The Dumbledore Thing

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The Gay Dumbledore thing has been convulsing the world for the last week so I thought I might as well weigh in. For the record, I'm not surprised -- there were, as more eminent readers have pointed out, lots of hints, particularly in Book 7 -- but I also don't quite see it as necessary. It's an interesting thing to know about Dumbledore but I'm not sure how it changes the story any -- now. It might perhaps have added some depth to his disillusionment with Grindelwald had it been made apparent, and not merely been hinted at, in the book itself. Other than that, I'm not sure what the narrative point of posthumously pointing out his gayness really is. I'm a fan of the books; and in general, I agree with the moral and ethical points brought up in the books. In brief, I think they can be summarized as upholding the values of a kind of mild multiculturalism -- in the saga, clearly those on the side of "purity" and "bloodlines" are evil, corrupt, jealous of their privileges or a noxious combination of all of the above. On the other hand, the Order of the Phoenix and Dumbledore's Army -- those defenders of difference and valuers of variety -- are good liberals.

But.... I have a problem with the way in which we're supposed to read the vanquishing of the Dark Lord and his followers as a victory for the different. Many of those who embody difference most are killed in the course of the "Second War": Sirius Black, who is rendered unstable by his long imprisonment in Azkaban, Remus Lupin, the werewolf whose difference is manifest every month, his beloved Nymphadora Tonks, who both chooses to be different (by loving Remus) and who is also born different as a metamorphmagus, her father Ted Tonks, whose very name suggests his lower class origins comically, Mad Eye Moody, whose years of Auroring have left him physically and mentally scarred, Dobby, the house-elf who will not accept his "natural" position, the unicorn which chooses to forsake the neutrality of all of its kind in order to fight , Severus Snape, who is physically unattractive and almost universally disliked and dislikeable, and Dumbledore, now newly revealed to be gay. I'll grant that not all who are different are dispatched for good: Luna Lovegood and the half-giant Rubeus Hagrid make it through, for instance; and nor would I suggest that all who die somehow embody difference from the mainstream of the wizarding world. But, it's awfully convenient that so many of the magical persons and beings whose place in the magical world is made precarious by the would-be-purists don't survive into the morning after the "Battle of Hogwarts."

To my mind, it would only have been possible to judge whether the kinds of difference embodied by so many of the "good" characters in the Potterverse were reintegrated into the wizarding world by keeping some of them alive. And now by "outing" Dumbledore, Rowling has just given us another character who is both on the side of the angels and different.... and dead.

It is, at best, a liberal vision of the magical world. A more radical one would perhaps have allowed for some of these different beings to survive and make a place for themselves in the difficult space of the living, as opposed to that of the safely dead and memorializable. Don't take this the wrong way: I'm still a fan of the books and I think that the Muggle world is a better place for having them in it than not. But to me their impossibility to imagine even a triumphant wizarding world in which difference is actually both alive and celebrated suggests the impossibility of even such an imaginative writer as JK Rowling escaping the constraints of the real world in which we live.