In mainstream fiction, TV shows, and movies, said Mark Harris in Entertainment Weekly, gay characters are almost nonexistent these days. Which is why most of us welcomed last week’s announcement by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling that she had always imagined Professor Albus Dumbledore, one of her best-loved characters, as a gay man. Gay people would have preferred the kindly wizard to have come out of the closet in the actual story, of course, but we appreciate Rowling’s belated gesture. By telling us only now that a main character in one of the best-loved children’s series of all time is homosexual, she’s saying: It doesn’t matter, does it? That’s the subversive genius’’ in this revelation, said Leonard Pitts in The Miami Herald. Readers first got to know Dumbledore as a complex, fully fleshed-out individual. Now Rowling adds his homosexuality as just an extra detail.
It’s a detail that’s absolutely inappropriate,’’ said Barbara Kay in the Toronto National Post. Of what relevance is it whether Dumbledore is gay or straight? In children’s fiction, adults are defined by their relationship to the children. Their personal lives—and certainly their sex lives—simply do not exist. But you don’t get taken seriously writing children’s fiction, said Ben Shapiro in Townhall.com. Now that Rowling’s the richest author in the history of the written word—earning as much as $1 billion from the Potter series—all that’s left to do is legitimate herself as a deep thinker and a profound author. And there’s no more reliable way to be hailed as a genius by the left-wing cultural elites than to take a politically correct stand that earns you the enmity of Christian conservatives. Hence, the belated outing of Dumbledore.
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