It’s official: Dumbledore was gay
From the “Let’s give hardcore conservatives yet another reason to want to stage Harry Potter book burnings” department:
J.K. Rowling, who’s currently on her first American book tour in almost seven years, was recently giving a reading of excerpts from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (the penultimate book and the basis of the next movie) at New York’s Carnegie Hall. An audience member (who apparently was not clued in as to the character’s fate at the climax of that story) reportedly asked the author if Albus Dumbledore would ever find “true love.” Rowling’s reply was simple, straightforward, and confirmed a lot of suspicions that fans have had for years regarding the Hogwarts headmaster:
Apparently, this was something Rowling had never planned on explicitly revealing to anyone, hoping that readers would pick up enough hints in that direction that it wouldn’t be necessary. But her hand was forced during the development of the Half-Blood Prince film script; there was a reference in one of the early drafts to a girl whom Dumbledore had once been interested in. When she read this, she sent the filmmakers notes on Dumbledore’s backstory, which (among other things) made it clear that the character was meant to be homosexual.
According to the B-story, Dumbledore was apparently involved with rival wizard Gillert Grendelwald. Rowling goes into detail on the relationship between Dumbledore and Grendelwald in the final book, released this past summer (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), but stops short of revealing it was anything more than a close friendship gone sour (with Grendelwald’s turn to evil). The homosexual angle is merely implied in the text, but it’s possible to read between the lines and find it. Naturally, some particularly obsessive fans have done precisely that, not just in Deathly Hallows but throughout the series; even a cursory perusal of FanFiction.net’s Harry Potter section reveals reams of (mostly awful) fics that suggest Dumbledore (and, frankly, just about every other major Potterverse character) was “batting for the other team,” as it were. Some in… quite… graphic detail.
Of course, it’s just fanfic, and bad fanfic at that. Nobody is supposed to take it too seriously. This just happens to be the one time in a thousand where the writers of such drivel were actually right about something like that. Granted it’s not an official statement or anything like that… but really, who would know these characters more intimately than the woman who created them in the first place?
now that it’s becoming known in the interwebs I can simply sit back and only shake my head.
I’ve read these books manyt times since completing the collection.
I even thought he might be gay but left it to J.K to reveal all when ever she pleased.
I’m mildly amused.
I’ll be honest - particularly after reading Deathly Hallows, especially that little scene in the afterlife’s King’s Cross Station, I thought that might have been the angle JKR was going for. Not, mind you, that I believed she would come right out and say it in so many words, not in a YA book intended to be sold in America as much as in the UK (where these things are a bit more tolerated by the public at large than they are on our side of the Atlantic).
The only surprise here, IMO, is that JKR is being straight-up honest about it. Though I guess, now that her part in telling the story is largely done (save for consulting on the remaining movies), she may figure there’s no need to keep such things a secret any longer, as she (presumably) won’t be using the character again.