# Dumbledore ....



## michaeledward

J.K. Rowling had a reading in New York recently. In response to a question from a young attendee, she informs us that Albus Dumbledore was gay. 

http://www.newsweek.com/id/50787

I don't know that it means anything, to anyone, but it is interesting. 

The religious conservatives were already displeased with the story because of the wizardry. I don't know that this will make much difference to anyone.


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## Big Don

She's making that up!





You know that's funny


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## MBuzzy

Big Don said:


> She's making that up!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> You know that's funny


 
  Didn't she make it all up?  I want to be a writer....


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## exile

This raises an interesting question: once an author has created a character and turned him or her loose upon the fictional world, to what extent does the author's private attitude and speculations about that fictional character require us to `sign on' to that attitude, or view, or picture, or whatever? 

Maybe JKR pictured AD as gay from the outset, and maybe she didn't. Not being a mindreader, I've can't imagine taking a strong view myself one way or the other on her intentions, or her candor; authors aren't immune to playing games of one sort or another with their readers, after all. But the point is, I think, that there's absolutely nothing in the structure of the narrative, at any point, which depends on AD's being gay, so far as I can tell. Look: suppose JKR said, `Oh, just in case you didn't know: Dumbledore was a vegetarian'. I cannot think of a single episode in the whole HP epic which depends crucially on this interpretation... or on him being a meat-eater. Does AD automatically become what JKR thinks about him after the fact? 

You can say, well, he is whatever JKR says he is, after all, she created him. But I don't think that follows. In the whole HP epic, AD's sexuality, or preferences in diet, or music, or any number of other things, play no role, are never mentioned, and do not, explicitly or implicitly, drive the story. What AD `is' is determined, in a very basic sense, by what the story itself shows him to be. And the story does not reveal his sexuality, any more than his attitude towards eating meat, or his love or hatred of jazz, or whatever.

What I'm trying to get at is that there is a shared AD, the AD of the Harry Potter saga. And there's a private, personal, individual AD, the one that JKR conceives one way, and you conceive a different way, and so on. An author doesn't have unlimited rights to define a character retroactively, once they've put the pen down. At that point, the character is what the tale shows them to be. In anything outside the evidence of the story itself, as written, the author is just one more fan.


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## Makalakumu

Well, coming form a person who quotes Hermes Trismagestis in his signature, I'm sure you can see why AB would be gay.  Think about all of the magi that were gender ambiguous or out right gay.  As far as occult practices go, that sort of thing is part and parcel.  Especially when you consider the unifcation of the male and female, left and right halves of the brain, humanity, the soul, etc...


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## Big Don

As Dumbledore was never linked romantically in ANY of the books, and she claims she isn't going to write anymore, a few questions spring to mind:
So?
Who cares?
Was it the robes? It was the robes, there was nothing under the robes was there?


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## exile

upnorthkyosa said:


> Well, coming form a person who quotes Hermes Trismagestis in his signature, I'm sure you can see why AB would be gay.  Think about all of the magi that were gender ambiguous or out right gay.



Or androgyenous or completely nonsexual. That's the point. Nothing in the narrative structure or the symbolism or anything else _entails_ any particular view of Dumbledore's sexuality.




upnorthkyosa said:


> As far as occult practices go, that sort of thing is part and parcel.  Especially when you consider the unifcation of the male and female, left and right halves of the brain, humanity, the soul, etc...



But this passage would apply _across the board_ to any practitioner of `occult practices' in the saga&#8212;i.e., the whole wizarding world. And clearly that's not the case: the are plenty of practitioners of the `occult practice' of wizardry who are emphatically heterosexual. So the mere fact that AD is a wizard can hardly constitute support for attributing any particular sexual preference to him, eh?

What perturbs me about this kind of story is the logic involved in an author imposing a property on a character that has no roots at all in the narrative&#8212;in the storyline, the description, or the iconography. It leads, I think, to a completely untenable breakdown of logic if you go that route. For example: JKR says that AD `is gay'. But imagine that, a decade or so up the line, she reexamines the character and decides that no, he isn't necessarily gay at all, in fact (as she later decides), certain of his actions in the book suggest (_to her, NB!!_) that he's not gay. Maybe he's heterosexual, in her new view, or maybe he's asexual&#8212;remember, in at least one interview she describes Dumbledore as an _angel_. Whatever her new view of him, just what does this do to our view of what AD `is'? Is it that he was heterosexual/asexual/metrosexual/etc. all along? Or that he was gay as long as she thought he was, but once she changed her mind, he miraculously become retroactively ungay, like someone going back in time and changing the past by a single action so that the present becomes totally different as well? ....??

The symbolism of Hermes, and the hermetic tradition HT wrote from, is way more complicated than the triple occult/sacred/gay imposes. I've no objection in the slightest to JKR entertaining her own private, fan's opinion of AD. But the character she created has his own existence separate from her after-the-fact gloss, and alternate conceptions of him, to the extent that that they are compatible in all respects with the stories, are equally valid.


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## Makalakumu

BTW, did you know that Dumbledore was based on John Dee.

He is an interesting charactor in and of itself...


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## exile

upnorthkyosa said:


> BTW, did you know that Dumbledore was based on John Dee.
> 
> He is an interesting charactor in and of itself...



Is't true??? I didn't know anything about this...  Rowling said something about this in some interview, I imagine?

Interesting guy... a lot of scientists of the time moved between the scientific/rational and the hermetic/occult without any sense of contradictionIsaac Newton most prominently, but Johannes Kepler and many others too. He actually came off luckier than he might havewith the kind of attention Dee attracted, he could have wound up in way worse shape. Giorano Bruno was a notable contemporary of Dee's, another pioneering scientist/astronomer with a taste for the occult, except _he_ wound up getting burnt at the stake... it was a dangerous time to attract the hostile scrutiny of the religious establishment.


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## tellner

What does it matter? Who cares?

It's always interesting to see what an author thinks of her characters and to see how it informs the way she writes them. Did she think this affected the career he took, his interest in caring for others' children since he wasn't likely to have any of his own, his relation to his family and all that implied? I don't know, but it will make me take a second look at the books.

As to Thrice-Blessed Hermes, Priest, Wizard and King, yep the symbolism is complicated. There's a lot of serious juju in transgression and even more in transformation and transcendence. Anyone wanting the quick surreal tour is invited to read Allan Moore's superb graphic adventure _Promethea_


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## Clark Kent

*J.K. Rowling says Dumbledore was gay
By Rowan - Sat, 20 Oct 2007 06:44:12 GMT
Originally Posted at: Nephrites Citadel*
====================

*J.K. Rowling Outs Dumbledore*
*by Natalie Finn*
Fri, 19 Oct 200709:17:22 PM PDT


 	Quote:

Albus Dumbledore took quite a few secrets with him to the grave. And it's possible that even he didn't know about this one.
After helping Dumbledore's favorite pupil uncover a treasure trove of information about the Hogwarts headmaster in _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows_,the final installment of her billion-dollar fantasy series, J.K. Rowling has pulled something new out of the pensieve: 
Dumbledore was gay. 
(What you just heard was the sound of conservative religious groups scribbling down one more reason to loathe the _Harry Potter_ franchise.)
"Falling in love can blind us to an extent," Rowling explained Friday in front of a packed house at New York's Carnegie Hall, where she capped off her first U.S. book tour since 2000. 
Which explains why the brilliant wizard was briefly blinded as a young man by the charm and skill of Gellert Grindelwald, his companion turned arch-nemesis who turned out to be more interested in the Dark Arts than a three-bedroom craftsman in Hogsmeade. 
After Dumbledore was "horribly, terribly let down," Rowling explained, he went on to destroy Grindelwald in what is considered in the wizarding world to have been the ultimate wand-toting battle between good and evil.
That love, she said to raucous applause, was Dumbledore's "great tragedy."
"If I had know this would have made you so happy, I would have told you years ago," Rowling said.
If this revelation seems almost too whimsical, consider this: Rowling, who penned much of _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone_ in a café while living out of her car, can certainly be a bit cheeky, but it seems highly unlikely that she would try to put one over on a Manhattan landmark full of kids and other readers who have made her one of the richest people in England.
While working on the sixth Potter film, _Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince_, which focuses largely on Dumbledore and Harry's relationship, as well as the elder wizard's interaction with a young Voldemort, Rowling said that she slipped director David Yates an eye-opening note after noticing that there was a reference in the script to a girl in Dumbledore's past.
There's no word yet on if this will affect Michael Gambon's character in the final two _Potter_ movies, which are slated for release in 2008 and 2010, respectively.
Dumbledore's sexuality has apparently been of great interest to bloggers and chat room denizens for years, with his historyand intimate affinitiesbecoming the subject of much debate and, ahem, original short stories.
"Just imagine the fan fiction now," Rowling joked. 
Of course, one could always have shrugged off the lack of romance in his life, what with his hectic work schedule and his penchant for secrecy. 
And, as the scarred one learned in _Harry Potter and_ _the Order of the Phoenix_, Dumbledore could be quite temperamental, especially when protecting those he loved. 


http://www.eonline.com/news/article/index.jsp?uuid=c2b40da2-2406-4e8f-bc89-6fc11d1b0e41&entry=index&sid=rss_topstories&utm_so  urce=eonline&utm_medium=rssfeeds&utm_campaign=rss_  topstories


Read More...


------------------------------------
Nephrites Citadel - SciFi/Fantasy/Anime and More!


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## Brother John

upnorthkyosa said:


> BTW, did you know that Dumbledore was based on John Dee.
> 
> He is an interesting charactor in and of itself...


That's VERY interesting!!
John Dee was VERY VERY interesting!!! The system that he and Kelly "Skry'd" from the Angels is both profound and confusing. Dee didn't even understand it....tried to alter it several times.

Those who came after him understood it much better and put it to a much more practical use.

Your Brother
John


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## Brother John

michaeledward said:


> J.K. Rowling had a reading in New York recently. In response to a question from a young attendee, she informs us that Albus Dumbledore was gay.
> 
> http://www.newsweek.com/id/50787
> 
> I don't know that it means anything, to anyone, but it is interesting.
> 
> _*The religious conservatives were already displeased with the story because of the wizardry*_. I don't know that this will make much difference to anyone.


I wouldn't be shocked to find that she did it as an intentional poke in the ribs for the religious conservatives who have such a problem with her and her works.

Personally, I LOVE LOVE LOVE The books.
My 9 year old son and I are reading them together, every night before bed.

In the end, what does it matter what JKR entertained in her heart concerning a characters sexual orientation???
It doesn't....
except to JKR!   

No matter how you fold it, it's a great story!

Your Brother (Who's STILL a Sci-Fi/Fantasy NERD)
John


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## punisher73

Wasn't the guy who played AD in the movies gay as well?  Again, so what?  It has no bearing at all on how the story is written because AD never had any romantic interests that were linked to the stories.

JKR is going to write another harry potter book, but it is an almanac type thing where she wrote the backstory of all the characters in the books so maybe this was part of that backstory she used to create AD and it was just never in the stories themselves.


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## Makalakumu

exile said:


> But this passage would apply _across the board_ to any practitioner of `occult practices' in the sagai.e., the whole wizarding world. And clearly that's not the case: the are plenty of practitioners of the `occult practice' of wizardry who are emphatically heterosexual. So the mere fact that AD is a wizard can hardly constitute support for attributing any particular sexual preference to him, eh?


 
Ok, here's the deal.  I'm not an expert in occult, everything I know, I know because a student of mine who just got his Masters of Liberal Studies by studying this stuff in detail.  Here's what I can tell you.  The most powerful magic is cast by people who unite male and female, left and right, black and white.  The rest of the wizarding community are not as powerful as AB because they do not do this.   

If you look at the Harry Potter story, JKR makes a point of showing that Dumbledore does all of this.  She ties all sorts of symbols to AB that make a pretty clear allusion to John Dee and Hermes Trismagestis.  My guess is that JKR studied this stuff to some extent before she wrote the HP series.  I find this interesting, because she could have wrote a story with wizards and made a bunch of stuff up.  Instead, she decided to draw from real occult practices to write her story.

