Opinion: Outing Rowling outing Dumbledore

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I love J.K. Rowling. I really do. But I take issue with her Saturday bombshell, which landed in the midst of a Carnegie Hall book reading and set the audience cheering: “I’ve always thought of Dumbledore as gay.”

When inquiring minds asked about why she lit the fuse on this otherwise inert plot point (Dumbledore seems pretty asexual in the Harry Potter novels) she testily replied, “I was asked a very direct question at Carnegie Hall.”

Well, yes, she was. And that direct question was whether Dumbledore had ever found true love.

The direct answer to that question should have been, “Yes, with Gellert Grindelwald” — i.e., it would have been a plot point. And then, after stunned silence, she could have explained her answer — “He’s gay” — for the slow and hard of hearing. Cue tumultuous applause.

While it was probably not conscious on her part, Rowling’s peculiar phrasing prioritized a politically loaded topic over the answer to a question. A simple response about character backstory became a matter of identity.

Aside from her choice of words, the fact that she’s revealing it at all rubs me the wrong way — though not because Ian McKellan would have made an awesome Dumbledore (so true) or because some observers claim that this could potentially throw the Harry-Dumbledore bond into a Catholic-priest sort of light (so not). Now, if she had a Dumbledore prequel in the works, her revelation wouldn’t be so jarring, since it would shortly have made it into the canon anyway.

The point is that it isn’t in the canon. I’m fine with re-envisioning, or reframing or even rewriting: Orson Scott Card did it, George Lucas kind of did it. But they did it by making more stuff. Dumbledore’s dalliance with double-G, although it’s probably been in Rowling’s files all along, never made it into the books. Except for one slightly homoerotic quote, “You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me,” she didn’t even give any real hints to that effect, tongue-in-cheek hindsight notwithstanding.

Any work of art or literature takes on a life of its own once the author has finished it, a life sustained by its audience. It’s the viewer’s right to interpret after the creator’s put on the finishing touches. This is particularly true for the sci-fi/fantasy genre — and especially so with Harry Potter — since it provides an open, welcoming door for alternate universes, character revival, crossovers, and unconventional romantic pairings. Troll through any number of fanfiction sites and you’ll get more slash fiction that you thought possible, featuring Harry/Draco, Sirius/Lupin and Fred/George (yes, you read that right: twincest is alive and well among the fandoms, in spite of heartfelt condemnation from the twins’ celluloid incarnations).

So the bigger issue isn’t angry conservative parents — they’re already riled up over the whole magic thing anyway. It’s an issue of author-reader etiquette. (Or is it author/reader etiquette?) The position of author-ity a writer has over her work means her words have more power than anyone else’s. That game is rigged.

Granted, the poor woman is hounded by fans who want to know what else lies in her reams of backstory that never makes it to print. “I’m dealing with a level of obsession in some of my fans that will not rest until they know the middle names of Harry’s great-great-grandparents,” Salon’s Rebecca Traister recalls Rowling saying in a TV interview.

True. Too true. And if I were at Carnegie Hall last Saturday, I probably would have been one of them. But in the words of Dumbledore, with great power comes great responsibility — and in this superstar author’s case, not giving into the temptation to outrun her drooling packs of fans by throwing juicy tidbits at them. At least, not until she commits to those tidbits on paper.