More on Dumbledore (ooh, that rhymes!)

[darcydodo]

With all of my replying to other people's Dumbledore posts in comments, I thought I should collect my opinions here. (All of these are culled directly from comments, so some of the context shifts may be a little abrupt, and there may be repetition.) More to potentially be added as I reply to comments further

Comments

[ingaborg]

My feeling is that it's like having (for example) significant female characters in a story. If there isn't a clear reason why there aren't any (all the women died in the war with the martians) then frankly there has to be some reason for leaving them out! If you are basing a book on *people* as you meet them in any ordinary society, then the gay people are there, the geeks are there, the snobs are there, they are part of society and as soon as you start deliberately leaving them out, you are distorting the view of society.

I'll grant that in AD's case it may not have been relevant. It's just that in any real society I would expect to say "ok these are the ones that are probably gay, even it it's not been a plot arc". My guess fwiw is that Neville might be.

[darcydodo]

EXCEPT for that, as I said, it's obvious whether someone is a woman when you meet them. It's obvious whether someone is a snob (or a geek) once you start interacting with them. It's not necessarily obvious whether someone is gay unless you ask them outright or they make a point of bringing it up.

My guess fwiw is that Neville might be.

Apparently he's not, though, unless he's totally closeted; he apparently married Hannah Abbott. (Source: same article)

[redbird]

Or if they're clumsy about hiding crushes, as high school students often are, regardless of gender. We don't see so much as a student being teased about a crush on a teacher of the same sex, or Hermione telling someone "you can moon over so-and-so, I have work to do." I suspect it's harder to hide that sort of thing in a boarding school than for students who leave school at 3 every afternoon.

At the very least, Rowling decided (or assumed without deciding) that the wizarding world would not be open to two boys or two girls dating at school, and that it would be open to a boy and a girl dating in that way.

[coyotesdaughter]

hmmmm. yes.

though i admit, as much as i dislike tokenizing... i do think that -maybe- "gay on principle" would not be such a terrible thing. hmmm.

[once_a_banana]

I wonder if one could just say that in the Magical community, homosexuality is just such a non-issue, that there was no point in bringing it up...

I've thought of this argument too, and unfortunately it doesn't work at all. It's statistically implausible that we would have intimate knowledge of all those straight flirtations, snoggings, dates, marriages, unrequited loves, and so on, while never running into any gay versions of the same. We're talking probably 30 or 40 items total not even counting pairings at the Yule Ball. The only way it would make sense is if we presume that (a) JKR's world is tolerant but she herself is so squicked as to not be able to mention any of this in writing or (b) she tried to mention such things but her publishers forced her to remove all references (I think after a few books she had a lot more clout than that!), or, most troublingly, (c) wizards are super OK with gay folks, but among wizards it's a trait that virtually never occurs (please lets not open that tremendous can of worms).

[darcydodo]

I can't imagine it was that many. Or, if it was, they were mostly main characters (or at least involved one main character), and then you would get "token!" again. So that, even if it were totally acceptable in the wizarding world and therefore 1 in 13 of those should technically (perhaps) have been gay pairings and nobody in the book would have uttered a peep, we're reading the books from this world's perspective, and therefore any such pairing would have shouted "token" despite the different mores of the community in which it was taking place.

[once_a_banana]

Yes I totally agree that there are all kinds of real-world publishing reasons for why she chose not include controversial non-normative real world behaviors. But I think it's pretty silly, and probably harmful, for us to sort of pull the wool over our eyes and say "well, numerically, maybe we just didn't run into any or maybe nobody happened to ever talk about it", just because we want to feel good about the books and about JKR and about our own complacency. That kind of generosity does nothing but perpetuate the heterocentrist status quo - it's virtually like closing one's eyes, sticking fingers in ears, and going "la la la la la la". The fact that a lot of us were doing that throughout our youths doesn't really add weight to the argument....

[threadwalker]

Angelina's in the first film in the Quid game. :)

[darcydodo]

Oh, I know, I meant I didn't think she was black in the film. :)

[threadwalker]

She was, just on the light side.

[cityofgates]

If Rowling had introduced a token gay character, she would have been forced by the laws of narrative convention to kill that character by the end of the book. This doesn't quite apply to Dumbledore. As the Wise Old Mentor figure, he was doomed from the get-go. That he was gay is an interesting detail. That he -- as a gay teen in interwar England -- had a tragic lovelife, is just realism.