IMHO, it adds another element to her story.  It makes me want to read the book again and see what I can pull out with my meager knowledge of this stuff.

I'm thinking about passing this thread along to my student (who is also a member of MT) and seeing what he has to say.  I'm sure he could give us a lot better perspective.


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## MBuzzy

Personnally, I feel that once books have been written, the interpretation is up to the reader.  If the author wants to change that perception and interpretation, they should write another book, or should have written the book differently in the first place.  In this case, it makes no difference what AD's orientation was.  Although author's probably have their own idea of each character in their minds, that is the beauty of books, every person who reads them gets to create their own perception of that character.


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## exile

upnorthkyosa said:


> Here's what I can tell you.  The most powerful magic is cast by people who unite male and female, left and right, black and white.  The rest of the wizarding community are not as powerful as AB because they do not do this.



I understand this angle; one of the most eminent people in my university's Department of History is a cultural historian whose research focus is precisely on this point of sexuality and magic, and the role of sexual transgression&#8212;the overriding of socially mandated borders&#8212;as a source of magical power. I was on our College's P&T review committee for his promotion to Full Professor last year, and I wound up reading quite a bit of his stuff in preparation for the discussion of his case._BUT_...

... it's important to recognize that that is not the only source of magical power. Consider Gandalf, a comparable figure from _LoTR_, and one who in many respects constitutes a model for Albus Dumbledore: an immensely powerful figure who has a quasi-paternal protective role for a much younger person who he yet must send into the most terrible extreme danger in order to... well, save the world, basically. In the course of that involvement, he can intervene, but only up to a certain point, and henceuses his enormous power guardedly. The final actions, on which the success or failure of the young hero's quest depend, must be undertaken, in the end, alone, supported only by his strength of will, character and willingness to sacrifice himself. Both Gandalf and AD literally die, in a certain sense, and return, in somewhat different forms, in the course of this quest. So what is the source of Gandalf's power?

It strikes me as very unlikely that JRRT, a devout Catholic, constructed Gandalf as a gay character. We actually know a bit about him: he was a Mayar, one level of immortal being down from the Valar, and his power, as various bits and pieces of Tolkien's writing makes clear, came directly from the Valar themselves: he is a conduit, into the ordinary world of Middle Earth, of the radiant power that the Valar themselves possess, which Tolkier identified as being, ultimate, _goodness_ on a cosmic scale. Interestingly, just as Rowling has done with AD, Tolkien explicitly identified his archmage `offline', so to speak, as an angel. The power of sexual boundary violation, of the sort you and Tellner were alluding to, is, so far as I've read&#8212;and again, it's not my area!&#8212;with magic of a kind rather different from what AD and Gandalf embody. They are classic types of the `white wizard' (whom Gandalf actually becomes, in _LoTR_); nothing that they do suggests the kind of uniting of opposites across socially defined bounds that what has always been considered black magic does. Voldemort, yes&#8212;that would make sense, in terms of hermaphrodism or other major violations of cultural norms (think about the Horcruxes, e.g.). 




upnorthkyosa said:


> If you look at the Harry Potter story, JKR makes a point of showing that Dumbledore does all of this.  She ties all sorts of symbols to AB that make a pretty clear allusion to John Dee and Hermes Trismagestis.  My guess is that JKR studied this stuff to some extent before she wrote the HP series.  I find this interesting, because she could have wrote a story with wizards and made a bunch of stuff up.  Instead, she decided to draw from real occult practices to write her story.



But she can pick and choose the way in which the symbols and `decorations' of traditional magic are actually used. That's the great thing about being a writer who has the freedom of unlimited syncretism&#8212;you can make up your own story. So far as I can see, there was no actual linkage _in the logic of the narrative_ between AD and any particular sexuality.




upnorthkyosa said:


> IMHO, it adds another element to her story.  It makes me want to read the book again and see what I can pull out with my meager knowledge of this stuff.
> 
> I'm thinking about passing this thread along to my student (who is also a member of MT) and seeing what he has to say.  I'm sure he could give us a lot better perspective.



That would be a very good thing, UpN&#8212;I'd be interested in hearing what he said!


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## Cryozombie

Im not supprised.  He wore a dress.

And if you look at his eyes, all heavy lidded and slanty, I bet he smoked weed too, just like Gandalf. 

Hehe.

Sorry, I had to.

Actually, I just don't see what difference this makes.  It's like in Mallrats when Brody asked Stan Lee if the Thing's Penis was made of rock too.

IMO It falls under the "um, do we really need to know this to enjoy or dislike the series any more/less?"


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## jks9199

This bumps into something that pisses me off...  Pointless sex scenes.  Whether it's tv, movies, or books, it seems like everything has to have sex scenes.  Even if there's no real point in the story...  I've been reading *Ghost* by John Ringo.  There are 100 pages there that could almost be entirely eliminated; I don't see what they had to do with anything else in the story so far.  Same way... I don't care whether Dumbledore was gay, straight, or bisexual.  He wasn't dating students at Hogwarts.   Who cares?  At least she left it out of the books & movies.


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## Makalakumu

Well, I don't think its pointless.  IMHO, I think it adds an occult perspective to the wizarding world that makes the story a lot more interesting.  The fact that Dumbledore was gay according to JKR adds some historical significance to the series.  It draws on many traditions.  All of this has me wondering whether or not JKR left us clues to all of this.  I may even go back and reread them to see...


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## Blotan Hunka

Im of the "eh..who cares?" crowd. Loved the books. Never cared or thought about AD's love life.


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## shesulsa

Blotan Hunka said:


> Im of the "eh..who cares?" crowd. Loved the books. Never cared or thought about AD's love life.


Well I thought about it ... but know a lot of schoolteachers and professors who never marry and/or never have children.

As for the rest of your statement, I agree - couldn't care less, really.


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## CoryKS

AD is Schrodinger's Homosexual - if the book is closed, he is neither gay nor straight.

Don't know what that means, but I think it's silly to speculate on the orientation of a fictional character.  I was able to cope with the hot, knowing looks between Frodo and Sam, I can cope with this.


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## shesulsa

CoryKS said:


> Don't know what that means, but I think it's silly to speculate on the orientation of a fictional character.  I was able to cope with the hot, knowing looks between Frodo and Sam, I can cope with this.


:lol2:

I hear Sir Ian McKellan had a hard time getting through that trilogy. :lfao:


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## MA-Caver

CoryKS said:


> AD is Schrodinger's Homosexual - if the book is closed, he is neither gay nor straight.
> 
> Don't know what that means, but I think it's silly to speculate on the orientation of a fictional character.  I was able to cope with the hot, knowing looks between Frodo and Sam, I can cope with this.


Well that's the problem ... when Tolkien written the trilogy he wrote about a very strong close bond of friendship between Sam and Frodo. There was nothing more to that. 
However it translated badly into film or due to today's increasing pro-gay society the looks exchanged between the actors was IMO mis-interpreted as loving/knowing looks rather than fondness of a loyal, close (hetrosexual) friends. Remember Sam always had a torch for Rosie Cotton the barmaid back at the Shire, and he eventually married and started a family with her. 
Same with Merry and Pippin who, in the novels each married and had children. 
Both had a close loyal bond but nothing sexual. 
If Tolkien had meant for that to be then he would've elluded more to that in his writings. He was a very detailed author and wrote several times of the closeness of the four hobbits of the fellowship. 

People are reading what they WANT to read into it. Maybe I am too but I've been reading The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (including the prequel "The Hobbit") annually for the last 18-20 years. I can be dense but I'm not THAT naive to have missed something along those lines if it were in there. :lol:

But as far as Rowling mentioning the sexual orientation/preference of Dumbledore this late in... I can't see any relevantcy to the story/plot at all. Especially considering that he died at the end of book 6 and only spoke to Harry in spirit. I'd have to agree that it's a (redundant) marketing ploy to appeal to the gay audience which were already enamored by the whole story anyway to begin with. Don't think they needed any help in liking the books anymore than they have. Several of my gay friends are big Potter fans and the fact that there's no "open" gay characters throughout the series doesn't bother them at all. 
So why bring up a dead character's orientation... especially since the story is finished.


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## shesulsa

See, I always thought there was a mad love triangle between Padfoot, Snape and Moody.


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## Blotan Hunka

MA-Caver said:


> So why bring up a dead character's orientation... especially since the story is finished.


 
I think its a smart marketing maneuver. Be all inclusive to draw a bigger market.

Like she needs it.


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## CoryKS

MA-Caver said:


> So why bring up a dead character's orientation... especially since the story is finished.


 
"I LOVE MY DEAD GAY WIZARD!"


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## bydand

shesulsa said:


> See, I always thought there was a mad love triangle between Padfoot, Snape and Moody.



Oh, now you see, that right there is just...  Eeeewww.   Glad you didn't mention wormtail in that mix, I would have had to go shower just to feel clean after reading something like that.


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## CoryKS

shesulsa said:


> See, I always thought there was a mad love triangle between Padfoot, Snape and Moody.


 
I see you've been reading the fan fiction.


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## shesulsa

bydand said:


> Oh, now you see, that right there is just...  Eeeewww.   Glad you didn't mention wormtail in that mix, I would have had to go shower just to feel clean after reading something like that.


Well I did have my suspicions.  But after giving his LEFT hand for his master instead of his RIGHT ... 

As for the other three, though, oh the possibilities.  Fur, potions, a crazy eye ... *raises eyebrows*


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## michaeledward

I have not read the books. As a family, we have listened to the Jim Dale readings of the books, while traveling in the auto. When I have attempted to read the books, I find they did not have half the appeal of hearing the stories. (Especially as read by Mr. Dale). 

What is apparent, from the books, the story arc, and the interviews that Ms. Rowling has given, is that the world and characters have been pretty fully developed prior to publishing.

While it may not be necessary for us to know that Ms. Rowling viewed the character as a closeted homosexual, I believe it may have been important for her to know that. 

I think the idea that she is spinning the story that way now, as a ploy to increase market share, is ridiculous. I don't know that she would be able to recongize the difference in her wealth on the basis of this knowlege. It would be, I believe, too little impact, on to large a body of wealth. 

... and, after the round of applause that greeter the announcement in New York, she is reported as saying something like "if I knew, I would have told you sooner.".


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## shesulsa

CoryKS said:


> I see you've been reading the fan fiction.


:lookie:  ... no ... (rep points for the first person who can make the SNL reference) :lol2:


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## Cryozombie

Caver, 

Everyone knows Hobbits are gay.  Thats why lady hobbits Date orks.

​


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## jks9199

michaeledward said:


> I have not read the books. As a family, we have listened to the Jim Dale readings of the books, while traveling in the auto. When I have attempted to read the books, I find they did not have half the appeal of hearing the stories. (Especially as read by Mr. Dale).
> 
> What is apparent, from the books, the story arc, and the interviews that Ms. Rowling has given, is that the world and characters have been pretty fully developed prior to publishing.
> 
> While it may not be necessary for us to know that Ms. Rowling viewed the character as a closeted homosexual, I believe it may have been important for her to know that.
> 
> I think the idea that she is spinning the story that way now, as a ploy to increase market share, is ridiculous. I don't know that she would be able to recongize the difference in her wealth on the basis of this knowlege. It would be, I believe, too little impact, on to large a body of wealth.
> 
> ... and, after the round of applause that greeter the announcement in New York, she is reported as saying something like "if I knew, I would have told you sooner.".


That's something to consider...

It may have been something that SHE needed to know to write the books.  I know some writers have to very carefully plot out details well beyond what they'll actually include in a book.  L. E. Modesit has clearly plotted out much more of the back story in several of his series than he has writted so far -- and clearly had much of this done before *The Magic of Recluse*.  (In fact, when I first read it, I started hunting for the book or books I missed!)  The same thing with the Liaden Universe created by Steve Miller & Sharon Lee.  Others run with it as it goes...  I think Piers Anthony is an example of this, based on his writings about writing.  I also remember other writers telling how characters took on a life of their own.

