Dumbledore is Gay

Yup, the venerable wizard headmaster Dumbledore is and always has been gay. I think it's great that she had planned it into his backstory from the begining but never made it explicit. And I believe some of the LGBT rights group responses are problemeatic(at least what's in the article, but it seems believably representative).

For example, Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said that he supported her having revealed his gayness, "But I am disappointed that she did not make Dumbledore's sexuality explicit in the Harry Potter book. Making it obvious would have sent a much more powerful message of understanding and acceptance." Why? Why does making someone's sexuality overt send a message of acceptance. Sure, if there was a storyline that was relevant to it, great, but from my familiarity with the series (admitedly the movie series), I've seen no sense that Dumbledore's sexuality (gay or straight) is really an issue at all, and in my mind, sexualizing him purely as part of a politics of representation (which is how I understand this quote from Tatchell) demeans him to the confines of gayness. As it stands, he is a much more indeterminate/queer character (which from my understanding in this article has already produced speculation about his sexuality as it is).

I don't want to get into theoretical debates too deeply in a blog post, but much of what has been written in recent years about the murder of the transgendered FTM Brandon Teena is especialy. What feminist and queer scholars have argued is that the discourse around Teena is obsessed with categorizing and delimiting what he was. When we are concerned as we are with certain identities being persecuted and denegraded (gay, lesbian, tran, etc), the most appropriate response is not finding ideal representations from each identity, but rather to help society develope a way of relating to others in a way that is open to the queerness of indeterminacy of identity in general. In other words, it shouldn't be on "us" to prove ideal representatives for each and every identity (there will always be more!), but rather a responsibility of ALL to reorient themselves to otherness.

Annother quote from the same article is even more problematic. A spokesman for English gay rights group Stonewall added: "It's great that JK has said this. It shows that there's no limit to what gay and lesbian people can do, even being a wizard headmaster." Really? Is that realy what's important about this fact? I think this statement is revealing to the extent that it shows mainstream LGBT movement has shifted fully back to an identity politics exacted from the black Civil Rights Movement. Black people in America were (and who are we kidding, still are) seen as lesser people, not capable of as high of acheivements as whites. This kind of statement from Stonewall would have fit perfectly in the 60s if Dumbledore were black. But today, for gay rights? Do we really have a problem of being seen as incapable of achievements? I thin we have a far more central problem beeing seen as immoral, not unintellectual. This statement just doesn't make sense to me. I think the LGBT movement has lost itself. We need to really reasses the priorities of our movement.