some* students or 
> teachers
> at Hogwarts can be presumed to be gay, even though we don't see  direct 
> evidence of the
> sexual orientation for 95% of the students (nor for any of the  teachers 
> except Lupin and
> Snape). So what actual canon gives  us evidence of Dumbledore's sexual 
> orientation?
>
> Julie

Shelley:
My very problem with your request is that logically, it doesn't hold. Just 
because we don't see it happening in canon doesn't mean that it didn't 
happen. It's a common mistake to make, but a very big one, IMHO.

I presume you mean that you want us to show you DD ever kissing a girl or 
showing evidence that he liked girls as evidence that he was straight. And, 
in that, you won't get any because there are none to show you. Rowling 
didn't go into that. People just assume that because of all the general 
clues don't show any obviously gay tendencies in DD, then he must have been 
straight, or totally uninvolved what-so-ever (which still equates to 
straight in my mind). That is a reasonable assumption- to assume the author 
would tell us if any "unusual" things went on, and that if she didn't, that 
"normal" must have happened instead.

But again, if you say that "we don't see canon evidence for ____, then ____ 
didn't exist", then you must think that Harry Potter and all the other 
characters must be full of (literally!) shit because we never see them 
taking a bathroom break to empty their colons, or that Harry Potter must 
smell really bad because we never see him taking a shower. Here's where we 
must use our brains and be smart about this. We see evidence of Harry being 
HEALTHY, and therefore we simply must come to a CONCLUSION that Harry did 
indeed attend to his body by using the bathroom, taking showers, brushing 
his teeth, and all the normal things people would do. Where canon doesn't 
specify directly, we are forced to conclude certain things. It's totally 
illogical to say that we shouldn't conclude facts that aren't told to us 
directly, for that leads us right back to a Harry who smells awful, with a 
full bladder and overstuffed colon. If we did that, he's be a dead Harry. No 
one could go 7 years of school without using the bathroom!

Dumbledore's life is even less shown than Harry's, and so naturally the 
number of conclusions we must draw about him is higher than that we have to 
make about Harry. I don't see anything wrong about having to draw 
conclusions about Dumbledore's life, personally, as no author can tell us 
EVERYTHING. There's just not enough pages, and who would want to read about 
Harry taking a dump anyway??? Best to leave some things off the page, and 
let the reader use his or her brain power to draw conclusions. The character 
is assumed to be straight, average, ordinary, normal, until the author tells 
us otherwise. So it is a reasonable argument to think that DD did not have 
any unusual tendencies until Rowling points out to us just HOW Dumbledore 
was different. In this case, she didn't tell us in canon that he was 
different in that area of his life, so we have come to the conclusion that 
he wasn't. Thus straight, because that's the very definition of straight.

I think the far more pressing argument would be to tell you to show us in 
canon how Dumbledore was anything different than straight.

Shelley