Mugglenet.com's Harry Potter Should Have Died - Emerson Spartz [4]
The author shouldn’t be surprised that some fans never saw Dumbledore as gay since she gave us the information through a very unreliable narrator—Rita Skeeter. No one could miss the gay innunendos in her book about Dumbledore, but why should readers believe anything Rita writes? In GoF, Rita wrote insulting smears about Hagrid being a half-giant, and she completely invented a torrid love triangle between Harry, Hermione, and Viktor Krum. None of it was true! We know that one time she wrote a true story about Harry in OotP under threat of blackmail, but the rest of the time Rita was just a muckraker working for money. So most readers took what she wrote about Dumbledore and Grindelwald with a grain of salt, especially when she implied something unclean in the relationship between Dumbledore and Harry. We knew that part wasn’t true, so why would we have believed any of it?
Gay readers themselves might have thanked J.K.R. more if she had introduced a gay character on the brighter side of one hundred years old who wasn’t celibate and eccentric. In fact, many readers, gay and straight, saw more potential in the dashing Sirius Black since his main relationships in life were all with men, and he never married or had time for a girlfriend. In OotP, he is shown as a teenager ignoring a girl who is clearly interested in him. J.K.R. tried to put the rumor to rest in DH by letting Harry see pictures of Muggle girls in bathing suits on Sirius’s bedroom wall at Grimmauld Place, but clever readers had a plausible answer for that: Sirius put those there to shock his pureblood mother, but he was also trying to fool his family into believing he was straight. Fan fiction writers have also insisted for years that Remus Lupin was gay, but the author married him off to femme fatale Nymphadora Tonks in DH. Yet that didn’t stop the speculation because, after all, Lupin tried his best to abandon his wife and child, and he seemed sorry he ever got married to a woman at all. J.K.R. has always been aware that fans will ignore her views on a character’s orientation and relationships, no matter what she says. If she chose not to resolve questions of sexual orientation in the books, then it would be better if she kept her views to herself and let the fans make up their own minds.
In discussing whether Dumbledore’s sexuality is even relevant to the books, J.K.R. spoke to Leaky Cauldron’s Pottercast about her perception of the relationship between Gellert Grindelwald and Dumbledore:
How relevant is that to the books? Well, it’s only relevant if you considered that his feelings for Grindelwald, as revealed in the 7th book, were an infatuation rather than a straightforward friendship. That’s how I think—in fact, I know that some, perhaps sensitive, adult readers had already seen that. I don’t think that came as a big surprise to some adult readers. I think a child would see a friendship, and a very devoted friendship. . . Dumbledore, who was the great defender of love, and who sincerely believed that love was the greatest, most powerful, force in the universe, was himself made a fool of by love. That to me was the interesting point. That in his youth, he was—he became infatuated with a man who was almost his dark twin. He was as brilliant, he was morally bankrupt, and Dumbledore lost his moral compass.
There’s a lot in that statement