Peg Kerr's Journal

Love and smooches to Matt of The Whomping Willows. With the recent announcement from JK Rowling that Albus Dumbledore is, in fact, gay, Matt wrote in a recent blog post, "I think the bottom line is that Dumbledore’s sexuality is just a part of his personal being. It’s obviously significant in how he dealt with Grindelwald, but it doesn’t necessarily have any bearing in how he dealt with Harry, Snape, Remus, Draco, Hermione, Hagrid, or anyone else. If we want to spend time analyzing Rowling’s political and social intent — well, she’s confirmed that one of her goals with HP is to promote tolerance." Read the rest here.

A few days later he followed up with another blog in response to fans being angered over this information. He says, "If you believe that Dumbledore’s being gay would lead him to think about/desire/pursue a sexual relationship with Harry during Harry’s years at Hogwarts, then I seriously don’t want you to support my band. I don’t want your money. I don’t want your myspace plays or page hits. I don’t want anything to do with you until you clean up your act . . . Also, I figure this is a great time to announce that the next Wizards and Muggles Rock For Social Justice CD will benefit both the Harry Potter Alliance AND Marriage Equality Rhode Island." More of the entry can be found here.

Rock on, Matt.

aeditimi, this will make your day:

David Thewlis On Potter's Lupin: I Always Thought He [Lupin] Was The Gay Character

He says that Alfonso Cuaron specifically directed him that way, too.

Most of my thinking about what's going on in the blog commentary about Rowling's remarks on Dumbledore is filtered through my experience in writing The Wild Swans, and particularly the difficulties and uncertainties I experienced in writing about a minority community when I'm not of that minority myself.

As I've told several people, I nearly stopped writing the book several times because I was so troubled about whether I could handle the material properly. (And let's face it, a book about sexuality, marriage, death and religion is just fated to include difficult, fraught and explosive material.) No writer should ever hold out for universal popularity, that's clear, and some people have been kind enough to say that I handled it well. But I was immensely troubled by the same issue that I believe a lot of people have latched onto when thinking about how Rowling handled Dumbledore. And yes, I did get some flack about it.

Specifically, I wrote a book where the gay character's story ended in death and tragedy, and the heterosexual character's story ended in rescue, love and redemption. Given the facts of the AIDS epidemic and the structure of the fairy tale I was basing the book upon, there wasn't much way around that, but it really REALLY bothered me, to the point that it almost made me abandon the book entirely. Because I absolutely didn't want that to be the message that people took away from The Wild Swans, that somehow gay relationships were doomed to tragedy, whereas heterosexual ones were not. I don't believe that it true about these relationships in real life.

sistermagpie has posted about this aspect specifically in complaining about Rowling's remarks about Dumbledore, although she has since locked the entry so that I can't see it.

How did I reconcile this in my mind? Well, I didn't ever manage solve it entirely to my satisfaction, really. I tried to show that Elias and Sean's relationship was the most loving one in the book, even more so than Eliza and Jonathan's, really: although Sean did indeed infect Elias, he didn't turn on him and betray him emotionally the way Jonathan turned on Eliza. And I wanted the ending, at the Quilt, to convey at least some hope, to get across the idea that there still might be a chance to save Elias, if we worked hard enough to break the curse (raising money to fight AIDS, medical treatments, etc.)

( Spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows here )

I'd like to do a post musing about Rowling's latest revelation about Dumbledore (although I hardly need to, I suppose, since the blogosphere, including my friends list, has been roiling for the past couple of days and goodness knows an enormous number of bytes have been slaughtered on the subject).

I want to post, but I just don't really feel up to it. Maybe I will later.

(It's been fun seeing all the new icons appearing on the topic. My favorite, however, is an older one at cesario's journal (credit sporkyadrasteia), based on a line of Kingsley Shacklebolt's from Order of the Phoenix):



I'm still coughing. As of tomorrow, I'm starting the fourth week now. I really don't think I have a bacterial infection/sinus infection/pneumonia (what I cough up is perfectly clear). I just keep coughing. After weeks of this, my gut just hurts. I can keep it at bay for a little while with cough drops (man, I'm getting sick of the taste of those) and tea. But only for awhile. It keeps coming back.

I slept for a couple of hours this afternoon, and I've been pottering around in my bathrobe. I need to finish my reading and start writing that paper for that Fantasy Matters conference. But my brain seems to have disappeared. Really, I feel as if I have been operating at about 60% capacity for the past two weeks (and at about 10% the week before that.)

How much longer can I expect this to go on?

( Here there be spoilers )

Links to reactions at daily_snitch here. Also see hallows_reviews, hp_essays and discuss_book7.