I don’t think there is any way to take the news that Dumbledore turns out to be homosexual as anything other than a stellar business. I haven’t heard such good news since that business about Gore and the Nobel Prize. This announcement made a bunch of issues just float right up to the surface, where we can scoop them all out with the pool net.
There is the sexual issue, coupled with the “other worlds” issue. There is the Christian imagery issue. Then there is the hermeneutical issue . . . but let’s address the sexual issue first. Crazed fundamentalists get a bad rap these days, and it is nice for someone like Rowling to actually throw them a bone every once in a while. Why can’t we fix the sodomy problem the same way we fixed the witchcraft problem? Why not say, for example, that in this fictional world, guy-on-guy is no more problematic than, say, turning someone into a newt? At the end of the day, alternative worlds, as it turns out, are always about this world. And yes, that includes Lewis’s fauns and satyrs, and Tolkien’s Gandalf. Lewis and Tolkien handle this quite differently than Rowling does, incidentally, what with all her magical jiggery-pokery. But that is a subject to be developed another time. Suffice it to say that they apply their Christian imagination in fundamentally Christian ways, as Rowling clearly is not doing. So then, let’s just give one to the fundamentalists. They may have been right for all the wrong reasons, but, as it turns out, they were still right. The culture wars are going badly for them, so let’s give them this one.
So then, what about all the Christian imagery? You bet it is there, as the author has made clear. But all kinds of groups use Christian imagery — liberals, uber-Catholics, conservative Methodists, and people who buy Celtic crosses from web sites featuring figurines that look like Betty Boop with bat wings. It happens that Rowling is a Church of England Christian, and once we discount the small roster of stalwart holdouts fighting the good fight there, she belongs to a communion that is foremost among the tolerance-mongers. And so that is what we get — a plea for tolerance. This is the kind of denomination that, once you take the Calvinism out, goes straight to gay. No sense pretending. Let’s face facts, shall we?
What is the hermeneutical issue? One counterargument against Rowling’s assertion is that there is nothing in the books to back up or prove what she said. The text has authority over the author in this view. But while authorial intent is not the ultimate word on such things, it should certainly be taken as very important, and as usually definitive. We might be justified in disregarding it if someone wrote a series of very fine books, got into some adulterous mess ten years after the last one was published, and then, in a move of self-justification, tried to say that his new found lecherous leanings had been woven tightly into the earlier books. Okay, so we should give the raspberry to authorial intent in that kind of situation. But in this situation, it seems to me that Rowling is well within her rights to exercise this kind of creative control over what she is doing. Note that “within her rights” is not the same as being right.
There are two ways this right can be exercised. The first is that good fiction writers have a backstory for their characters, and it would be unusual for every detail of that backstory to make it onto the page in explicit terms. In other words, an author can be the only one in the world who knows that the protagonist “Stan was married before.” The author uses that kind of information to help him understand his character whose actions, motives, and words he is in the process of putting on the page. And this leads to the second way this authorial intent can be exercised. A wildly successful series of books like this one will certainly warrant Rowling putting out her equivalent of The Silmarillion, in which she can provide the textual warrant for her assertion by simply writing it down. We don’t know from The Lord of the Rings that Gandalf was one of the lesser Valar (although Tolkien presumably knew it), but once it came out in The Silmarillion, well, there you go.