Should JKR shut up?

[sienna291973]

No: HPFGUIDX 178682

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "va32h" <va32h at ...> wrote:
> 
> But that's our sensibility isn't it - any amount of violence is
> acceptable, any drop of sexuality offensive.  Some movie director said
> once - you can show a breast being sliced off and get an "R" rating,
> but if you show a breast being caressed it's an "X". 

I don't particularly mind the idea of Dumbledore being gay. In fact, within the books as a 
relevant subplot, it would have been a brilliant way of subverting the traditional wise old 
man figure and made quite a comment about society. And no, I don't think children need 
protecting from something like that but rather exposure to it would have been great.

HOWEVER, like all of Rowling's extra-canon pronouncements, it is just irrelevant. We do 
not see it, we don't get anything beyond perhaps a shadow of a hint of it (and that's at a 
wild stretch).  We don't get to experience it. It has nothing to do with Harry's journey. At 
no point is gayness in the wizarding community ever touched upon as an issue. To 
mention it now, after so many years and 4000 odd words? Ridiculous and vaguely 
offensive both to her readers and to the homosexual community, which frankly deserves 
better than being tossed a scrap as an afterthought.

Dumbledore as a gay man in a powerful position would have been an extremely strong 
subplot. As a throwaway line in an interview ten years after we're first introduced to him, 
it's completely irrelevant. 

Irrelevant because as a reader I can ignore it. I don't object to the idea, but I do have a 
serious problem with her insistence on limited perceptions of her work. In my opinion, 
that kind of fundamentalism has no place in the realm of the imagination and is more 
suited to the realm of the religious (where most of the problems are caused by people's 
inability to accept alternative perceptions of the nature of God!).

What right does Rowling have to insist on one way of viewing her text? She had 4000 
words in which to tell her story. The rest is up to the reader. And when Rowling isn't 
around to tell people how they *should* be reading Harry Potter, who's character will he be 
then?

Sienna
*Who apologises for the mild rant*