Wizards and Fairies

The doctor was late, as usual, and the waiting room was filling up fast. All the people were sitting around, trying to busy themselves so as to avoid staring into one another's faces. I wasn't interested in reading, but where else was I to direct my gaze ...I was starting to feel stupid looking at the blank wall above the heads of the people sitting in the row of seats along the opposite wall of the waiting room.

"Oh what the hell", I sighed as I reached for the latest issue of People Magazine. I couldn't care less about all the celebrity crap, but I leafed through the pages looking for something of interest. Then all of a sudden, I came across this article about the Harry Potter Books ...the last one in particular in which it was revealed that Dumbledore was a homosexual. What the ....!!!

Incidently, this is not the issue I was reading, it's the image I retrieved from a google search. Obvious, this story broke last year (Oct. 2007). I'm always behind the times when it comes to celebrity gossip.

Anyway, just as I was about to delve into the article, the physician's assistant called my name. Damn! I hadn't finished the article, but I had read enough to conclude that J. K. Rowling had made this declaration while talking to a group of people about the book. She was talking about how his proclivity was something incidental ...that he was just a human and that this was just a human trait which he happened to possess.

Now, I'm a huge HP fan, and I've read all the books ...as soon as each was available, and I hadn't read anything about this. Even if it were subtly implied, being gay myself, I think I wouldn't picked up on it.

I hadn't finished reading the People Magazine article, but as soon as I got home, I Googled "Dumbledore homosexual" and was amazed at the number of pics and articles ...evidently this is old news. Anyway, I retrieved the following excerpted from a Newsweek.com installment...

J. K. Rowling, author of the worldwide best-selling Harry Potter series, met some of her American fans Friday night and provided some surprising revelations about the fictional characters who a generation of children have come to regard as close friends.

In front of a full house of hardcore Potter fans at Carnegie Hall in New York, Rowling, sitting on the stage on a red velvet and carved wood throne, read from her seventh and final book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," then took questions. One fan asked whether Albus Dumbledore, the head of the famed Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft, had ever loved anyone. Rowling smiled. "Dumbledore is gay, actually," replied Rowling as the audience erupted in surprise. She added that, in her mind, Dumbledore had an unrequited love affair with Gellert Grindelwald, Voldemort's predecessor who appears in the seventh book. After several minutes of prolonged shouting and clapping from astonished fans, Rowling added. "I would have told you earlier if I knew it would make you so happy."

So evidently, I really didn't miss anything while reading the book. Dumbledore just happened to be gay ...it had nothing to do with his motivations or the story plot. It's just that in order to write such a rich, thoroughly detailed story, [she] would have to have the whole wizarding world in her head, and as such, the characters would be real people, with all the personality and idiosyncrasy that make for a complete person ...stuff that wasn't actually a part of the HP story.

In any event, I'll have to re-read "HP and the Deathly Hallows", this time with the updated "perception" of Albus Dumbledore.