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

[once_a_banana]

(duplicating my response to your comment on my post which is repeated above... y'know, for discussions sake

[darcydodo]

who kept his secret until beyond the grave

We don't know for sure that he kept it secret. Sure, the thing with Grindelwald was secret, but so was the fact that they were friends at all, which is rather different. We don't know that McGonagall didn't know, we don't know that Hagrid didn't know, we don't know that, oh, Arthur Weasley, if you like, didn't know.

[once_a_banana]

Oh come on, Rita Skeeter totally failed to dig it up. Dumbledore could not have kept this juicy gossip from her if anyone else were in the know. In fact she's such a master of gossip that her failure to discover it is inconsistent with her character and pretty much seems like an arbitrary author decision (assuming JKR had actually decided AD was gay at that point).

[darcydodo]

Given that she actively quashed a female love-interest for him in one of the scripts, I think this wasn't a post-publication publicity decision.

And I think "anyone" isn't consistent with "anyone who wouldn't tell Rita Skeeter." Sure, if Fudge or someone from Dumbledore's youth knew, RS would have been able to dig it up. And yes, it means that most people didn't know. But that doesn't mean his closest friends didn't know. So he wasn't out, fine, we can take issue with that if we really want. But I don't think that having a character who's gay and not out is somehow worse than not having a gay character.

[once_a_banana]

It is worse if it's the only gay character. With this as our only exemplar, It implies that any other gay characters are also closeted, and that this is an area of injustice in the wizarding world that JKR was apparently content to ignore.