But we, the readers, don't always need to know all of this, or all the backstory of the book!


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## exile

I think the crucial question is, are the author's _intentions_ part of the story? Are they crucial to the abstract object which the narrative constitutes? Here's an example of the same question in another guise:  do we need to know what Beethoven's naturalistic intentions were to grasp the structure and musical meaning of the Pastoral Symphony? The logic of tonality, melody and theme and variation are really what the 6th Symphony exhibits, and denotes. Beethoven's images of shepherds, shepherdesses, harvest celebrations and thunderstorms isn't in the least relevant to the 6th as a muscal structure: it's the _score_ which tells the story, not the rather prosaic storyline that Beethoven supplied for it. The Harry Potter epic is similarly the score which JKR composed; how could her private attitudes about the characters&#8212;to the extent that they did not take the form of plot or character components&#8212;actually be considered parts of the story at all?

In exactly the same way, the idea that JKR's intentions, views, attitudes and so on actually affect the logic of the story after the fact, so to speak, seems to me without any foundation. Suppose she announced, in another interview, that she had always viewed Fred and George as 20th century wizard versions of the Greek heroic twins Castor and Pollux. Exactly what would this tell us about their role and actions and so on in the story?? It might tell us a good deal about JKR herself, but everything that we can legitimately infer about the _story_ JKR has told is contained in the story, which Castor and Pollux have no connection to whatever.

Mozart is said to have hated the flute. He wrote little for it, but what he did write is as transcendently beautiful as anything he wrote for the violin or any other instrument. Knowing that he hated the flute, will this change our perception of his magnificent flute concerti? An author is allowed to entertain little private ideas about her characters, just as we are, but once she's put down the pen and the story is told, her intentions, and ideas, however they may have expedited creating the tale, are not part of the story unless they've played a role in the story itself. If anyone can identify some component of the saga which makes no sense unless we assume AD was gay... then the picture changes, sure. But no one has actually pointed out anything remotely like that on this thread so far.


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## crushing

michaeledward said:


> J.K. Rowling had a reading in New York recently. In response to a question from a young attendee, she informs us that Albus Dumbledore was gay.


 
Dumbledore?  Not Snape?


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## shesulsa

crushing said:


> Dumbledore?  Not Snape?


According to Rowling, Snape loved Lilly all his life to the extent he could love no other.

But see my theory on Padfoot, Snape and Moody.


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## MA-Caver

Lord of the Dead said:


> Caver,
> 
> Everyone knows Hobbits are gay.  Thats why lady hobbits Date orks.
> 
> ​



Hmm, I would've thought that female Hobbits dated/mated with Dwarf men because "... there _ARE_ no Dwarf women..." according to Gimli speaking to Eowyn while enroute to Helms Deep (The Two Towers movie).


----------



## Kreth

MA-Caver said:


> Hmm, I would've thought that female Hobbits dated/mated with Dwarf men because "... there _ARE_ no Dwarf women..." according to Gimli speaking to Eowyn while enroute to Helms Deep (The Two Towers movie).


It's been a year or two since my last read-through, but I thought he told her that Dwarven women were often mistaken for Dwarven men? It was the Entwives that were "missing."


----------



## crushing

Lord of the Dead said:


> Caver,​
> 
> Everyone knows Hobbits are gay. Thats why lady hobbits Date orks.​


 
Are you sure it wasn't just for the orck chasms?


----------



## jazkiljok

i like this fictional characters' take on the fictional character...


http://www.theonion.com/content/amvo/rowling_dumbledore_is_gay



> "Dumbledore? I always figured the gay ones were Harry, Draco Malfoy, Hermione, Ron, Hagrid, Dudley Dursely, Ptolemy, Morgana, and Professor Snape.


----------



## Kacey

Time magazine also had an article this week.



> Outing Dumbledore
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> When J.K. Rowling said at Carnegie Hall that Albus Dumbledore--her Aslan, her Gandalf, her Yoda--was gay, the crowd apparently sat in silence for a few seconds and then burst into wild applause. I'm still sitting in silence. I feel a bit like I did when we learned too much about Mark Foley and Larry Craig: you are not the role model I'd hoped for as a gay man.
> <snip>
> So along comes Rowling with Dumbledore--a human being, a wizard even, an indisputable hero and one of the most beloved figures in children's literature. Shouldn't I be happy to learn he's gay?
> Yes, except: Why couldn't he tell us himself? The Potter books add up to more than 800,000 words before Dumbledore dies in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, yet Rowling couldn't spare two of those words to help define a central character's emotional identity: "I'm gay." We can only conclude that Dumbledore saw his homosexuality as shameful. His silence suggests a lack of personal integrity that is completely out of character.


----------



## exile

Kacey said:


> Time magazine also had an article this week....





> We can only conclude that Dumbledore saw his homosexuality as shameful. His silence suggests a lack of personal integrity that is completely out of character.



Which is why I think we should consider the much simpler solution: Dumbledore isn't gay in the Harry Potter saga. He may well be gay in JKR's imagining of him. But that imagining and the actual Harry Potter saga Dumbledore have no more necessary relation to each other than my imagining, or your imagining, or anyone else's imagining of AD&#8212;or Harry, or Hermione, or Ron, or Draco&#8212;have to the story. AD's alleged gayness was not part of the story, had no import in anything he said or did, and is reflected, so far as I can see, in no facet of the plot. If I'm right, then the narrative problem the _Time_ magazine writer observes simply disappears: there was no actual denial involved&#8212;which would have, as the writer notes, been totally out of character for the Dumbledore who we _know_, on the basis of his words, decisions, and actions&#8212;because what would have been had to be denied, on Rowling's after-the-fact `revelation' was not actually true. For this reason, the article and commentary Kacey cites here _could_ be taken to foreground the strongest possible reason to reject JKR's characterization of the Harry Potter epic Dumbledore (as vs. her own private vision of the character) as gay&#8212;because to assume him to be gay creates, rather than solves, a significant problem of consistency in the character where none existed before.

Of course, there's a way out for anyone who wants to defend Rowling's right to add biographic detail to AD's life in the epic which is completely uncorroborated by anything _in_ the epic. It's this: you could say, well, Dumbledore doesn't deny his gayness; as you can see from the story itself, neither his sexuality, nor the sexuality of many of the other staff at Hogwarts, ever arises in any kind of direct way in any context, so why would it have been relevant for AD to assert his gayness, any more than for, say, Professor McGonagall to mention her straightness? We can make inferences about, say, Lupin and Snape (though admittedly not 100% definitive ones) based on their involvements, hoped-for or real respectively, with women, but about any number of the other figures who appear as faculty at Hogwarts, no. If there never was an occasion where it was relevant, why would we expect AD to interject the point completely out of context? Would that be any _more_ in keeping with his character? 

Someone who argues along these lines might imagine that they've gotten around the problem of character consistency, but then the 800 lb gorilla in the room has to be faced: since there's absolutely no reason, no context, no plot element, in which the issue of AD's sexuality legitimately arises as a question&#8212;something you have to insist on if you want to deny that any actual denial is involved as per the _Times_ writer's complaint&#8212;then exactly what warrant do we have for interpreting him as indeed _being_ gay? JKR's say-so? But now we're back to the same point: since, on this line of reasoning, we've agreed that there is no point in the whole seven book saga which pivots on AD's sexuality, what does it mean for JKR to assert _anything_ about that after the fact? Suppose she `revealed' in an interview that McGonagall had actually been a Slytherin when she was a student at Hogwarts&#8212;would that actually _make_ her an ex-Slytherin? And so on. The fact is, anything JKR reveals at this point which wasn't at least strongly implicit in the story is... well, _fan fiction_.


----------



## AceHBK

The only thing that upsets me about Dumbledore is that Richard Harris passed away and I am stuck with the "fake" Dumbledore...

God he is awful at Dumbledore!!

I swear if Jim Dale doesn't sound like Richard Harris it's scary.


----------



## exile

AceHBK said:


> The only thing that upsets me about Dumbledore is that Richard Harris passed away and I am stuck with the "fake" Dumbledore...
> 
> God he is awful at Dumbledore!!



Michael Gambon is a great actor&#8212;if you ever saw _The Singing Detective_, you'd have no doubts whatever about that; he was beyond brilliant. But definitely, he does not recreate the true Dumbledore of the the book that Richard Harris did. RH was absolutely perfect; MG's Dumbledore is by contrast a much harsher personality than either RH's or JKR's Dumbledore is. 



AceHBK said:


> I swear if Jim Dale doesn't sound like Richard Harris it's scary.



Dale is a genius... by voice alone he manages to communicate the essence of each character, and to do so flawlessly every time. `Scary' is exactly the right word for someone who can randomly retrieve almost two hundred voices, consistently and with perfect `pitch' every time. He deserves every one of the Grammy's he's won, in spades....


----------



## Makalakumu

exile said:


> Which is why I think we should consider the much simpler solution: Dumbledore isn't gay in the Harry Potter saga. He may well be gay in JKR's imagining of him. But that imagining and the actual Harry Potter saga Dumbledore have no more necessary relation to each other than my imagining, or your imagining, or anyone else's imagining of ADor Harry, or Hermione, or Ron, or Dracohave to the story. AD's alleged gayness was not part of the story, had no import in anything he said or did, and is reflected, so far as I can see, in no facet of the plot. If I'm right, then the narrative problem the _Time_ magazine writer observes simply disappears: there was no actual denial involvedwhich would have, as the writer notes, been totally out of character for the Dumbledore who we _know_, on the basis of his words, decisions, and actionsbecause what would have been had to be denied, on Rowling's after-the-fact `revelation' was not actually true. For this reason, the article and commentary Kacey cites here _could_ be taken to foreground the strongest possible reason to reject JKR's characterization of the Harry Potter epic Dumbledore (as vs. her own private vision of the character) as gaybecause to assume him to be gay creates, rather than solves, a significant problem of consistency in the character where none existed before.
> 
> Of course, there's a way out for anyone who wants to defend Rowling's right to add biographic detail to AD's life in the epic which is completely uncorroborated by anything _in_ the epic. It's this: you could say, well, Dumbledore doesn't deny his gayness; as you can see from the story itself, neither his sexuality, nor the sexuality of many of the other staff at Hogwarts, ever arises in any kind of direct way in any context, so why would it have been relevant for AD to assert his gayness, any more than for, say, Professor McGonagall to mention her straightness? We can make inferences about, say, Lupin and Snape (though admittedly not 100% definitive ones) based on their involvements, hoped-for or real respectively, with women, but about any number of the other figures who appear as faculty at Hogwarts, no. If there never was an occasion where it was relevant, why would we expect AD to interject the point completely out of context? Would that be any _more_ in keeping with his character?
> 
> Someone who argues along these lines might imagine that they've gotten around the problem of character consistency, but then the 800 lb gorilla in the room has to be faced: since there's absolutely no reason, no context, no plot element, in which the issue of AD's sexuality legitimately arises as a questionsomething you have to insist on if you want to deny that any actual denial is involved as per the _Times_ writer's complaintthen exactly what warrant do we have for interpreting him as indeed _being_ gay? JKR's say-so? But now we're back to the same point: since, on this line of reasoning, we've agreed that there is no point in the whole seven book saga which pivots on AD's sexuality, what does it mean for JKR to assert _anything_ about that after the fact? Suppose she `revealed' in an interview that McGonagall had actually been a Slytherin when she was a student at Hogwartswould that actually _make_ her an ex-Slytherin? And so on. The fact is, anything JKR reveals at this point which wasn't at least strongly implicit in the story is... well, _fan fiction_.


 
I think we need to be very careful before we assert that there are no clues, no allusions, or no references to AD's sexuality.  As has been mentioned before, homosexuality has played a large role in real occult magical practices.  Do you know enough about those to notice what could be incorporated in JKR's narrative?  

