Introduction: Outing Dumbledore

This special forum on the posthumous outing of Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore was first suggested by Tison Pugh and David L. Wallace, who wanted to write a postscript to their recently published essay on the Harry Potter series in light of its final installment, The Deathly Hallows. J. K. Rowling's announcement last October that she had "always thought of Dumbledore as gay" (without quite telling us) was met with excitement as well as ambivalence, with responses ranging from "I knew it!" to "No way!" to "Who cares?" As a magically challenged gay male fan, I too found the announcement both pleasing and irritating. It's certainly fun to imagine Dumbledore as more affirmatively queer. What a show he could put on atop one of those gay pride parade floats, shooting fireworks and zapping homophobes by way of his Elder Wand! Or how about Dumbledore as a leatherman into magical bondage? Still, isn't his outing too little, too late? Shouldn't the fact (if we can call it a fact) that he is now gay and dead give us pause? How, why, and to what effect did Dumbledore acquire such public status? Can or should wizards (whatever their sexuality) be political figures or cultural role models?

These are among the questions taken up by our contributors here. In their postscript to their earlier essay, "Heteronormative Heroism and Queering the School Story" (vol. 31, no. 3 of Children's Literature Association Quarterly), Pugh and Wallace find Dumbledore's outing less than praiseworthy in the context of the series' ongoing project of traditional subject formation. As they point out, Deathly Hallows shifts the scene away from Hogwarts and thus out of the usual school story frame. On the one hand, they propose, Harry becomes a kinder, gentler, more cooperative, and sacrificial man than we might expect from the more traditionally heroic trajectory of the first six books. At the same time, the overarching gender and sexual norms of the series prevail, not just at the level of Harry's character but also in the final glimpse of happy and procreating heterosexual couples (even Draco is married with children). Pugh and Wallace plead for authors of children's and young adult literature to make space for queer themes and characters inside rather than only outside or after the texts. "Ultimately," they write, "it was J. K. Rowling who put Dumbledore in the closet, and she now receives credit for taking him out of it."

Karin Westman puts Dumbledore's love affair with rival wizard Grindelwald in the context of the series' larger preoccupation with love's forms and consequences. By the end of the series, she notes, love emerges as "a heady concoction that is potentially dangerous to the lover and the beloved." With great power comes great responsibility—as with magic, so with love, the highest sort of magic. Simultaneous with the compulsory heterosexuality of the series, suggests Westman, are variously queer forms of love, some positive, some not, some uplifting and fortifying, some obsessive and destructive. Love is not only salve and community but also weapon and battlefield. The challenge, she suggests, is how to mobilize love for good rather than evil. Westman turns to the Wizard Rock movement to explore how an obsessive and perhaps problematic love for the Harry Potter series itself might be channeled into socially progressive pursuits. Whereas for Pugh and Wallace, Dumbledore's outing is only the latest in an ongoing series of foreclosures on same-sex love—a process that Judith Butler sees as constitutive of "melancholic" heterosexual subjectivity—that outing represents for Westman an opportunity to rethink love and its cultural discontents.

Catherine Tosenberger concentrates on Harry Potter online fanfiction (fanfic), pointing out that fanfic writers and readers have long been engaged with the queerness of Dumbledore, Harry, Ron, Snape, Draco, Lupin—the list goes on (even if it is mostly about the boys and men). "Slash" writers and readers anticipated the outing of Dumbledore by a good three months, she points out, and Rowling was more than alert to the frenzy her announcement would create among them. As Tosenberger emphasizes, fans respect source...