I'm pissed off at JKR because it's just one more example of her oh-so-liberal but totally-supportive-of-all-status-quo ideology -- just like the way she shows wizard society escaping from voldemort with all its fatal flaws attached, and how all her dodgy race/slavery analogies end up perpetuating the inequalities she seems to think she is against
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At first I was all "YAYSQUEE" but a few days have made me more cynical. I like stoneself's recent series of posts on the problem of the Gay Man With the Tragic Love Affair Who Dies Alone.
Still, I want to give Rowling points in the positive column for this one. When parents try to instill homophobic ideas in kids who have grown up loving the HP books, they might not be so receptive to the idea that one of their favourite characters is a sinner or whatever.
My take as posted in my journal: In case you've been living under a rock, earlier this weekend JK Rowling announced to an audience at Carnegie Hall that Albus Dumbledore was gay and tragically in love with Grindlewald (if you read the book, you know how well that went--which is to say that it didn't). Now, I get why people are so happy about having a in-text gay character confirmed, but I really wasn't impressed with this at all. This is actually fairly characteristic of what bugs me about these books. Rowling has an interesting habit of swinging back and forth between the conventional and unconventional, and I knew that it would be the final book that would determine for me if she'd done something subversive or not. The answer is definitely not. That epilogue tipped everything over into the conventional with everyone ending up in heterosexual marriages with children going off to Hogwarts (and was it just me, or were all of the characters in the epilogue white as well?). Characters who wouldn't have fit into that kind of a happily
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Wish it had made it into the books on a textual level, glad that it is in books on a subtextual level. Seriously, Rowling writers Dumbledore/Grindelwald as gay in everything but name. Like that Dumbledore is too AWESOME to become a token character, wish he wasn't the only queer character in the story. Glad that Rowling stopped the movie folks from heterosexualizing him. Becoming very annoyed with people insisting that Rowling only said Dumbledore was gay to be "PC". Seriously...the hell?
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Good intentions mena nothing if you don't have the brains, research, knowledge to back it up.
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True.
Personally I'd be more excited if she came out and said the Sirius and Remus were an item back in the day.
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That's why J.K. Rowling gave us a wizard afterlife.
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Still, I want to give Rowling points in the positive column for this one. When parents try to instill homophobic ideas in kids who have grown up loving the HP books, they might not be so receptive to the idea that one of their favourite characters is a sinner or whatever.
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In case you've been living under a rock, earlier this weekend JK Rowling announced to an audience at Carnegie Hall that Albus Dumbledore was gay and tragically in love with Grindlewald (if you read the book, you know how well that went--which is to say that it didn't). Now, I get why people are so happy about having a in-text gay character confirmed, but I really wasn't impressed with this at all. This is actually fairly characteristic of what bugs me about these books. Rowling has an interesting habit of swinging back and forth between the conventional and unconventional, and I knew that it would be the final book that would determine for me if she'd done something subversive or not. The answer is definitely not. That epilogue tipped everything over into the conventional with everyone ending up in heterosexual marriages with children going off to Hogwarts (and was it just me, or were all of the characters in the epilogue white as well?). Characters who wouldn't have fit into that kind of a happily ( ... )
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