Outing gives Potter passages new meaning
The British author stunned her fans at Carnegie Hall on Friday night when she answered one young reader's question about Dumbledore by saying that he was gay and had been in love with Grindelwald, whom he had defeated years ago in a bitter fight.
I never saw this one coming and I'll bet the crazy, right-wing evangelicals did, either. But, I can hear the distant pops, as there heads explode with righteous indignation.
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"You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me,'" Dumbledore says in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the seventh and final book in Rowling's record-breaking fantasy series.
The news brought gasps, then applause at Carnegie Hall, the last stop on Rowling's brief U.S. tour, and set off thousands of e-mails on Potter fan Web sites around the world. Some were dismayed, others indifferent, but most were supportive.
I know what some of you must be thinking. "Noooooo! Not Dumbledore! Grindelwald must have had him under some sort of gay imperius curse, like magic roofies!"
I'm here to tell you, Dumbledore was too powerful of a wizard to allow that to happen. He was in love - inflamed by passion.
As a young man, Dumbledore, brilliant and powerful, had been forced to return home to look after his mentally ill younger sister and younger brother. It was a task he admits to Harry that he resented, because it derailed the bright future he had been looking forward to.
Then Grindelwald, described by Rowling as "golden-haired, merry-faced," arrived after having been expelled from his own school. Grindelwald's aunt, Bathilda Bagshot, says of their meeting: "The boys took to each other at once." In a letter to Grindelwald, Dumbledore discusses their plans for gaining wizard dominance: "'(I)f you had not been expelled we would never have met.'"
It was love at first sight, you see. Dumbledore couldn't resist the charms of the golden-faced, merry-haired Grindelwald. Or was it golden-haired and merry-faced? Doesn't matter.
What does matter is that we can all look forward to newly invigorated efforts to ban Harry Potter books in schools throughout the Midwest and the South.
Get your popcorn ready for the parade of idiots that are sure to be marching through the media sometime in the near future.