A pet theory: Rowling only decided that Dumbledore was gay after she finished writing the series. She was giving a question-and-answer, someone asked about Dumbledore's love life, she was vaguely aware that a lot of internet people would be made very happy if it turned out that one of the HP characters were gay, so she blurted out that Dumbledore was gay and reeled out the Grindlewald connection as spurious evidence. Pretty much everything she says in that quote strikes me as someone rationalising, improvising, and retconning, retconning, retconning into the future, essentially making shit up on the spot to try to explain why a) we never saw any sign that Dumbledore was gay in the actual books and b) why Dumbledore being gay is at all important or worth mentioning.

The more I read from you, Dan, the less I want to ever read Harry Potter.

@Rami
At this point, I'm right there with you. This is one of the worst things about being a fan of anything written by hacks-- if you wait long enough, they'll rip apart everything that was marginally good about it and scribble all over it with fuckwit pens. I'm not sure when I decided to stop listening to JKR's stupid public announcements, but I'm firmly set on doing that as much as possible now.

I don't know if you're familiar with how anal fanfic writers can be about what does and doesn't belong in canon? Well, the movies don't count for me (on account of them mostly being SHITE), and no word that JKR says after the fact counts, ESPECIALLY everything she's said after the last book came out. I half wish I could strike books 7, 6 and maybe 5 (and what the hell, how about 4) from the list as well, because though they're spread-your-hands-and-sigh okay, just about every plot point introduced in those books is rushed and unedited and stinky.

I think cutting the series off at book 3 is a reasonable stance. Rowling was always at her best when she was straining against the bounds of the 300-page large type children's novel format; book 3, in particular, is my favourite in the series. Once she became big enough that her editors either didn't dare say "no" to her or realised that the books would sell like crazy whether or not they actually bothered to edit them, the downhill slide began. Book 4 is good and fun, but I still feel that it's a step down from the first three; aside from the tri-wizard tournament and the little glimpses we had of the wizarding world beyond the UK, I can't think of any cool elements in it which weren't introduced (and handled more effectively) in the earlier books.

Book 3 was my fave one as well. Man, I just wish some editor had just hung in there, you know? I still love the HP world (well, more like I love it as it was in the first three books) of yore. It was flawed and there were some gaping holes in it if you knew where to look, but it was also a really fun read way back when. Now, with chest monsters and Undying Love and rampant intolerance all over the place...eeurgh.

A pet theory: Rowling only decided that Dumbledore was gay after she finished writing the series.

Weirdly, "it was completely pulled out of her arse" is - to my mind at least - the generous interpretation. I'd rather believe that she made up "Dumbledore was gay" on the spot than believe that she intended him to be gay from the start, and decided to express this by making him wear outrageous purple suits and never never mention being sexually attracted to another man.

Certainly there's evidence that she sent a "Dumbledore is gay" note to one of the film producers, when he was going to have Dumbledore reminiscing about an old girlfriend.

Certainly there's evidence that she sent a "Dumbledore is gay" note to one of the film producers, when he was going to have Dumbledore reminiscing about an old girlfriend.

Yeah, I think this has been confirmed by the director in question, now that I think about it.

Somebody mentioned recently how there's no interest in sex or romance but a lot of interest in playing house. I remember being struck by JKR using similar phrasing to describe Charlie and Sirius and whether Charlie was gay or Sirius had a girlfriend. It was something like "He's not gay. He's more interested in dragons than girls/He's too busy being a rebel to have a girlfriend."

Setting up again a situation where either you're one of the characters who are meeting their true love and marrying for life, or else there's a lack of interest in girls, iow you're asexual. (They're interested in girls enough not to be gay, but not interested enough for a relationship. Teen!Sirius has pictures of girls on the wall, but in the one scene where we meet him attention is specifically drawn to him being disinterested.) Since she's giving out everybody's future you start to notice there's no such thing as divorce or living with somebody without being married, or dating people without ever getting married or being in a committed gay relationship. It's who they married, or else how they're not interested in something else instead of that.

Characters are supposed to date others in a superficial way (snog them, at least) before settling down with the true love, but that's about it.

Of course some would say it's a kids book (when they're not saying it's a book that dares to be gritty and realistic and the way life really is!) and it's not about the soap opera lives of the characters. And that's true of the books. But the interviews have become about that in large part and it's consistent with what little is in the books.

Somebody mentioned recently how there's no interest in sex or romance but a lot of interest in playing house.

To be fair to Rowling, she's not exactly free to frankly explore the sex lives of the Harry Potter character. If she'd been able to stick to her original plan - of writing books which would grow for the readers, pitched at kids around the same age (or perhaps 1 or 2 years younger) than Harry is in the book in question, it'd have been different: publishers are much more comfortable about discussions about people's sex lives in books for older teenagers than they are in books for 11-year-olds.