We need to be very careful not to look at this through the cultural lense that we currently see gayness.  That is not the context that she associates with AD's character.  He is a wizard tried and true I think we need to examine the character and narrative through that historical context.


----------



## Makalakumu

Here's some information that people can use to inform themselves better before they go back and read.  I'm looking for particular names, words or verbs that could have been used or turned into anagrams.  Check it out.

Aleister Crowley
Argenteum Astrum

And then there is John Dee.  Check out his picture...





Now look at this...



> Dee appears in Alan Moore's comic book Promethea, as does the 19th-century occultist *Aleister Crowley**.* Dee and Kelley are the main characters in Gustav Meyrink's 1927 _The Angel of the West Window_.
> 
> The book, "The Alchemyst:the Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel", portrays Dr. Dee as a human enemy of *Nicolas Flamel**. *The book is penned by Michael Scott.
> 
> Roger Highfield, _The Science of Harry Potter_ (New York: Penguin, 2002), 218-221, claims that *Dee's physical appearance is the inspiration for Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series*.


 
Highfield's claim, as far as I know, was corroborated by JKR, but more interestingly, check out the connection to Nicolas Flamel and Aleister Crowley that Dee has had.  All of us who have read the book know that Nicolas Flamel was directly mention in the series.  

Here is something else to think about...






First of all, just about all of the mythology that JKR ties to these objects is an occult allagory.

Secondly...

Enochian Magic



> It is not quite clear how much of Enochian magic was put to use by Dee and Kelley. However, rediscovery of Enochian magic by the Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn has sparked remarkable publicity for it in modern occultism. Enochian as an operative system is difficult to reconstruct based upon the Sloane manuscripts, but contemporary occult organizations have attempted to make it usable. The Golden Dawn was the first, but their knowledge was based upon only one of Dee's diaries and their planetary, elemental, or zodiacal attributions are unfounded.
> 
> One facet of the rediscovery is Enochian chess, a four handed variant of the game played in the Golden Dawn in Mather's time and revived by New Zealand Golden Dawn members and chess players in the late Twentieth Century.
> 
> Aleister Crowley, who worked with, and wrote about, Enochian magic extensively, has contributed much to its comparatively widespread use today. His first work on the topic was his Liber Chanokh, a walkthrough to decipher some elements of this system, but his attention was particularly focused upon the Calls of the Aethyrs. His visions from these calls formed a document called _The Vision and the Voice_, also known as Liber 418.


 
This is an enochian banner...






In JKR's narrative, the cross has been replaced with the occult sunburst cross used by the Golden Dawn.






With all of that being said, it makes perfect sense for AD's character to be gay.  You can't look at this through our current cultural lense.  Further, I would say that JKR left us PLENTY of evidence of THAT and WHOLE BUNCH more.

Holy Crap!  I never expected this post to go like that.  It was click click click and connection after connection popped up.  This 25 minutes of research has totally blown my mind.


----------



## exile

upnorthkyosa said:


> I think we need to be very careful before we assert that there are no clues, no allusions, or no references to AD's sexuality.  As has been mentioned before, homosexuality has played a large role in real occult magical practices.  Do you know enough about those to notice what could be incorporated in JKR's narrative?



But the burden of proof is upon the asserter. If someone wants to argue that Dumbledore is _X_, then no matter what _X_ is, there has to be some reason to assert it which gives it a privileged status in the infinite list of things someone _might_ think about Dumbledore. For example, Dumbledore is a vegetarian. Dumbledore prefers robes which do not have stiched-in pockets. Dumbledore's left arm is, due to a minor birth defect, noticeably shorter than his left arm.... If you assert _any_ of these things&#8212;and `you' here includes JKR&#8212;then for it to mean something beyond your own private imaginings, your personal visualization of AD, you need to point to textual evidence, to show that it's not just in your head, but in the story as well.



upnorthkyosa said:


> We need to be very careful not to look at this through the cultural lense that we currently see gayness.  That is not the context that she associates with AD's character.  He is a wizard tried and true I think we need to examine the character and narrative through that historical context.



These are generalities, UpN. It's also true that we need to be careful about assuming that something is or is not true about any place on the planet; but that doesn't mean that, when every single bit of so-called best-case evidence for the existence of the `Bermuda Triangle' has been reviewed in detail and shown to be nothing of the sort (as in Lawrence  Kuschke's book), a supporter of that particular delusion can still say, `well, there are still more cases that you haven't looked at yet, so it's still an open question.' The fact is, if you want the Bermuda Triangle to be true, you can't say, you haven't disproven it&#8212;the burden of proof is on you, given the impossibility of disproving an existential assertion over an open set (e.g., you can disprove the claim that `All swans are white' by finding a melanstic  swan, but you cannot disprove the claim that `there is at least one black swan', because unless you look at every swan that is, has been, or will be, you cannot know that the next swan you look at won't be black, no matter how many white ones you've already pointed to. So the burden of proof is on the one who claims that there is such a black swan to actually produce that swan.)

 And in this case, the burden on proof is on you to present something that constitutes evidence for AD's gayness. Just as the burden of proof would be on you to offer proof, given the text, that McGonagall had been in Slytherin house as a student, if you asserted that she was. Or that Ron also had had an identical twin who had died at birth and was never, ever spoken of in the Weasley houshold. Or...

JKR could assert any of these other possibilities, but the same constraint is on her: _OK, where's the evidence?_ The _Times_ story Kacey referred us to gives one possible piece of reasoning for thinking that AD is _not_ gay (i.e., if he indeed were, his lack of candor about it would contradict the otherwise completely consistent openness he shows in the rest of his personality). I've given a possible challenge to that line of reasoning in the post you've cited, but I don't know whether or not the _Times_ story writer might not want to pursue the argument that if he _were_ gay, Dumbledore would have made sure that people knew about it.

Yes, sexual boundary crossing is a component of magical tradition. But, as with Gandalf, or, arguably, Ursula Leguin's archmage Ged, there is also a tradition of mages in fantasy literature who derive their power directly from an angelic source; their magic is not, in that sense, `occult' but based on their being a conduit for some kind of cosmic ordering principle which they are, in a sense, a representative of, or caretaker for. So whether Dumbledore's power derives from occult sources is _itself_ part of the question. As I mentioned, in at least one interview, JKR explicitly noted that Dumbledore was an angel, and she wasn't talking about his sweet nature. I also noted in earlier post that of course, if someone could demonstrate that the narrative doesn't make sense in one or more cases unless AD is gay, then that of course would change the nature of the case considerably. But so far, no one has produced anything that favors that interpretation.... and by the logic of the case, the burden of proof _is_ on anyone who believes something about any of JKR's characters to demonstrate it. As soon as some piece of evidence on behalf of his gayness is actually produced, then there's something to talk about, eh? 




			
				upnorthkyosa said:
			
		

> With all of that being said, it makes perfect sense for AD's character to be gay. You can't look at this through our current cultural lense. Further, I would say that JKR left us PLENTY of evidence of THAT and WHOLE BUNCH more.



Of course it's possible. But what you are calling evidence for his gayness is nothing of the sort. It's _at best_ evidence for JKR's sources of inspiration, sources for her iconography. But it doesn't contain the least bit of evidence for asserting a particular property of AD. The only evidence for that is the content of the story, the text. Again, I think you're conflating JKR's _thinking_ with the narrative _content_ of the Harry Potter saga. But it's a category error to treat these as the same thing.


----------



## Rich Parsons

exile said:


> But the burden of proof is upon the asserter. If someone wants to argue that Dumbledore is _X_, then no matter what _X_ is, there has to be some reason to assert it which gives it a privileged status in the infinite list of things someone _might_ think about Dumbledore. For example, Dumbledore is a vegetarian. Dumbledore prefers robes which do not have stiched-in pockets. Dumbledore's left arm is, due to a minor birth defect, noticeably shorter than his left arm.... If you assert _any_ of these thingsand `you' here includes JKRthen for it to mean something beyond your own private imaginings, your personal visualization of AD, you need to point to textual evidence, to show that it's not just in your head, but in the story as well.
> 
> 
> 
> These are generalities, UpN. It's also true that we need to be careful about assuming that something is or is not true about any place on the planet; but that doesn't mean that, when every single bit of so-called best-case evidence for the existence of the `Bermuda Triangle' has been reviewed in detail and shown to be nothing of the sort (as in Lawrence Kuschke's book), a supporter of that particular delusion can still say, `well, there are still more cases that you haven't looked at yet, so it's still an open question.' The fact is, if you want the Bermuda Triangle to be true, you can't say, you haven't disproven itthe burden of proof is on you, given the impossibility of disproving an existential assertion over an open set (e.g., you can disprove the claim that `All swans are white' by finding a melanstic swan, but you cannot disprove the claim that `there is at least one black swan', because unless you look at every swan that is, has been, or will be, you cannot know that the next swan you look at won't be black, no matter how many white ones you've already pointed to. So the burden of proof is on the one who claims that there is such a black swan to actually produce that swan.)
> 
> And in this case, the burden on proof is on you to present something that constitutes evidence for AD's gayness. Just as the burden of proof would be on you to offer proof, given the text, that McGonagall had been in Slytherin house as a student, if you asserted that she was. Or that Ron also had had an identical twin who had died at birth and was never, ever spoken of in the Weasley houshold. Or...
> 
> JKR could assert any of these other possibilities, but the same constraint is on her: _OK, where's the evidence?_ The _Times_ story Kacey referred us to gives one possible piece of reasoning for thinking that AD is _not_ gay (i.e., if he indeed were, his lack of candor about it would contradict the otherwise completely consistent openness he shows in the rest of his personality). I've given a possible challenge to that line of reasoning in the post you've cited, but I don't know whether or not the _Times_ story writer might not want to pursue the argument that if he _were_ gay, Dumbledore would have made sure that people knew about it.
> 
> Yes, sexual boundary crossing is a component of magical tradition. But, as with Gandalf, or, arguably, Ursula Leguin's archmage Ged, there is also a tradition of mages in fantasy literature who derive their power directly from an angelic source; their magic is not, in that sense, `occult' but based on their being a conduit for some kind of cosmic ordering principle which they are, in a sense, a representative of, or caretaker for. So whether Dumbledore's power derives from occult sources is _itself_ part of the question. As I mentioned, in at least one interview, JKR explicitly noted that Dumbledore was an angel, and she wasn't talking about his sweet nature. I also noted in earlier post that of course, if someone could demonstrate that the narrative doesn't make sense in one or more cases unless AD is gay, then that of course would change the nature of the case considerably. But so far, no one has produced anything that favors that interpretation.... and by the logic of the case, the burden of proof _is_ on anyone who believes something about any of JKR's characters to demonstrate it. As soon as some piece of evidence on behalf of his gayness is actually produced, then there's something to talk about, eh?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Of course it's possible. But what you are calling evidence for his gayness is nothing of the sort. It's _at best_ evidence for JKR's sources of inspiration, sources for her iconography. But it doesn't contain the least bit of evidence for asserting a particular property of AD. The only evidence for that is the content of the story, the text. Again, I think you're conflating JKR's _thinking_ with the narrative _content_ of the Harry Potter saga. But it's a category error to treat these as the same thing.



Some random thoughts :


So if I wear a robe with a hood and a mask with  silver cord for a belt on Halloween, does this make me a homosexual? I mean they are the trappings of magic, and one can back this up with all the phallic symbols in my living room. i.e. swords and knives and sticks and staves, and ...,  well you get my point. Another point would be that I am divorced but no kids and no current girl friend, as any real man of hetro persuasion would be married or not find himself without a GF or have children running around the world that he may or may not be helping to raise. Having friends who are Homosexual, and knowing that one gay man married a lesbian women while both were in the military and then divorced to help their cover. I guess my divorce also supports that I am gay. The relationship between the two can be drawn. 

