Abstract Acacias

With all of my replying to other people's Dumbledore posts in comments, I thought I should collect my opinions here. (All of these are culled directly from comments, so some of the context shifts may be a little abrupt, and there may be repetition.) More to potentially be added as I reply to comments further.

...

To be perfectly honest, I don't agree. Not that I think JKR is necessarily a good storyteller, but I don't think that omission of Dumbledore's sexual orientation is proof of this. We don't know anything about any of the teachers' love-lives. Since these books were ostensibly written as kids books, that makes sense. You never know anything about your teachers' personal lives. (I mean, we called our teachers by their first names and knew how many kids they had, but I remember, for example, how in Mathilda it was a great revelation to the students to learn Miss Honey's first name.)

In HP, we don't know if a single one of the teachers is married, has children, etc., so why should we know that one of them's gay? If we did, it would only have been there to say LOOK, I HAVE A GAY CHARACTER, I'M SO AWESOME AND OPEN-MINDED.

If Dumbledore had been alive in the 7th book, that would be a different story, because of all the stuff about Grindelwald. But he wasn't.

...

But Snape's love-life is important because it deals with Harry, not because of how it shapes his character in general. If Lily had been, say, Padma and Parvati's mother, and he'd picked on them to no end rather than Harry, we'd probably never have gotten information on why he was so nasty to them.

And as I said on someone else's post, it's not like people reading the books from now on aren't going to know Dumbledore's gay, since her revelation has obviously spread across the internet like wildfire.

...

If it's a question of JKR's "bravery," as some people are saying, then I think saying it after-the-fact is really just as brave as saying it in the books, because look at how it's spreading across the internet like wildfire — everyone's going to know.

So then on the other hand (as regards students, not teachers), yes, if she really wanted to be actively pro-gay yadda yadda, then she could have made one of Harry's circle gay. But that wasn't what the book was about, and just tossing it out there would have seemed very much like having any other token minority would. You notice the way she deals with her black characters? There's mention of it maybe once, when we first meet them, in the same way that she would say someone's Irish or has red hair, and then we don't encounter it again. Lee's black, Angelina's black, Dean's black, Kingsley's black — and I didn't even remember those last two until they showed up as black in the film, and I had to go back to the book and say "really?" (And I think Angelina wasn't in the film, tsk tsk.) Except when you meet someone gay it's not going to say "She was small, with freckles and crooked teeth, and terribly fancied other girls." So then it becomes an issue of "is it actually relevant to the story?" And very few kids are out in high school; if they know they're gay, they're more likely just not to have any obvious relationships at all. (Never mind the Harry/Draco fanfic, of course.) So yes, if Hermione or Ron or Neville or one of the Weasley sibs had been gay, then sure, it would obviously have been mentioned, and yes, they were all straight, but making one of them gay would definitely have seemed like making a character gay on principle.