I’m sure many of you have either heard about or read one of the many articles concerning J.K. Rowling’s publicity stunt where she “came out” and proclaimed in all of her authorial splendor that Headmaster Dumbledore, a fictional character in her incredibly popular Harry Potter series, is actually a flaming homosexual. I bet Fawkes was his secret lover.
It’s too bad there’s one small problem with this revelation: there is no direct literary proof. I don’t care who the author is – you cannot dictate anything about your characters that isn’t somehow alluded to in the book. Rowling does cite an obscure reference to Dumbledore’s childhood which she claims to be circumstantial proof that Dumbledore is gay, when in fact the rest of Dumbledore’s literary behavior and character devolpment is completely heterosexual and normal. The way I read it, Dumbledore is written as a heterosexual father figure who is the last person ever to be suspected as gay, and if it weren’t for the advances of the gay movement to infiltrate every aspect of society with their lies and filthy lifestyle and have the audacity to pass it off as normal, there wouldn’t even be a discussion about this.
Rowling cannot interpret the story she wrote for her readers. That is what is dynamic and engaging about fictional literature: it can be interpreted in many different ways by many different people, and in the end, there may be several different correct ways to interpret any given story, as long as the interpretation is built on the solid foundation of literary proof. But you cannot make up an interpretation without sufficient literary proof. And as an author, you cannot tell your readers how to interpret your book if there is more than one way to interpret it.
Seeing as Rowling’s evidence for accusing Dumbledore of being gay is overshadowed by the complete lack of homosexuality in the rest of his character development throughout the seven-book series, coupled with the fact that sexuality as a whole is completely absent from the series due to the fact that Harry Potter was written as a children’s book, I see no other conclusion than this is just another fictional interpretation of a character, and a weakly supported one at that. If she were a literary critic making this remark, (in a sane world, mind you) she would be laughed at for making such a preposterously unsubstantiated claim. So in no way does Rowling have the right as author to tell us that her interpretation is right when it was clearly not in the story.
Barbara Kay, a woman who has written articles about this authorial overstepping of bounds, has a great quote that sums up what is wrong with Rowling’s statement. She said “Once the books are written, the gates of the fictional characters’ lives and their world clang shut. Any post-publication pronouncements she makes about her characters are superfluous and inadmissible, except as a personal self-indulgence on her part, and likely a bid to appear tolerant and liberal.”
She goes on to say that “whatever Rowling is as a person, and whatever her sympathies are for gays in the real world, they are irrelevant to Hogwarts, since she failed to include that component in the stories as written. She is an author of fiction, not a social worker. In a literary work, the characters must be true to the parameters of the fictional landscape in which they find themselves, and in Hogwarts there is – or was - no adult sexuality.”
So what can we learn from this? Well, the fact that Rowling is a sellout to the gay rights movement is overwhelming. It also seems evident to those who know the facts about this story that she has lost her respectability as an author with most people who wish to keep their loved ones away from the destructive and morally degrading homosexual lifestyle which is currently trying to be passed off as societally normal, when in fact it is largely both a cover for attacking Christians and those with strong traditional values and morals as well as an attempt to legitimize and normalize any sort of promiscuity or obscene fetish while at the same time making heterosexual monogamy and the traditional Christian family out to be obsolete and intolerant.
Okay, I know I’ve been pretty hard with the facts so far, so I want to return to the sort of jocular banter I started with in the first paragraph of this blog. I’d like to offer some literary examples that for some reason J.K. Rowling chose not to use during her press conference to back up her defamation of the Headmaster of Hogwarts, or “The Top Four Reasons Why Dumbledore Was Gay!”.
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