Oooh, ooh, was it because stating afterward that a totally celibate and portrayed as asexual character is gay while offering no hint of this in the canon is a spineless and meaningless move that allows you to say that you have a gay character without actually working at portraying a gay character and facing the criticisms that come from portraying a gay character while your works are still in progress? Is it that you blithely declared a character who is never seen to have a romantic relationship with anyone and who is implied to have only ever had one relationship in his life (with young Wizard Hitler) ‘gay’ without thinking of what this means re: the sexualities that we are to presume of all the other characters (after all, you didn’t say anyone else was gay)?
Because those are my reasons for thinking that the ‘Dumbledore Is Gay’ declaration is approximately not shit. If the character’s sexuality is not apparent in the canon, then it’s up to fan interpretation and the fans are not wrong about it. Your post-work declarations are not valid, author. Time for me to once again quote Ferretbrain:
“As far as Rowling is concerned, Harry Potter is not a series of cultural artifacts existing within the world, but a world that exists in her imagination. This is why she feels so free to amend, interpret, and justify the text after its publication. As far as she’s concerned (and, as other FB articles have discussed, as far as a depressingly large number of other people are concerned) the Harry Potter universe has a distinct, external reality and the process of reading about Harry Potter is a process of bringing your understanding into line with this distinct, external reality. Essentially a person’s appreciation of Harry Potter (as far as Rowling is concerned) can be judged exclusively in terms of how closely it matches her own.”
The entire post on this subject, “What The Fucking Fucking Fuck JK Rowling?” is also really worthwhile.
Basically, ROWLING IS NOT CORRECT. If she didn’t write, in the books, anything that indicates that Dumbledore is gay, her declaration that he is because she’s the author and she says so is worth approximately squat in terms of character interpretation from the text, because the text is a thing that exists.
JK Rowling didn’t write, in her text, any explicitly sexual relationships. No one is stated to be having sex with anyone else at any time during the events at Hogwarts. We can infer in some instances that sex has occurred between characters; we can infer that Molly and Arthur Weasley have had a bunch of sex because they have seven kids. We know explicitly that Merope Gaunt raped Tom Riddle Sr. with the use of drugs, because that story was explicitly told. But no one has sex or even is said to be having sex on the page. Hence it is legitimate to debate whether it happened/is happening/will happen at any point in the story. What this means is that Rowling has no characters that are explicitly gay because she never shows characters in explicitly homosexual relationships. Just like she has no characters who are explicitly trans, and no characters that are explicitly outside of the gender binary. Not having characters like this is -safe- because the erasure of such characters is ubiquitous. These are marked categories of humanity. If we are not given explicit details about certain things pertaining to characters, it is an unfortunate fact that we, the readers, live in a culture where certain things are to be presumed about them. A character that is not described physically is presumed to be white, cis, able-bodied, and of averge weight and height. A character who isn’t in a romantic relationship with anyone and doesn’t have any sexual thoughts about anyone is presumed to be straight. It is not the fault of the reader for presuming these things, because these are assumptions that the author generally expects the reader to make; characters are from default classes of existence (Male, white, straight, able, average) until described otherwise. This is why white characters’ skintone is seldom described in fiction but black characters’ skin tone -always is- and why if a director makes a casting choice in which a character whose skintone in not described is played by a person of color, the fandom rants and raves and rends the heavens. It’s also why many readers feel totally comfortable ‘not picturing the character that way’ even when the character IS explicitly of color. Because white is default. Straight is default. Cis is default. POC, Gay, and Trans are -marked-.
Everyone go read “He’s Gay, and He’s Native American: Rowling and Scalzi Claim Marginal Identities for Charcters After the Fact”. I’ll wait here.
When an author declares information about a character that is not indicated on the page in any way, and says ‘I always envisioned them thus’…that’s useless to us as readers. When an author further says ‘If you envisioned the character some other way than the way I envisioned them, and you’re upset that I didn’t indicate that the character was that way, it’s your own fault. I always thought they were black and if you think the fact that I never described them as black means they’re white, it is you who are racist!’ that’s…. a fucking horrible, spineless move. SHAME ON YOU, AUTHOR. MOTHERFUCKING SHAME.
So yeah, maybe that’s why the reader looked like they wanted to slap you, JK. Just a thought.
this a million jillion times.
incidentally i’m moderating a slash panel at Ascendio this july that is going to feature a shitload of discussion on this type of ‘tee hee!’ grandstanding/fanservice with regards to homoerotic subtext—in Harry Potter, in bromantic tv shows, and more.