Wasn’t quite sure how to react to this little tidbit when I saw it, buried at the bottom of CNN’s homepage.  Evidently Dumbledore’s love interest was Grindelwald, that brilliant-yet-megalomaniacal wizard who played such an important supporting role in the last Harry Potter book.  I say I wasn’t sure how to react because it came as a total surprise.  J.K. Rowling revealed it only in a Q&A at Carnegie Hall this last Friday night.  While some fans (reportedly) may have wondered about Dumbledore’s sexuality, I can’t say that I did, any more than I did for Minerva McGonagall or Kingsley Shacklebolt.  It simply wasn’t important for the story.  If it were, then I imagine Rowling would’ve been a little less subtle.  But outing Dumbledore in this way, at this time, feels a little cheap to me.  If Rowling wanted to make a statement about sexual tolerance, then she should have made it a little more clear in her books.  Now it seems like an afterthought, a distractor, or perhaps something that Rowling wanted to avoid having to deal with in the book itself.  Of course, the far-right groups who already hate Harry Potter for promoting witchcraft now have even more to hate, but that’s hardly a big loss.  My fear now is that Dumbledore will only come to be recognized for his sexual orientation, and not for the moral, yet flawed and conflicted character he so richly represented in the books.  It’s a bit of a shame.

Link to CNN