You could have read all seven books and watched all eight movies and you still wouldn’t have known.
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Quite. You might say the real problem is the deliberate crafting of gayness that never has to be shown, and is deployed exclusively outside the story to suggest a diversity and inclusiveness not present within it.
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Ok, but that’s not really something exclusive to or even typical for medieval societies (which were rather based on feudal serfdom).
Ancient Rome and Greek poleis on the other hand were slave societies - with relatively tolerant attitudes towards… well, homosexual behavior among men, at least.
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Something that stood out to me when reading the HP books, and especially when watching the movies, that not only is their fashion and architecture late Middle Ages to early Renaissance, it’s impossibly high culture. The Hogwarts castle alone would have bankrupted Mansa Musa, king of Timbuktu. They have friggin’ personal horse-drawn sleighs just for winter use. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Professor Lockhart was Hogwart’s newest incompetent hire and his office was bigger than the house I grew up in.
Now if the wizarding world had been post-scarcity, which would make sense since they could “curse” valuables to multiply upon touch, that would all make sense. But they’re clearly a monetary society with pre-industrial capitalist elements and gold coinage.
My takeaway, our actual modern wealth disparity between billionaires and working/middle classes in the real world absolutely pales in comparison to the fictional wealth disparity between the wizarding and muggle worlds. No wonder muggles so often hated wizards and witches. It would be like living next door to a Dyson sphere civilization that refused to share but periodically threatened to invade and conquer you.
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I wonder if they made Dumbledore straight again because Hollywood’s idea of doing better is “let’s not depict Johnny Depp beating his lover”.
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That’s dark man, that’s real dark.
Are any of the other characters having their ‘sexual preference’ suppressed. They express their sexual preference all the time…with school dances…family…and relationship. But I guess that’s not expressing their preference when they marry, date, or fall in love. Totally not relevant to the story…but if a gay does it…that’s expressing a preference and making a statement. Personally, I think knowing Dumbeldores sexuality adds a great deal to His ultimate rejection of Grindelwalds philosophy. It makes him braver IMHO.
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There has been one plausible reason given for Dumbledore’s sexuality not being mentioned in the first books.
More specifically, books with supposedly LGBTQ characters were banned from school libraries (although I can confirm that The Marvelous Land of Oz got through the filter despite Tip getting magical confirmation surgery.) The first book after the repeal of that law was HP and the Half-Blood Prince, which J.K. Rowling would already have been well into writing, so the first book where she could even hint at Dumbledore’s sexuality would have been Deathly Hallows.
Section 28 was also a major reason why my schooldays were hell. Apparently the school dealing with transphobic bullying was seen as promoting “homosexuality”.
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This. Students and adults are presented loudly in hetero-normative and monogamy-normative shades across the whole canon.
Even if you had watched all the movies and read all the books you wouldn’t have known. His sexuality was retconned by JK Rowling long after Deathly Hallows.
For all intents and purposes it’s not really important to the plot.
“Retconned” probably isn’t the right word since it doesn’t contradict anything previously written, more like “Rowling revealed she’d always personally imagined Dumbledore as gay when a fan asked if he’d ever been involved in a romantic relationship.”
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Well then, it is relevant to the plot. Carry on!
Maybe if Dumbledore wasn’t so damn stingy with Harry about every single bit of relevant history it would have come up.
Pretty much this. I think it started with a tossed-off “oh, haha, I always imagined he was a bit gay!” comment which, Harry Potter fans being as fervent as they are, became a much bigger deal than she anticipated. So then she gave the fans a bit of context by saying “well, he was in a relationship with his best friend who became evil, which is why he’s celibate.” None of that would matter to his character as we see it in the movies, except that now they’re literally going to film that chunk of his life, so avoiding that supposedly formative relationship is going to be kind of awkward.
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