If there's one thing I do not have, it's a dirty mind.
OK, so I DO have a dirty mind, which makes me even more upset at J.K.
Rowling's public revelation that one of the great characters in the
Harry Potter series, Albus Dumbledore, is gay. If there were any
evidence of that in the books, surely my dirty mind would have seen it.
Not that I haven't wondered what wizard sex would be like. Wasn't it Freud who said: "Sometimes a wand is not a wand"?
A more serious take on Rowling's unnerving revelation appeared in a
column I wrote for the
St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, which scooped by a day
this good
article by Edward Rothstein on the same topic in
The New York Times. My basic argument is that an
author should not present to the public information about her characters that is not in the book. Any important evidence should
be placed IN THE BOOK.
I'd love to hear your opinion on this topic. Do the characters in
fiction narratives "belong" to the author or to the
readers? Isn't it the writer's duty to present the evidence
in the text, and the readers' to imagine a back story or
an epilogue? How do you feel about the revelation that Dumbledore is
gay? (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
I think Rowling's disclosure was meant to be a revelation....
