JK Rowling outed Harry Potter’s mentor years ago, but the new film exploring the wizard’s younger years leaves his romantic life to guesswork
News reaches us this week, from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them director David Yates, that the next film in the Harry Potter spin-off will not “explicitly” mention the gayness of Hogwarts honcho Albus Dumbledore. This is an exciting development for keen followers of the wizard’s constantly evolving sexuality. The first step in the fictional magician’s journey came in 2007, when, after writing a series of seven books that never mentioned Dumbledore fancying anyone at all, JK Rowling delighted an audience of Potterheads by “revealing” that he was gay. Quite how somebody is supposed to be gay without it ever being said, written or observed is for greater minds than mine to fathom, but this apparently throwaway comment duly entered Potter lore.
Time-travel ahead 11 years, and David Yates finds himself making Fantastic Beasts 2, the entire point of which is that it’s about Gellert Grindelwald, whom Rowling had said (but not written) that Dumbledore was in love with. So the film-makers of this Potter-adjacent franchise that nobody had foreseen are in a spot of bother, since for obvious reasons it would be politically and financially savvy if the new films could also somehow get away with him being gay while never stating it, like the seven books and eight films we’ve already had. That’s the thing with coming out, or being an ally: you might actually have to run the risk of taking some sort of personal hit, or having to stand up for yourself.
from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2DSsKHY
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