As it is, Potter unexpectedly became a publishing phenomenon, and it took more than 1 year to write each book, and Rowling realised that each book would have to cater not only to people who'd been in the original target audience and were reading from the beginning, but anyone aged 5 to 85 who had jumped on the bandwagon since. It's no surprise that boyfriends and girlfriends don't do much more than kiss and hug, and it's kind of unreasonable to suggest that Rowling should have made the characters interested in more than that.

Where Rowling horribly fails, as you point out, is in the romance angle. It's entirely possible to write romantic subplots which are kid-safe and yet nuanced enough to engage with a teenage and adult audience. (At their creative peak, the guys at Disney were able to do so, repeatedly, for movie after movie.) Rowling doesn't even try.

(I tell a lie: she does try, once, in Goblet of Fire, with the big dance and Harry and Ron's hilarious failure to be gentlemen leaving their dates weeping by the end of the night: I think that part was really nicely observed. It's one of the few genuinely interesting parts of the fourth book. Of course, it was funnier in the movie than in the novel.)

It's no surprise that boyfriends and girlfriends don't do much more than kiss and hug, and it's kind of unreasonable to suggest that Rowling should have made the characters interested in more than that.

Absolutely--no point in criticizing an author for what she's not doing in the first place. I would say another place where "romance" is done well is with Harry and Cho's date in OotP--another place where everything just falls flat for both parties. And one reason it does is that you've got two specific, different people actually trying to have a conversation and connect.

With the "real" romances they're more just magically zapped onto the characters like a love potion. It's not really about these two people having stuff in common and getting to know each other, it's just picking out, as a reader, who their intended is going to be.

The romance plots are more like the mystery plots that way--for instance, you don't see Harry growing to like Ginny as a character, you figure out the clues like Harry randomly watching her, or feeling annoyed when she leaves him, or she responds correctly when he's almost killed someone, or has a chest monster, or her smell is in the love potion. Along with telegraphed stuff like "Ginny was the most awesome person on the team" etc.

I actually doubt she ever planned on dealing frankly with sex or this kind of romance since it doesn't really seem to interest her, at least in this series. I don't get the feeling she's really holding back.

I guess I'll just throw a couple of pennies into the discussion fountain. I think what annoys me most is the media song and dance routine that accompanies each book (you can say that this isn't Rowling's doing but she interacts massively and voluntarily with her fanbase), the disparity between what the books actually *are* and *do* with what Rowling seems determined to *insist* they are and do. You see, I don't care a damn about Dumbledore's sexuality and if Rowling had just said in passing "well, I guess, I always thought he was gay" that would be fine: what drives me up the wall is the fact that we're meant to take this as yet further evidence that the Harry Potter series isn't just a bunch of kid's books about a boy wizard but Serious Literature addressing Meaningful Issues. It's basically just cheating. It's like she wants the kudos of being open minded about gay people without actually having to face the fact that being so noticeably in fiction - especially children's books - is likely to make her unpopular in a few circles. Have some fucking courage.

Absolutely--no point in criticizing an author for what she's not doing in the first place

As Kyra points out, while I don't think there's any point in criticizing somebody for not doing something they were never trying to do, I think it's totally okay to criticize somebody for not doing something that they were not trying to do but which they never the less claimed they were doing.

I'm not going to complain that somebody doesn't cook me dinner if they haven't offered to, but if somebody offers to cook me dinner, and then does an enormous poo on a plate and serves it to me, I think I have the right to be peeved, and I don't think "but I wasn't trying to cook a meal, I was trying to take an enormous poo" isn't really a defence.

I don't think "but I wasn't trying to cook a meal, I was trying to take an enormous poo" isn't really a defence.

LOL! Words to live by. But yeah, that's why I don't think it's a problem when she doesn't write detailed romance or get too deeply into sex, or the sex lives of adults, since she doesn't really claim to be doing more than matching people up for plot reasons anyway.

But the plea for tolerance, the "right versus easy," the choices stuff--all that is set out as what the books are supposed to be admired for or at least what they're saying. So you can't help but question places where they don't actually do that. Or since DH, whenever she talks about Dumbledore it's like it sounds like she's talking about her choice to do something realistic or daring with a gay character that strikes a blow against homophobia in children's lit, when she didn't even write the gay character to begin with. She could talk about hypothetically what she'd think about a writer who actually did put a gay teacher in a YA book (and there are plenty), but what she did was after-the-fact say a character was gay and then kind of add, "Sure he was gay. That's why he went evil. Wasn't that clear?"