I have paisley in my Dining room. I guess one could argue that it is another point for me being gay. Yet, it has nothing to do with me hating wall paper and taking it off and dealing with the mess and the paisley is nicely done and only part of the way up. But another point towards being gay. 

I guess it is all about the symbology and the perceptions of others and nothing to do with personal being. While in college, I asked one gay male how he knew he was gay. He asked me to walk from the lab to the hallway, and pointed at a couple walking arm and arm. He then smiled and asked me a single question. Which *** did you look at? I said hers. He replied I have always looked at his. I said ok, I get it now. So, in this case, if the author wants her character to be gay, then he is gay. If it is to upset people that is her personality failing and has nothing to do with others being gay or not.


----------



## Makalakumu

> Someone who argues along these lines might imagine that they've gotten around the problem of character consistency, but then the 800 lb gorilla in the room has to be faced: *since there's absolutely no reason, no context, no plot element, in which the issue of AD's sexuality legitimately arises as a question*something you have to insist on if you want to deny that any actual denial is involved as per the _Times_ writer's complaintthen exactly what warrant do we have for interpreting him as indeed _being_ gay?


 
Hold the phone, exile.  Lets not forget your assertion.  Have you gone back and read the section that JKR points us?  Have you gone back and reread all 800,000 words to make sure of that?

_



One fan asked whether Albus Dumbledore, the head of the famed Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft,  had ever loved anyone. Rowling smiled. "Dumbledore is gay, actually," replied Rowling as the audience erupted in surprise. She added that, in her mind, *Dumbledore had an unrequited love affair with Gellert Grindelwald*, Voldemort's predecessor who appears in the seventh book.

Click to expand...

_ 
I've read it again and knowing that AD was gay certainly makes a lot more sense.  As far as contextual evidence goes, I think that when you combine that evidence with the historical wizarding context in the characterization and iconography that JKR used, a case could be made that he was possibly gay.  Now, the real work would be to trace all of these elements throughout all 800,000 words and see where it goes.  

I'm very curious as to AD's relationship with Nicolas Flemel.  The John Dee, Enochian Magic, Golden Dawn, Crowley connection seems to say that there may be more significance there then one first thought.


----------



## CoryKS

And then it gets weird:  Harry Potter as Leftist wehrmacht against the American Way of Life.  Brought to you by the French.  Jeez, all I got out of the series was a furious desire to play Quidditch.


----------



## exile

upnorthkyosa said:


> Hold the phone, exile.  Lets not forget your assertion.  Have you gone back and read the section that JKR points us?  Have you gone back and reread all 800,000 words to make sure of that?


 


But I'm not the one who's making the claim, UpN. I hate to keep dwelling on the point, but the burden of proof isn't with me. It lies on person making the claim. I tried to be clear about why that's the case in my last post...



upnorthkyosa said:


> I've read it again and knowing that AD was gay certainly makes a lot more sense.  As far as contextual evidence goes, I think that when you combine that evidence with the historical wizarding context in the characterization and iconography that JKR used, a case could be made that he was possibly gay.



I think we already know that he was possibly gay&#8212;as is true for virtually _any_ of the characters in the book, except perhaps for the Sorting Hat. 

But notice:



> One fan asked whether Albus Dumbledore, the head of the famed Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft, had ever loved anyone. Rowling smiled. "Dumbledore is gay, actually," replied Rowling as the audience erupted in surprise. She added that, *in her mind,*Dumbledore had an unrequited love affair with Gellert Grindelwald, Voldemort's predecessor who appears in the seventh book.



The fact that the unrequited love affair with GG is, as she says, _in her mind_, is the key to the whole business. To you, this makes the relationship between AD and GG more plausible; to me, though, it adds nothing to the information she already supplies, in copious detail, about the two in the discussion AD and Harry have about the circumstances surrounding AD's sister's death. That's the problem: the nature of the AD/GG connection in JKR's mind isn't evidence for anything in the _story._ The evidence there is Dumbledore's tesitmony. JKR's remarks of course constitute more evidence for what was in her mind, but again... _big_ difference.




upnorthkyosa said:


> Now, the real work would be to trace all of these elements throughout all 800,000 words and see where it goes.



Anyone who wants to can do that, and I'll be all ears if they find anything in the book which crucially, or even plausibly, supports JKR's impression that AD is gay.



upnorthkyosa said:


> I'm very curious as to AD's relationship with Nicolas Flemel.  The John Dee, Enochian Magic, Golden Dawn, Crowley connection seems to say that there may be more significance there then one first thought.



Maybe. Or not. There are, it has been noted repeatedly, many specifically Catholic liturgical and musical references in Bach's _Mass in B-Minor_. I've yet to hear anyone try to argue from that that this greatest of all High Lutheran music makes it plausible that Bach was a closet Catholic... Reasoning from sources, from materials, to strong conclusion is very, very dicey.


----------



## Makalakumu

exile said:


> But I'm not the one who's making the claim, UpN. I hate to keep dwelling on the point, but the burden of proof isn't with me. It lies on person making the claim. I tried to be clear about why that's the case in my last post....


 


exile said:


> *...since there's absolutely no reason, no context, no plot element, in which the issue of AD's sexuality legitimately arises as a question*.


 
I think that you are misascribing the assertion that "Dumbledore was gay" to me when all I'm doing is parroting what JKR herself said.  All I'm trying to do is provide more context in which to understand how AD could be gay.  Hopefully, I can provide people with enough information to go back and look for actual textual support and know what they are looking for.

Regarding the boldface, I think that your assertion, which runs counter to what the author has claimed, places a burden of proof on you.  IMHO, I think you need to go back a reread the book taking into account the occult aspects as well as analyzing other connections that AD may have had before you can make THAT assertion.



> I think we already know that he was possibly gay*as is true for virtually any of the characters* in the book, except perhaps for the Sorting Hat.


 
No its not.  Not when you take into account that Dumbledore was modled after John Dee and that much of the occult context and iconography draw directly from the things in which he was involved, which includes sex magic.  Thus, I think it is more accurate to say that out of all the characters, it is probably most probable that Dumbledore was gay.



> The fact that the unrequited love affair with GG is, as she says, _in her mind_, is the key to the whole business. To you, this makes the relationship between AD and GG more plausible; to me, though, *it adds nothing* to the information she already supplies, in copious detail, about the two in the discussion AD and Harry have about the circumstances surrounding AD's sister's death. That's the problem: *the nature of the AD/GG connection in JKR's mind isn't evidence for anything in the *_*story*._ The evidence there is Dumbledore's tesitmony. JKR's remarks of course constitute more evidence for what was in her mind, but again... _big_ difference.


 
IMO, it provides more contextual evidence that further characterizes AD with John Dee the Occultist.  I'm starting to believe that it ties into an underlying theme in the book.  I'm not saying that JKR is promoting occult beliefs and/or secret societies, but I believe that she specifically wrote this story to use real historical traditions.  Perhaps this was done to show that the wizarding world has always been hidden from the world of muggles...in which case AD's sexuality takes on even more meaning, because it adds even more to that connection.



> Anyone who wants to can do that, and I'll be all ears if they find anything in the book which crucially, or even plausibly, supports JKR's impression that AD is gay.


 
My wife is a huge Harry Potter fan and I know she'll go back and reread it if I can turn her onto this.  She's UpNorthMum on MT, so maybe she'll jump in if she bites.  I'm currently revising a 500,000 word peice of science fiction, so I don't have time.



> Maybe. Or not. There are, it has been noted repeatedly, many specifically Catholic liturgical and musical references in Bach's _Mass in B-Minor_. I've yet to hear anyone try to argue from that that this greatest of all High Lutheran music makes it plausible that Bach was a closet Catholic... Reasoning from sources, from materials, to strong conclusion is very, very dicey.


 
I think it would be different if Bach himself hinted or told us that he was Catholic...which is essentially what JKR did.  All that needs to be done is for a reader to take the occult contextual information provided in this thread and reexamine the nature of the magic and activities of Albus Dumbledore.  

As far as this thread goes, I think that all I have done is provide a different lense in which to read this story.


----------



## exile

upnorthkyosa said:


> I think that you are misascribing the assertion that "Dumbledore was gay" to me when all I'm doing is parroting what JKR herself said.  All I'm trying to do is provide more context in which to understand how AD could be gay.  Hopefully, I can provide people with enough information to go back and look for actual textual support and know what they are looking for.



You don't need context. Dumbledore could be gay regardless of what JKR said. So could any of the characters, including the ones who have active heterosexual relationships.



upnorthkyosa said:


> Regarding the boldface, I think that your assertion, *which runs counter to what the author has claimed,* places a burden of proof on you.



Sigh...what I have claimed is that there is no evidence currently on the table that Dumbledore is gay, and that therefore there is nothing _in the text_ which supports the assertion that he is gay. _The author's claims are irrelevant._ That's the critical point: the author cannot change the story after it's been told, unless she wants to go back and write a second edition. And that will not change anything, really; we will now have two different Harry Potter sagas, and the dispute will be about whether AD is gay in the _first_ of these.

A story, once told, is independent of its author: it exists as a narrative on its own. It's always interesting to know what the author's take on the characters is, but it _does not change the narrative content._ So no, I do not have the burden of proof, because Rowling's private opinions do not count as narrative content: they do not belong to the story, but are what the lit crit types like to call a metanarrative, a story about the story. Commentary, whether it's the author's or someone else's, is fundamentally different from text: it is a different order of thing. If you want to argue that the story supports AD's gayness: fine&#8212;argue away! But the nature of the argument rests on hard evidence, evidence which consists of narrative problems that require AD's gayness in order to unravel. We have have line of analysis, that in Kacey's link, which creates a _possible_ basis for a claim that AD _isn't_ gay in the possible world created by the HP story. If there is contrary evidence making AD' gayness more probably, in terms of the coherence of the narrative, than his non-gayness would... let's have it.



upnorthkyosa said:


> IMHO, I think you need to go back a reread the book taking into account the occult aspects as well as analyzing other connections that AD may have had before you can make THAT assertion.



No, I don't. Whoever is claiming that the text supports AD's gayness does. They have to _defend_ that assertion, logically speaking. In the absence of evidence, the conclusion has to be that nothing in the story itself supports that assertion. 



upnorthkyosa said:


> No its not.  Not when you take into account that Dumbledore was modled after John Dee and that much of the occult context and iconography draw directly from the things in which he was involved, which includes sex magic.  Thus, I think it is more accurate to say that out of all the characters, it is probably most probable that Dumbledore was gay.



The fact that Dumbledore was `modelled after John Dee' is _not part of the story_, and what we know about that modelling is only that he was _physically_ modelled after him. We have no information that anything else was. But I'll tell you this: we have evidence that Dee himself was heterosexual. He was married&#8212;_which Dumbledore was not_&#8212;in fact, Dee was married twice, and had eight children, _which Dumbledore did not_, so far as we can tell from the story itself. Dumbledore is modelled on Dee, you say? Then where is AD's wife, where is his daughter, the analogue of Dee's daughter Katherine? And if he _is_ modelled on Dee, then the modeling was only very partial, in these respects. And in terms of the claims of AD's homosexuality, it better be: otherwise you now have the _extra_ burden of showing that John Dee was also gay.



upnorthkyosa said:


> IMO, it provides more contextual evidence that further characterizes AD with John Dee the Occultist.



Your reasoning seems to be:

AD = John Dee
John Dee = occultist
occultism = sexual boundary transgress

therefore

AD = sexual boundary transgressor

therefore

AD = gay.

But you face the serious problem that if AD was modeled on Dee only physically, none of the crucial identifications hold. And if AD was modeled on Dee personally, then you are saying that Dumbledore's gayness crucially depends on identication with a man who was married twice, had eight childre, and whose life has, so far as I now, revealed no traces of homosexuality. Do you really want to go there, UpN? I myself think, from all this, that the tighter the identification with Dee, the _weaker_ any case for AD's gayness becomes!



upnorthkyosa said:


> I'm starting to believe that it ties into an underlying theme in the book.  I'm not saying that JKR is promoting occult beliefs and/or secret societies, but I believe that she specifically wrote this story to use real historical traditions.  Perhaps this was done to show that the wizarding world has always been hidden from the world of muggles...in which case AD's sexuality takes on even more meaning, because it adds even more to that connection.



