If you are an author hoping to inject a forced significance into the characters within your oeuvre, then J.K. Rowling is your role model. There is no doubt in my mind that this was designed not so much as a gambit for the fan fiction enthusiasts, but as a sexual orientation to launch a thousand grad student essays. Now that we know that Dumbledore is gay — and we must assume this to be true because the author says so! — one wonders why insinuations weren’t there in the text all along. After all, if Rowling “always saw Dumbledore as gay,” would this not have provided an extra subtext to the Harry Potter universe for Rowling to play around with? Or is this merely a retroactive attempt to move a few more units?
I’m wondering if other YA authors will follow in Rowling’s footsteps. Will Daniel Handler declare Klaus Baudelaire a BDSM enthusiast? The time has come for more startling announcements. Because as jaw-dropping bombs released to the public go, Dumbledore’s secret life is terribly anticlimactic.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
As a fiction writer, I often know things about my characters that help me get a handle on them but which end up not specifically mentioned in the stories. For example, a fairly recent story had a minor character whom I thought of as a black woman, although after drafting the story, I saw that there was no point where I made that clear and it seemed forced and awkward to state it. (Back in the day — the 1970s for me — the young white writers I knew discussed graceful ways of making it clear that characters weren’t white; we’d read too many books where there were lines like, “He stared at his ebony face in the mirror.”)
For me, it’s similar to what actors do. They often know something about their characters that is not revealed explicitly through the dialogue or any other way; this helps the actors “inhabit” the role but it shouldn’t be necessary to know this for the audience to “get” the character. Once, in a play, I decided that my character had six toes on one foot.
So I don’t think it’s odd that Rowling had in her mind that Dumbledore was gay when she wrote the character if it helped her portray him. I don’t see why she would make this known to anyone if it’s not explicit in the book; however, she was asked a direct question relating to Dumbledore’s love life. She might have answered without reference to his sexual orientation, but it’s hard to blame her for a spontaneous remark. It’s not as if she called a press conference to say this.
I have to admit, having only seen some of the HP movies, that it did cross my mind that Dumbledore might have been gay. But then I think many people assume things about characters that may or may not have been true.
Did you consider the possibility that Dumbledore could have been gay without Rowling knowing it? Have you ever met anyone who was gay and not aware of it themselves? I am pretty sure I have met several.
“and we must assume this to be true because the author says so!”
You appear to be using the exclamation point of sarcasm — but I don’t understand why. Who better than the author to know about her characters? Or is this one of those academic, post-modern things that I’m not getting where characters exist irrespective of an author and we’re all Pirandello?
They did this on Law and Order too. Retroactive characterization.