I also don't believe Dumbledore would have revealed his love for Grindlewald to Harry had Grindlewald been a woman. To me, Dumbledore is just not a guy who talks about his personal feelings.

esp to those he is teaching /leading / training. In a number of cases Harry has to come to decisions based on what he knows about Dumbledore. I'm not sure how Dumbledore felt was relevant to Harry.

I would have prefered JKR didn't say anything - but mostly because if it isn't in the book , it doesn't feel real to me.

and, I think I am repeating myself, but to the story , I don't think it matters if the adolescent thrall is intellectual or sexual. In real life, it happens. and I thought it was well done.

I think that if you'd like to live in a world where sexuality doesn't matter it's quite fair to not make a point about the sexuality of your characters.

That's been my take on it.

But it appears to be worth it to her now that the series is safely wrapped.

Reiterating what ita said a few posts up. Had JKR ever been asked about Dumbledore's love life previously? If so, did she dodge the question? Unless the answer to both these questions is "yes", I don't think your statement is fair.

I was going to look up something to back up what I'm going to try (and possibly fail) to say, and then I realized that googling "gay love explicit" would not help me in ANY WAY.

I'm a bit in both camps on this. (Also, I don't have the books at hand, so I could be completely wrong.) On the one hand, I don't think she wrote Snape's love for Lily as more explicitly romantic than Dumbledore's for Grindelwald, so I don't think she was necessarily hiding it (I really wasn't trying to make this point yesterday, just gathering data). She may well have thought that people would get that there was a romantic attachment there, or at least that an explicit "I loved him, Harry, yes, like that, yes I know he's a man, are you getting what I'm saying here?" scene didn't work in the story. And for that matter, except for Dudley's "Is that your boyfriend?" line, we've never gotten any mention of homosexuality at all, so she may envision the wizarding world as one where it doesn't need to be mentioned because it's not a big deal.

However. It is a big deal in our world, and she is a YA author which means reaching many impressionable yoots a) who will probably not have read the Dumbledore/Grindelwald thing as romantic and b) on whom the visibility of a gay character they already like could have made a big impact.

Actually, this reminds me of a comedian I once saw who dropped a comment to her lesbianism about 20 minutes into her routine, paused, and said, "See, I like to do it that way, because now the only thing that's changed... is you."

Mind you, I find the idea that Dumbledore's one great love occurred, what, 70 years ago? to be really sad. So I'm assuming he had an unmentioned longtime companion.

Mind you, I find the idea that Dumbledore's one great love occurred, what, 70 years ago? to be really sad. So I'm assuming he had an unmentioned longtime companion.

It is sad and sadly I think he didn't have another love. Just like Tim Gunn! Although I think Tim Gunn maybe just had a bad breakup and his ex- wasn't actually evil. But who knows?

I think anyone who could make Tim Gunn swear off love has to be evil.

Tim Gunn: just like Dumbledore.

I think you're right, Dana.

And Tim Gunn really is rather a lot like Dumbledore.

Tom is dead and that's where I left off. I had to sit in my car to get to that point.

The whole wand thing leaves me a feeling a bit unsatisfied, I think there could have been better ways to go about it. It doesn't ruin the book for me or anything like that though.

I never would have thought it would be Molly who finished off Bellatrix, but I can totally believe it.

Kreature and the house elves (sounds like a band name) were great. A hoard of house elves with knives actually sounds kinda scary.

Neville killing the last horcrux was great too. It's ironic that Harry never destroyed a single horcrux in the book. Of course Neville is a true Gryffindor, he's always been brave. He lacked confidence, but his bravery has been all the more impressive because of that.

One thing I did like about the final confrontation despite the wand stuff was Harry calling Voldemort by his actual name, Tom Riddle. Something about that whole sequence gave me the impression of Voldemort being lessened and that was a big part of it.

There's a bit more left, but I'm sure it's all just wrap up from here on out.

Salon.com has a Dumbledore article that basically posits that only to a hetero-normative society is it not plain that Dumbledore and Grindewalde are in love. She gives lots of examples. I found it very interesting.

Then on the second page she talks about how authors need to stop writing since the book is over now and she wants to imagine things -- and there are lots and lots of letters.

(Personally, I think the author should do whatever s/he wants to do)

only to a hetero-normative society is it not plain that Dumbledore and Grindewalde are in love.

See, I find this defense problematic, because most of us live in a heteronormative society. Except for those of us who live in lesbian separatist communes, perhaps (or San Francisco). With a few exceptions, the culture that we live in expects and assumes that straight is normal and anything else is "alternative." I'm talking movies, TV, advertisements, textbooks, news reports, *laws* -- most of what surrounds us is heteronormative. Maybe less so for us fannishly-inclined Internet weirdos, but probably *more* so for most kids out there reading these books, who don't have as much agency as we do to seek outside the mainstream quite yet. And those kids are the primary audience I'm concerned with here, since they would be the ones least likely to see queerness in the books and the ones most likely to be positively affected by the inclusion of queerness.

For another thing, the society that JKR created in the HP books? Also heteronormative. We can talk about queer readings of the text, and god knows I believe Sirius and Remus were lovers, but the world that she wrote, on the page, is explicitly and exclusively heterosexual. So the idea that it's just our own heteronormative blinders that prevents us from seeing Dumbledore's feelings for Grindelwald as romantic doesn't really fly with me, because I don't think we were given any reason, in the text, to see it that way.

I mean, look, I'm a slasher, and I didn't read that relationship as particularly queer (although I know some people did). In a list of HP characters I'd expect to be queer, I doubt Dumbledore would crack the top 20. I'm not saying it's not there if you look for it, but IMO it's pretty damn subtle.