Well, one can tell any story one likes about another story; it will have greater or lesser plausibility. If you're basing anything on the linkage between AD and John Dee, though, I'd say you have your work cut out for you...



upnorthkyosa said:


> I think it would be different if Bach himself hinted or told us that he was Catholic...which is essentially what JKR did.  All that needs to be done is for a reader to take the occult contextual information provided in this thread and reexamine the nature of the magic and activities of Albus Dumbledore.



Again, no. JKR is not AD. She created him as a character in a story; he now exists in that story independently of whatever she happens to think that is _not_ in that story. Whatever her sources for they, they do not implicate that character unless something inherent in one or more of the sources also turns up in the text of the narrative itself. And as I've suggested, if John Dee is the best that anyone can come up with so far as relevant sources go, the facts of his life pretty much pull the rug out of any use of him anyone would want to make of that line of argument. Similarly, Bach's sources do not implicate the exalted Protestantism that emerges everywhere in the _B Minor Mass_. Sources are just those&#8212;sources. They are not the story. Valid conclusions about the story derive from the story itself. 



upnorthkyosa said:


> My wife is a huge Harry Potter fan and I know she'll go back and reread it if I can turn her onto this.  She's UpNorthMum on MT, so maybe she'll jump in if she bites.  I'm currently revising a 500,000 word peice of science fiction, so I don't have time.
> 
> 
> As far as this thread goes, I think that all I have done is provide a different lense in which to read this story.



A different lens, or whatever one wants to call it, does not enforce a particular reading of the story in the absence of evidence for that reading. A `lens' is a hunch. Looking at things a different way does not&#8212;the critical theory `there is no reality' types(who figure that their own personal theories of the solar neutrino shortage are just as valid as the current solution supplied by particle physicists because science is, after all, just another text) notwithstanding&#8212;demonstrate that the world operates with multiple truths. It merely gives one a different-sized net to use in trawling for facts that bear on a hypothesis. The plaintiff is claiming that AD is gay, based at the moment on hearsay evidence. The defendent, the storyline, is claiming that there is nothing remotely strong enough to challenge reasonable doubt. The burden of proof is on the plaintiff, and I think the plaintiff would be _gravely_ mistaken to summon John Dee as a witness...


----------



## Makalakumu

What is "gayness" to an occultist?  What does "sexuality" mean?  Can you ascribe our current views of such to people who obviously believe differently?  I think you need to translate such views into a hermetic, enochian magical, cabalistic perspective.  What does being married twice and having eight children mean especially when one considers his underlying beliefs and the time period that he believed them?  Apparently not much, because if you look at his what he wrote of his beliefs, he not redefined the boundaries of sexuality, but was involved in sexual experimentation of all sorts.

Now, I can't say that AD is a perfect replica of John Dee, but I do think that it provides a little more insight into at least JKR's metanarrative.  As far as finding the textual support for this, I'm going to have to leave that for someone else.  The only thing this does is provide a little context for that investigation.

With that being said, here is something I'm really interested in.  If JKR says that AD is gay, doesn't it make sense for the reader to initially take her word for it and go back to the narrative to see if that is true?  I think I would be much more skeptical if reader after reader was basically reporting that they could find absolutely nothing to support that.

So, I'm curious as to why the resistence?  Especially before anyone has really done any work?

Especially when I spent five minutes, went back and reread the part where the relationship between AD and GG was explained and had a "hey wait a minute" moment.  

I feel like you are starting with the premise that AD is not gay and JKR is changing the story after the fact.

Also, I don't understand your point about not needing context.  Why wouldn't understanding the origin of the iconography and traditions help a person look for clues to a character's sexuality?  That doesn't make any sense to me...

:idunno:


----------



## exile

upnorthkyosa said:


> What is "gayness" to an occultist?  What does "sexuality" mean?  Can you ascribe our current views of such to people who obviously believe differently?  I think you need to translate such views into a hermetic, enochian magical, cabalistic perspective.  What does being married twice and having eight children mean especially when one considers his underlying beliefs and the time period that he believed them?  Apparently not much, because if you look at his what he wrote of his beliefs, he not redefined the boundaries of sexuality, but was involved in sexual experimentation of all sorts.



This line of reasoning seems to me to seriously beg the question. The question is, does the line of the story require us to apply an external historical frame which is not organically tied to anything in the story. Your question only makes sense if we are given a reason _within the text_to bring in a _particular_ aspect of _certain_ occult traditions (which you appear to be generalizing to universals, a seriously questionable practice in this case, bearing mind that much of the occult tradition was consciously defined by people who believe that their power came, as it were, from the `dark side of the force'&#8212;people like Crowley, whom you mentioned earlier, being a perfect example). But it is abundantly evident from the text that AD's magical career, and his antecedents, did not seek their power from that source. Who in the story did? Well.... um... Voldemort? AD's nemesis, as Sauron was Gandalf's nemesis? Remember, in one of his last conversations with Aragorn in _LoTR_, when Gandalf tells Aragorn that his role, and time, in Middle Earth have come to an end: `_I was the Enemy of Sauron_'. Capitalized. In the same way, AD is the Enemy of Voldemort. You could not have a clearer picture of the class between darkness and light than between AD and V, other mayb than Gandalf and Sauron, and in the former case, all the violations come from Voldemort. The horcruxes, for example, are absolutely typical of the occultic thread you continue to allude to&#8212;power through violation&#8212;but it's _Voldemort_, not Dumbledore, who commits those violations. It's Voldemort who commits patricide and sends his great-uncle to imprisonment in Azkaban for the rest of his life. It's Voldemort whose `signature dish' is the Avada Kadavra curse that in the end comes back to kill him. Darkness and Light, eh? 

In the absence of any evidence provided from the structure of the story, the questions you're asking are unmotivated by anything _in_ the story. In other words, their relevance, which you are assuming in advance, is actually part of the point under debate.



upnorthkyosa said:


> Now, I can't say that AD is a perfect replica of John Dee, but I do think that it provides a little more insight into at least JKR's metanarrative.



I have a metanarrative, you have a metanarrative, JKR has a metanarrative. But something in the metanarrative is not remotely the same thing as that thing being in the narrative. 



upnorthkyosa said:


> With that being said, here is something I'm really interested in.  If JKR says that AD is gay, doesn't it make sense for the reader to initially take her word for it and go back to the narrative to see if that is true?



No! It does _not_. If JKR pointed out where in the text the story she created made that evident, then fine&#8212;I have no horse in this particular race; I don't really care if it turns out that the story contains evidence of AD's gayness or not, as long as that evidence is actually identified, and as long as, in the absence of such evidence, we understand clearly that JKR cannot `make' the story something different from what exists, after the fact. What I am concerned about is author's abuse of their legitimate authority. If Rowling says, `Hey, I know something you don't know... guess what, Dumbledore is gay', my question to her, just as to you or anyone else who asserted it, would be, `Really? _What makes you say that??_' And if she says, `Well I created him, I know it', at that point we have what I would call authorial abuse. One of the great themes of modernist literature, explored in the work of Pirandello, Calvino and others is the autonomy of character: if an author gives life to a character, that character then is separate from the author and isn't subservient to the author's decisions about them. I won't take JKR's word about Dumbledore any more than I would take, say, Einstein's word were he to have assured me that the content of relativity theory ensured that, say, quantum theory could not be a complete theory of matter. (Actually,come to think of it, Einstein tried to do something vaguely like that. He inserted a term in the field equations describing the relationship between mass on the one hand and the metric tensor reflecting the curvature of space so that this curvature could not become infinite&#8212;in effect, ruling out both what we now call black holes, on the one hand and the expansion of the universe on the other. There was nothing in the field equations that determined this result; they were Einstein's gloss on the way the world seemed to him to have to be. He later admitted this to be his biggest mistake in his work on relativity. Yes, he created, or discovered, the relations among matter, energy and the structure of space, but he could not go in and alter that relation after the fact...)




upnorthkyosa said:


> I think I would be much more skeptical if reader after reader was basically reporting that they could find absolutely nothing to support that.



You're saying that the fact that no one has yet gone back over the seven book canon with a magnifying glass and reported, `nope, can't find anything' makes you more receptive to the idea that there really is some evidence there? When you yourself indicate that you have too much going on in your life to do it? Well, ask yourself this: millions of people by now have heard about JKR's claim. Has anyone, even one person, written anything you know of to produce a single shred of solid evidence to back her claim about AD?



upnorthkyosa said:


> So, I'm curious as to why the resistence?  Especially before anyone has really done any work?



The resistance comes from the fact that a claim has been made with no substantiation. Isn't that enough to make one resist the claim? If you tell me something and I ask you why you said that and you don't have an answer for me... why on earth should I believe that what you said is true? Yes, it could be true, as could many other things, including the negation of the assertion you made.  Logically, as I've mentioned, the burden of proof for an assertion lies with the one who makes that assertion. 



upnorthkyosa said:


> Especially when I spent five minutes, went back and reread the part where the relationship between AD and GG was explained and had a "hey wait a minute" moment.
> 
> I feel like you are starting with the premise that AD is not gay and JKR is changing the story after the fact.



I am starting with the premise that there is no reason to suppose that AD is gay, based on anything JKR has said, in the absence of textual evidence that his gayness is part of the story. Period. Your `aha' moment may indicate a tie-in with certain of your own beliefs and expectations, but are you really saying that if JKR had instead claimed that AD was straight, the AD/GG relationship would be murky and inexplicable? Is there an actually problem in AD's description of his relationship with GG that is now suddenly solved? Suppose, for example, that we didn't know that the Elder Wand accepts as its master the wizard who has defeated its previous master. Suppose JKR had, inexplicably, left that little fact out. The whole last hundred pages of the story, left unmodified, would fail to make sense. Those last hundred pages, and the culmination of the entire story really, depend crucially on that plot element. Well, what is there about the AG/GG relationship which fails to make narrative sense in the same way, or even a more attenuated way, and which requires AD's gayness to make sense of?



upnorthkyosa said:


> Also, I don't understand your point about not needing context.  Why wouldn't understanding the origin of the iconography and traditions help a person look for clues to a character's sexuality?  That doesn't make any sense to me...
> 
> :idunno:



Let me try explaining again. First of all, in spite of your allusion to Dee's supposed wild sexual experimentation, he seems to have been conventional enough to resent bitterly the wife-swapping experiment that one of his associates at one time sought to arrange between the two of them. The iconography that Dee supplied was, as you yourself I believe it was pointed out, a purely _physical_ resemblance. And you are persisting in treating the relevant traditions as though they consisted entirely of the one `black magic' strand often associated with magic by occult revivalists like Crowley, even though the tradition was much broader and richer than that (again, Tolkien provides an existence proof here). Finally, and most important, there is not the slightest evidence in the text that anyone has presented so far linking the `white magic' of AD and his `side' with the `black occultism' that has everything in common with Voldemort, and none so far defended for that of Voldemort' great Enemy. So I am questioning the grounds for the whole set of linkages you've established, and am saying that they do not make the case you want them to make, for the reasons I've given. As to whether AD is gay or not in the story, that's an _empirical_ issue, to be resolved by the story. But JKR can't superimpose it on the story simply because she now thinks, or has always thought, of AD that way. If it's not supported by the story, then it's not in the story, and it's just her private opinion. I can't put it any more plainly than that....


----------



## Blotan Hunka

CoryKS said:


> And then it gets weird: Harry Potter as Leftist wehrmacht against the American Way of Life. Brought to you by the French. Jeez, all I got out of the series was a furious desire to play Quidditch.


