The Real Chamber of Secrets

In the mystical world of Harry Potter overflowing with trolls, ghosts, poltergeists, and all other variety of well-established magical creatures, I sometimes wondered why Rowling never made allowances for fairies.

Now we know why.

Rowling recently revealed that the late Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore was, in fact, a homosexual.

I have always been a little suspect of how Rowling would sometimes alter characters or back stories from book to book in order to suit a particular plot development, never believing--like many are wont to do--that she had it all scripted out from the start.

This posthumous exhuming of Dumbledore out of the magical closet is, forgive the expression, a big steamy pile of hippogriff dung. Do I care if Dumbledore was gay? Certainly not. In fact, when Michael Gambon began portraying him in the films after Richard Harris' death, it became much easier to believe. My biggest problem with this revelation is, why not have him make his way out of the closet in the books? Now that the series has concluded, it feels as though the story is cemented in the past and is therefore immutable. Any revelations Rowling wants to bring forth only feel like speculation now if it escaped the written word. In short, to say Dumbledore was gay seems like sacrilege.

None too surprising, Rowling has always had a propensity for cozying up to politically correct causes, the Aspen crowd if you will, no matter how irrelative or pointless those causes may be. Yes, mudbloods are equal to purebloods, house-elf slavery is wrong, and we do understand the symbolism of it all. But if this was an important issue to her and she thought about Dumbledore in this light all along, she should have had him come out in the books.

Now I have to go back and clarify my thinking on many things which occurred in the Harry Potter universe now knowing Dumbledore was gay:

• Was Dumbledore originally responsible for the Chamber of Secrets?
  
• What did Dumbledore *really* see in the Mirror of Erised? Would it have shocked and horrified us all?
  
• Where did Dumbledore hide his secret stash of liquid memory for the Pensieve?
  
• What was the point of all those so-called random "wand inspections?"
  

Well, and of course being a live-in headmaster of a school crawling around with the freshest new wizards in Britain. What did J.K. Rowling think would happen given the implications of what's gone on in the Catholic church? Where do you think the term "Head Boy" comes from? Being smart?

I don't think so.


Get an interesting perspective from a gay columnist for Time magazine here. (Link discovery courtesy of Marshall Mitchell.)