Monday, October 22, 2007

HARRY POTTER AND THE GAY REVELATION

Rowling's outing of Dumbledore lauded

With files from AP

In the biggest outing in the entertainment industry since Ellen DeGeneres (did anyone care that much about Lance Bass or Neil Patrick Harris?), J.K. Rowling has revealed that Dumbledore, Harry Potter's late headmaster, was in love with a man.

The revelation, which came at a Q&A session after a reading at Carnegie Hall in New York on Friday night and was met with cheers, has left some Canadian Potter fans confused.

"It seems weird that she revealed it outside the context of the story," says Sarah Charlton, a 25-year-old consultant in Toronto who was one of the hundreds who lined up to be among the first to buy Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in July. "If it was important to her, I feel she should have put it in the book."

Charlton devoured the last book in its entirety the night it came out.

(I found it from globeandmail.com, and the other about Dumbledore at Yahoo News, click here.)

She says it's especially odd, given the fact that Deathly Hallows concerned itself largely with the relationship between Dumbledore and the evil wizard Grindelwald, the object, as Rowling explained it, of Dumbledore's affections.

"I think the interesting question is why she left it out," says Andrew Braithwaite, 26, Charlton's fiancée, another series-long fan of the books. "I think the reason is that she didn't want a controversy swirling around the book." Asked if he will now go back over the books and read Dumbledore's character in this new light, he says, "I think the fact that she didn't include it in the book means that I don't have to consider it. If it was really that important, she wouldn't have just introduced it like that, post facto."

Gellert Grindelwald was a dark wizard of great power, who terrorized people much in the same way Harry's nemesis, Lord Voldemort, was to do a generation later. Readers hear of him in the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. In Deathly Hallows, readers learn they once had been best friends.

"Neither Dumbledore nor Grindelwald ever seems to have referred to this brief boyhood friendship in later life," Rowling writes. "However, there can be no doubt that Dumbledore delayed, for some five years of turmoil, fatalities, and disappearances, his attack upon Gellert Grindelwald. Was it lingering affection for the man or fear of exposure as his once best friend that caused Dumbledore to hesitate?"

Potter readers had speculated about Dumbledore, noting that he has no close relationship with women and a mysterious, troubled past.

"Falling in love can blind us to an extent," Rowling said Friday, adding that Dumbledore was "horribly, terribly let down."

Wayson Choy, the Trillium Award-winning writer who quietly assumed the unofficial position as Canada's premier gay novelist after Timothy Findley's death, disagrees, saying Rowling's announcement is of enormous importance.

"She's taking a major leap in bringing human history up to date," he says from his Toronto home, where he's working on his latest memoir. "It means that she has the courage to suggest that even in children's books, the real world, with its adult intrigues, can be respected by children. I think her revealing this is why her characters have some kind of third dimension that we don't know about entirely, but is always there, that makes them more vivid than cartoon characters.

"She's honouring the complexity of the human being," he says, "and no child should be deprived of that truth."

Rowling Reads at IFOA

Who: Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling

What: She will read from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, as part of the 28th International Festival of Authors (IFOA)

Where: Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto, the only Canadian stop of her first North American tour in seven years.

When: At 10 a.m., Tue. Oct. 23

Why: To take questions from fans and sign complimentary copies of the Deathly Hallows for all 950 in attendance

How: Tickets (now gone) were free through a series of random draws and lotteries.

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