SJW fans are disgusted that there will be no explicit gay scenes in the next Harry spin-off movie – Fantastic Beasts: the Crimes of Grindelwald – about the youthful adventures of Hogwarts headmaster Professor Dumbledore.
They are convinced Dumbledore is homosexual and that the movie, starring Jude Law, would be incomplete without some Brokeback-Mountain-style action.
I know just how they feel.
Who can ever forget the scene in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets where Professor Dumbledore thrillingly introduces the young boy wizard to his extensive collection of Judy Garland memorabilia?
Or the one in the Half-Blood Prince where Dumbledore finally deems Harry and Ron old enough for a tour around his private dungeon, with the Mirror of Erised on the ceiling and walls decorated with special, moving pictures by Tom of Finland and Robert Mapplethorpe?
No, wait –
– I don’t remember either of these scenes because they never happened.
That’s because Dumbledore is not gay.
Dumbledore only became “gay” after the seven Harry Potter books had been written. His creator JK Rowling suddenly announced this amendment on a publicity tour in 2007 , once the final book had been published.
She made her revelation to a packed house in New York’s Carnegie Hall on Friday, as part of her US book tour.
She took audience questions and was asked if Dumbledore found “true love”.
“Dumbledore is gay,” she said, adding he was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, who he beat in a battle between good and bad wizards long ago.
The audience gasped, then applauded. “I would have told you earlier if I knew it would make you so happy,” she said.
But that still doesn’t make Dumbledore gay.
No more is Dumbledore gay than Jaws was vegetarian.
Even if, on a 1970s book tour, Peter Benchley had suddenly announced that the shark had only eaten all those people by accident when it mistook them for strands of wholesome kelp, that still wouldn’t have made the shark vegetarian.
That’s because when you write a book, those are the rules. Sure you may decide afterward – as Benchley did later in life – that great white sharks are lovely creatures which deserve our protection rather than our fear. Or you may decide – as JK Rowling did – that your books just weren’t woke enough and really should have included more characters who were black, gay, trans, disabled etc.
But that doesn’t give you the right to change the characters after the event – which is what JK Rowling has attempted to do in her new, immensely tedious post-Harry-Potter career as a social media virtue signaller.
Here are some reasons Professor Dumbledore belongs firmly back in the closet
Hogwarts does not need a ‘gay’ headmaster.
It’s not the gayness I object to here. It’s the children having to know that he’s gay that’s the problem. Why do they need to know about his private life? Why is it relevant? Sure I can see it might make sense from a strident gay activism point of view: making it clear to the world that a gay wizard can make at least as wise, benign, principled and safe-with-kids a headmaster as a straight wizard. But for some of us – many of us, in fact probably most of us, I’d say – this is just too much information for a child to have to consider. (My kids went to a school with a gay headmaster; none of the kids knew he was gay. They didn’t even guess when he turned up to the parents’ fund-raising barn-dance evening in a baby pink cowboy outfit with tassels and a Barbie-colored cowboy hat. And quite right too. Kids have got plenty of time to learn about that stuff when they’re older.)
Harry Potter fans are already some of the worst people in the world. This kind of thing only encourages them.
Personally I would have been straight on to my lawyers to get this hideous SJW meme – which also happens to be entirely dishonest and inaccurate: show me the place, anywhere in the Harry Potter books where we learn this trite lesson – wiped from the face of the earth, with the perpetrators being sued within an inch of their miserable SJW lives.
What does JK Rowling do? Only goes and endorses it by retweeting it.
Rewriting history is for Stalinists, not millionaire children’s authors
One of the joys of the Harry Potter series is that it’s set in a magical, far-off world which looks a bit like our own but is somehow much more charming and fun. There’s a reason for that: it was written before the era of Social Justice. It’s a product of a more innocent age when you could write a children’s book series starring three white characters, at a school entirely devoid of gay teachers, where the vast majority of kids are white and able-bodied, and no one is transgender, and not feel remotely like you’d done anything which might embarrass yourself or your publishers. This old fashioned quality is what a lot of us liked about Harry Potter at the time and which a lot of us still like about Harry Potter now. We’re probably in the majority – and these attempts by JK Rowling retroactively to make her books more woke by giving them quotas of gay, ethnic, transgender etc characters – are an act of bad faith towards us. We have an idea in our heads of what all the characters are like, based on the information provided in the text. Changing them after the event is just plain rude.