Authorial responsibility?

More on the Great Gay!Dumbledore Reveal.

People are not happy with Jo Rowling. More extreme members of the "values" camp are probably planning a campaign to keep Harry Potter away from the kids. They are around 300 million copies too late, but points for trying.

Even sane non-bigots diversity sympathisers are getting on Jo's case now.No less a liberal pillar than the Guardian Newspaper has weighed in on the issue (to be fair, James Ball's piece is on the whole quite even-handed). She should have written it into the books! She wasted an opportunity to make strong positive statement about gay people!

Realistically, COULD she have written it into the books? The books are largely written from Harry's point of view and he was not exactly going around taking note of everyone's sexual preference. (Hmmm .... come to think of it, OOTP would have zipped by a lot faster if Harry WAS doing that.) By the time Harry came to Hogwarts, Dumbledore was well into the "grandfather figure" stage of his life. Teenage boys tend not to think about their grandfathers' sexuality. Especially not teenage boys who are fighting evil forces on a regular basis.

To establish Dumbledore as a gay character within her chosen narrative device, JKR would have had to provide a context for discussing Dumbledore's sexuality at all. As it the books aren't long enough as they are! The alternative is to resort to appalling gay stereotypes (a taste for show-tunes or a prized collection of Vogue back issues) for Harry to observe and relay to us as the reader. Frankly, why should she go through the trouble to do either when Dumbledore's sexuality has nothing to do with the books' central plot? Sexuality is an interesting character note but it is hardly Dumbledore's (or anyone's) single most defining characteristic.

James Ball suggested that JKR could have made explicit Dumbledore's love for Grindelwald in The Deathly Hallows. After all, a fair few pages of that book is devoted to exposition on Dumbledore's past and the Grindelwald sub-text is quite apparent without being obvious.

Again, COULD she have written it that way? I think she knew that DH would have become ALL ABOUT GAY!DUMBLEDORE if she had done that. It would have completely overshadowed Harry, Voldemort and the Horcruxes, which is the main story she is trying to tell. This is a fandom with serious ADD. Large chunks of readers already think that Harry Potter is a teen-romance series.

James Bell wrote in the Guardian:

Harry Potter is not a story about a gay head teacher, of course. But mentioning Dumbledore's sexuality within the books would not have changed this.

I think it would have changed it. Maybe not in Britain, where attitudes towards homosexuality are perhaps more tolerant. But in more than one place I could think of, "mentioning Dumbledore's sexuality within the books" would have most certainly made Harry Potter "a story about a gay head teacher".

I like how JKR handled this. She spoke about Dumbledore's sexuality because she was asked. It was almost a throw-away fact. Yes, it is part of Dumbledore's identity but just one of the many things about him that she could not fit into the books. Not an unimportant detail, but not a big one either. Just another factoid about the greatest wizard of his age. By not making a big deal about it, she is saying that it isn't a big deal. Which is what tolerance essentially is; that differences in race, gender, colour, religion, sexuality etc., are not a big deal.