 
Literature is like the whole 9/11 conspiracy stuff. You can find anything you want in it if you make enough convoluted connections. Many people insist that LOTR is a WWII allegory even though JRRT repeatedly denied it. JK could come forth now and say that Harry potter was Bi-Sexual and people would start looking for "evidence" in the story.


----------



## Makalakumu

A couple of things...

1.  Exile is right.  This isn't going to go anywhere unless someone starts putting some textual evidence on the table.

2.  I can in no way speak authoritatively on this matter.  I hardly know a thing about what I'm talking about other then thumbing through a book here or there.

3.  With that being said, I think that there is a curious connection between Albus Dumbledore, John Dee, the symbols used in the books, and real life occult traditions.  How deep does this connection go, I cannot say.  My guess is that it is pervasive based on the mythology behind the hallows, the symbol that indicates them, and its mimicry of real occult symbols.

4.  I think the classification of the various occult traditions discussed as "black arts" is historically incorrect.  From what I know, which isn't much, there are both white and black paths.

5.  Another important thing to remember, when considering all of this, is that JKR made a point to show that AD was human.  She gave specific examples during his life to show that he wasn't perfect.  All of this forms a curious connection to the Hallows and AD's demise for trying to use the hallows to bring his sister back from the dead.  My guess is that all of that ties back to real myths or traditions, but I'm not sure how or even what myths.  

6.  Regarding Authorial Abuse.  Is that a real liturature term or is that just your opinion, Exile?  I've never heard of it and I've spent a lot of time in writers circles (my undergrad minor is in creative writing, I have several published stories and poems, I've written 8 novels, and am currently working on publishing the last five...this certainly doesn't mean I should know everything...).  If it's just your opinion, I'd have to disagree.  Maybe JKR is just being provocative, but my guess is that, considering the level of detail she used in her story, there probably is something to it.  Further, wouldn't it make sense to throw out a bombshell like that and then clam up in order to get people read the books again and figure out for themselves and sell more books by revealing a provocative secret about a main character?

Anyway, FWIW, now back to my writing...


----------



## exile

upnorthkyosa said:


> 6.  Regarding Authorial Abuse.  Is that a real liturature term or is that just your opinion, Exile?  I've never heard of it and I've spent a lot of time in writers circles (my undergrad minor is in creative writing, I have several published stories and poems, I've written 8 novels, and am currently working on publishing the last five...this certainly doesn't mean I should know everything...).  If it's just your opinion, I'd have to disagree.  Maybe JKR is just being provocative, but my guess is that, considering the level of detail she used in her story, there probably is something to it.  Further, wouldn't it make sense to throw out a bombshell like that and then clam up in order to get people read the books again and figure out for themselves and sell more books by revealing a provocative secret about a main character?
> 
> Anyway, FWIW, now back to my writing...



UpN, it's a real term (check out http://www.wsfa.org/journal/j91/c2/index.htm, and many other websites, for some current usages) and it means a specific thing (or range of things). I am using it to cover a particular offense which the so-called `New Criticism', exemplified by critics like Cleanth Brook and R. P. Blackmur, was in a sense a reaction to: the assumption that the author's mind, not the text created by that mind, is the `proper home' of the meaning, or literary content, of the fictional work created. (If you're interested in this most rigorous and demanding of all critical approaches, there's a nice Wiki entry here on CB that explains why he was the dean of American literary critics of his generation and well respected even by people skeptical about the value of literary criticsm.) I used the example of Beethoven's somewhat banal pictorial imagery for his almost supernaturally beautiful _Pastoral Symphony;_ the actual denotation of that symphony has nothing to do with any kitchy 19th c. shepherd-and-shepherdess clichés, but rather with the surpassingly beautiful melodic structure and density of the variations on that structure in each movement of the symphony. What I'm getting at here is a related notion, one that people like Brooks argued brilliantly&#8212;I'd say, _lethally_&#8212;for: the content of a work of art is what's in it. I want to see author's creations protected from author's moods, second-guessing, attitudes, and whatnot. _War and Peace_ exists, _The Scarlet Letter_ exists, all these wonderful works of literature we're the lucky inheritors of exist, and they themselves, in their plot structure, contain their own keys to interpretation.

Please don't think that I'm hostile to interpretation based on the writer's life. When you look at the complex symbolism of the poetry of authors like Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats or Wallace Stevens, you cannot decode the meaning of the words unless you are able to identify the symbolic code they're deliberately playing on (in a sense, like kata). But the point is, if we assume that poems have a logic and a structure that jointly express a coherent relationship amongst ideas, and we find passages in the poem from which it's impossible to extract those relationships on a literal reading, then we're forced by our assumptions to seek out the extended senses of the poetic language employed, so that in the end we can present that complex of relationships as a clean, integrated whole. That's what literary criticism was, once upon a time when intellectual integrity had a bit more weight in the world: a decoding of often exceedingly complex works of literary art into their components, with plenty of sharp argumentation to support the interpretation. 

But the point is in the keyword _forced_. The failure of literal interpretation to yield anything coherent is the signal that you have to go well below the surface to make sense of the text of poems such as TSE's `The Wasteland' or Yeats' `Leda and the Swan'. And we know that in many cases these poets were consciously referring to specific works outside their own poems: Eliot, for example, is virtually banging it into your head at every turn that he's talking about the _Upanishads_, or Sir Philip Sydney, or whatever, and he even published _notes_ to the Wasteland _along with the poem_ which said, basically, look, you idiots, if you aren't going read Jesse Weston's stuff about the fertility myths that underlie the Legend of the Holy Grail, and figure out what I'm talking about here, I'm done with you. Very nasty chap, he was, but there you are. The notes are in fact part of the poem, though people don't often think of them that way. 

But if someone creates a work of art and then, later on, says, well, you know, I think this or that about that... I have to say, I don't think their views have any kind of privileged status. If it turns out that you can't make good sense of the narrative structure unless you adopt their own attitude... sure; in that case, they've given you some information, after the fact, that they concealed from you, leaving you with a problem. But if there's nothing that structurally demands that perspective, and the author wants you to think it anyway&#8212;_tells_ you, but can't actually _show_ you, as they say&#8212;then that comes under the New Criticism idea that I'm including under the (widely used) term, authorial abuse. The main idea is: even if you create the work, you do not have carte blanche over it once you've put the pen down. In a sense, it's not yours any more, it exists on its own. If AD is gay, I'm saying, that proposition can only be interpreted meaningfully if it arises from the work itself, not from the opinion of a single individual who happens to have written the work, but hasn't actually _shown_ us, in the work itself, what she want us to believe is there.


----------



## AceHBK

exile said:


> Michael Gambon is a great actorif you ever saw _The Singing Detective_, you'd have no doubts whatever about that; he was beyond brilliant. But definitely, he does not recreate the true Dumbledore of the the book that Richard Harris did. RH was absolutely perfect; MG's Dumbledore is by contrast a much harsher personality than either RH's or JKR's Dumbledore is.
> 
> 
> 
> Dale is a genius... by voice alone he manages to communicate the essence of each character, and to do so flawlessly every time. `Scary' is exactly the right word for someone who can randomly retrieve almost two hundred voices, consistently and with perfect `pitch' every time. He deserves every one of the Grammy's he's won, in spades....


 
I agree with you.  Gambon is a great actor...its just this role that does not suit him and the shoes he has to fill on this makes it even harder.  It is the exact reason why Ian McKellan (Magneto from X-Men) turned down the role when it was offered to him after RH passed.

Yes he is so much more harsh and really shows way more emotion that what was portrayed by Harris as well as how Rowlings portrayed him in her books.  Seems like the role was made for Harris and his demeanor.  I would have loved to have seen RH in the Dept of Mysteries taking on Voldemort.


You are so right with Dale...I am almost tempted to go get any audiobook as long as he is reading it.  I use to lay int he bed and play the audiobook and close my eyes and let the whole story run free in my mind.  Yes, Dale should win a award for it.  He can retrieve 200 voices?!?!?!


----------



## tellner

Now that I look back at the books I see how the bit about Dumbledore's sexuality had an effect on how Rowling developed his character. There's a sort of loneliness and desire for family that leads a certain sort of closeted gay person to lean towards education and having a positive influence on other peoples' children. He - it often expresses itself a little differently with women - won't have kids of his own, so his way of passing on his legacy is to take an interest in aiding the growth and development of others' children. 

Three of four teachers from my own high school days come to mind. They were very dedicated to their work and all had a slightly melancholy air about them. They were all very concerned with and attentive towards their families even if they were estranged from the for reasons which I didn't understand at the time.

Looking at Dumbledore's past it fits in nicely. I can see how it could have provided a frame of reference for the author. Oldest child, talented, devoted to his siblings even though he resented his too-early adoption of parental roles. A disastrous, secret, unrequited love affair cuts him off from romance for the rest of his life. He refuses more public careers and ends up in education and becomes devoted to his surrogate children in their hundreds over the years. Much of what he does involves creating networks of people, artificial extended families to make up for the loss of his own family and for the one which he would like but isn't going to have.

I've also got my suspicions about Professor McGonagle, but that's another matter...


----------



## exile

AceHBK said:


> I agree with you.  Gambon is a great actor...its just this role that does not suit him and the shoes he has to fill on this makes it even harder.  It is the exact reason why Ian McKellan (Magneto from X-Men) turned down the role when it was offered to him after RH passed.



I didn't know that, but I think IMcK was right to do that, in terms of his craft. There is a mildness and deep compassion that RH projected which is very different from how IMcK defined Gandalf for us in the _LoTR_ moviesand again, there I think the actor and the role meshed perfectly.  



AceHBK said:


> Yes he is so much more harsh and really shows way more emotion that what was portrayed by Harris as well as how Rowlings portrayed him in her books.  Seems like the role was made for Harris and his demeanor.  I would have loved to have seen RH in the Dept of Mysteries taking on Voldemort.


 
It would have been a very different kind of confrontation, though the special effects would, no doubt, have been the same. The thing that emerged in _The Order of the Phoenix_ during that duel was the restraint that AD showed, which at first astonished Voldemort and then elicited his contempt; AD in the book was clearly doing the minimum necessary to stop Voldemort and protect Harry, and paradoxically (or not, perhaps?) the result was a feeling of enormous latent power held in reserve. This might well have been the way RH would have played the scene; I think he could have, but Gambon's Dumbledore clearly didn't, and couldn't, probably, given the persona that MG had created. 

A lot of times, the first actor to play a role fixes that role for a generation or two, because that's how people first encounter the characterthrough that actor's interpretation; but I think that there's something more herewhat you say about Dumbledore in the book almost having been created for Harris to play. Hindsight is always suspect, but I think that if MG had played the original AD, I still would have found the contrast between JKR's AD and MG's AD somewhat jarring.



AceHBK said:


> You are so right with Dale...I am almost tempted to go get any audiobook as long as he is reading it.  I use to lay int he bed and play the audiobook and close my eyes and let the whole story run free in my mind.  Yes, Dale should win a award for it.  He can retrieve 200 voices?!?!?!



Well, he was credited with 130+ voices as of the third book. After the 6th book, I read something about him which upped the total to 200 voices. And then the final book appeared... so even conservatively, 200 seems plausible to me, given the enormous influx of characters as the saga progresses...


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## Rich Parsons

tellner said:


> Now that I look back at the books I see how the bit about Dumbledore's sexuality had an effect on how Rowling developed his character. There's a sort of loneliness and desire for family that leads a certain sort of closeted gay person to lean towards education and having a positive influence on other peoples' children. He - it often expresses itself a little differently with women - won't have kids of his own, so his way of passing on his legacy is to take an interest in aiding the growth and development of others' children.


 
   While this may be true, I contend it does not have to be that one has to be gay because of this. I know many introverts who are straight but are so busy with their careers and or the interests they are not in a relationship. Not all of them in education either. Also one may choose not to have children for medical reasons, such as a 50/50 chance of a genetic issue being transferred to a child. Yet said person may love children and work well with them or said person may not work well at all. 

   The other side of this that I know parents that cannot stand children be it their own or others. When they get to adulthood they tolerate them, but they reproduced. 




tellner said:


> Three of four teachers from my own high school days come to mind. They were very dedicated to their work and all had a slightly melancholy air about them. They were all very concerned with and attentive towards their families even if they were estranged from the for reasons which I didn't understand at the time.


 
   Do you know that they are homosexual now? Did they come out? I have one instructor that was married with kids of his own who had kids but would not associate with his students at all. Reason why? He liked to drink and smoke and did not wish to influence children this way. He felt horrible as I came home one night when my mother was having a party with some people form the school and he was there drunk and smoking his pipe. I never mentioned it nor did I mention it to others. He is retired now. So now harm now, but still mentioning names. 




tellner said:


> Looking at Dumbledore's past it fits in nicely. I can see how it could have provided a frame of reference for the author. Oldest child, talented, devoted to his siblings even though he resented his too-early adoption of parental roles. A disastrous, secret, unrequited love affair cuts him off from romance for the rest of his life. He refuses more public careers and ends up in education and becomes devoted to his surrogate children in their hundreds over the years. Much of what he does involves creating networks of people, artificial extended families to make up for the loss of his own family and for the one which he would like but isn't going to have.


 
   While this may be true, I think it people reaching here, unless the author has come out and said this directly. I remember a Rodney Dangerfield movie that he paid the author of a book to write up the review and the meaning of his writing. Rodney failed as the instructor knew more about what they author had meant then the author. 




tellner said:


> I've also got my suspicions about Professor McGonagle, but that's another matter...


 
   Does it matter?


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## tellner

One of the teachers outed himself, two were after they died. The last one? I'd lay dollars to horse turds and hold the stakes in my mouth.

I think you really do protest too much, Rich. We know it was in the author's mind as she developed the character. It makes sense, and you can see how it would be a useful type with motivations when the story was being developed. And we do know that she plotted things out several books in advance. It's just one of those interesting things that goes into making the people real in a good story. Even if the audience doesn't know it, the writer does, and it adds something to the way they write.

If it had been anything from being ginger to a secret affair with Mrs. Weasely I doubt you would be so insistent on it not mattering. It mattered to the writer. It mattered to the way she wrote the character. That should be good enough.


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## Ceicei

tellner said:


> I've also got my suspicions about Professor McGonagle, but that's another matter...



Now this caught my attention.  Pray tell, spit out your suspicions.  I'm curious about how you think of her.

- Ceicei


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## tellner

Ceicei said:


> Now this caught my attention.  Pray tell, spit out your suspicions.  I'm curious about how you think of her.
> 
> - Ceicei



I have to confess that it wasn't my suspicions originally. It was a bunch of lesbian friends. The consensus included "Gold Star Lesbian!" and "I just love strong Butch women." I bow to their more practiced gaydar  She reminded me a lot of the professor who was our mentor in teaching women's self defense.


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## Rich Parsons

tellner said:


> One of the teachers outed himself, two were after they died. The last one? I'd lay dollars to horse turds and hold the stakes in my mouth.
> 
> I think you really do protest too much, Rich. We know it was in the author's mind as she developed the character. It makes sense, and you can see how it would be a useful type with motivations when the story was being developed. And we do know that she plotted things out several books in advance. It's just one of those interesting things that goes into making the people real in a good story. Even if the audience doesn't know it, the writer does, and it adds something to the way they write.
> 
> If it had been anything from being ginger to a secret affair with Mrs. Weasely I doubt you would be so insistent on it not mattering. It mattered to the writer. It mattered to the way she wrote the character. That should be good enough.




Tellner et al,

I may protest too much. One may think or assume that if one does then they have something to hide such as being homosexual.  I am not. But you can think it or inply and it is ok with me. 

I will continue to protest what I think is ignorant (* Note: Ignorant and not stupid or idiotic so please no insult intended.  *) comments that is someone acts like this or uses something like that then they MUST BE GAY. So the local muffler company that has been around for decades before the Gay community started to use the rainbow as a sign or badge of identification, has it in their logo. They have kept it. So all business with a triangle must be GAY because they have a triangle. To argue it further which no one has stated, but is part of my point, FMA since it has Triangular footwork it must be gay or at least those who practice it. So should all Geometry teaches. 

One could also argue that since one knows so much about the OCCULT or the Homosexual Community one must be Homosexual themselves. (* NOTE: I am not stating that anyone here is homosexual, I am only using the similar arguement being presented to make a point on the comparisons. *)

So yes I might look to protest to much, but it seems that too many are trying to force the relationship. Why? Do they want it to be such? Are they after a religious agenda? i.e. occult and Homosexuals are deviants and or sinners or what have you. (* NOTE: Once again I am not saying anyone has stated this directly or indirectly, but it is the next logical conclusion with the comparison arguement. *) Should we compare their soul with a feather to see where they go in the after life?  . . .  Lots more that just does not add up. 

So I apologize for trying to state an opinion based upon points that I could defend, or show examples of, that refute the absolute statements of other points being presented. 

In the end it is all GRAY area, and if the Author wants to have a GAY Character then so be it. If she used icons to represent then good for her. If she did not, but just created it and went with the flow then good for her. (* Note: It is not unheard of two scientist or groups of scientists to come up with the same results or theory working separately. *)


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## exile

I've been thinking a bit about just what it is we're doing here and trying to make sense of it, and I mean that in the most serious way possible. We're talking about a property of a fictional character. Dumbledore is a figure in a story. What does it mean to say that Dumbledore, who does not exist save in our imaginations, 'is' something we don't imagine him to be, something independent of how we think of him? Or any of the other characters? With real human beings that makes perfect sense, but what does it mean of a completely fictional entity?

It seems like a kind of bizarre, even surreal thing to be doing, but here we are, a group of reasonably reasonable people, doing it... so it must make some kind of sense. What could that be? I've been trying to work out a _model_ for what it is we're doing here, and I have something that seems to me to make the activity a reasonable thing to do&#8212;something also seemingly bizarre, but which turns out to make a very weird kind of sense, even if no one understands how. So let me try it out on you folks...

We have a work of fiction, and can think of it in a very basic way: a set of entities and a set of situations that those entities enter into. And every time an entity enters into a situation, something emerges about that character. So if Colin McCreevy is part of a crowd going to a quidditch match, the result of Colin's being in that crowd, so far as we're concerned, is at least this: that we can assume he knows what quidditch is. And in general, every situation that a character enters into, every interaction, is in a sense like an experiment which yields certain results about the characters, like _measurements_ in a physics experiment tell us whatever the experiment is designed to tell us: how fast something is moving, how much it weights, what it's coefficient of friction is and so on. So that's the first part of the model: a situation which a character is part of is like an experimental measurement of one or more properties of that character. 

But we also know that at the most basic level of physical reality, matter cannot be said to actually have any values for any physical property until these have been measured. The absolutely crucial revelation of quantum theory was that at the most fundamental scale, a particle does not have a value for momentum, energy, location, spin or any of the other basic `quantum numbers' _until it undergoes an experimental measurement for some particular property_. It's not that it has a value but we can't get at that value. It's not even that it has that value but the measurement in itself changes the value it originally had, so we'll never know what that was. These ideas were the ones that the pioneer generation of modern physics tried to apply to make sense of this incomprehensible, but seemingly infallible theory it had discovered. What emerged from the mathematical foundations of the theory was that the actual state of affairs was much weirder than any of these: the particle does not possess a value for any physical property; rather, it possesses a spectrum of possible values for that property, none of which describe it until a measurement is carried out that yields a specific number. At that point, the probability of one of those values (even one of the lowest probability possibilities) becomes 1 and all others become 0. 

My idea is that properties associated with fictional characters are similar. In the absence of an actual measurement&#8212;a situation which yields a`fixing' of the value for that property&#8212;the character's height, ethnic identity, taste in beer, sexuality, or medical history&#8212;anything at all about them, in fact&#8212;is exactly the same as that of a quantum-level particle which has not passed through an experimental apparatus designed to measure a certain dynamical variable such as energy, position or spin. The character simply does not have a value for that property; rather s/he (and this exends to inanimate objects as well) has a spectrum of possibilities associated with any of those kinds of personal properties. Unless the character enters into a situation which yields a measurement, so to speak, for that property, we have nothing but a spectrum of probabilities,  a kind of smear of ghostly values-in-waiting none of which can be said to hold of the character at that point. This obviously is not true of real human beings: someone can be a reformed compulsive gambler even if not one person in the world is aware of it and possesses no information about the person in question. But fictional characters exist only in the same way that particles at the quantum level exist: till we have interactions which measure something about them, they aren't there, and apart from the measurements we take, they do not possess values for personal properties. The author constructs situations which the characters are subject to just as the physicist constructs experimental apparata that matter at various scales is subject to. The results are similar, and so are the cases of properties that are _not_ measured.

Now in a sense, I think the point that Rick and I are agreed on here is that none of the situations in the saga yields a value for Dumbledore's sexuality; I'm also reasonably sure that none yields a value for whether or not he's a carnivore, or an opera fan. If so, then he isn't gay, and he isn't straight, just as he's neither a carnivor nor a vegetarian, and neither an opera-lover, an opera-hater, or a complete neutral on the subject: his status with respect to all of these parameters belong to his probability spectrum... but none are true of him, none constitutes a valid description of him. Like Schroedinger's cat, we won't know until the box is opened, which collapses the wave packet, as they used to say. Only, since the saga has come to an end with the box still closed, there's never going to be an actual value determined.

And whatever shaping power the idea that AD is gay may have had with JKR in developing the character&#8212;and I agree with tellner, that could very well have led her to develop his demeanor and way of relating to people in a particular way that _is_ reflected throughout the novels&#8212;it doesn't look as though any of the situations he's in _in any of the books_ actually forces a measurement. Maybe someone will turn one up, and then it will a different story. But for the present, I think it makes way more sense to say that that AD doesn't _have_ a sexuality.


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## tellner

Well, that and by the time the books start he's old enough that it wouldn't be as much of an issue unless he'd mastered the spell "Aspergo Corpus Cavernosum!" Besides, the character as written was eccentric but believed in certain standards of propriety (or at least dignity). It just wouldn't be fitting for kids young enough to be his grandchildren to know about his extremely personal life.


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## Novitiate

Greetings...
I am just jumping into this mess having been asked.  I have seen a few Harry Potter movies but have no vested interest in the sexuality of the characters.  I am a bit rusty on my rhetoric.  This is just a testing the waters move for me so I will make a few statements;

1. If you want to know about sexuality and magic look into Crowley's Paris Working (no quick wiki link) and his attempt to invoke Pan that left him naked, in a fetal position, and his male "son" assistant dead followed by four subsequent months in an insane asylum.
2. With a surname of parsons I pray you are not Jack Parsons relative because if you are I bow out of the discussion. 
3.  Black Swans!?  please keep true to Hempel's _Raven _Paradox.  the black swans smacks of something from dirty Diana.


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## Makalakumu

Considering the subject of your continued research, I would suggest that sometime in the future, you read these books.  The story is well written and has enough "magik" mixed through it that, at the very least, it gets kids to fantasize about the subject.  Anyway, maybe a new thread is in order.  Occult Themes in Harry Potter.  Now we can have a freewheeling discussion of this topic and not have to tie it back to Dumbledore's alleged sexuality.


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## michaeledward

I know this thread was quietly dying down. 

But, it seems there are some great hints about one or two more literary characters being forcefully pushed from the closet.

Did you see Berkeley Breathed's Opus this morning? 

Do you think that, maybe Opus is attempting to hide something? Do you think Garfield really is gay?


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## tellner

I know how hard it is to be in the closet. I only recently came out as a transphibian. I think the three foot sticky tongue, the trips to the Newport Aquarium and labeling the Acta Herpetologica subscription "high class pr0n" gave me away


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