J.K. Rowling Reiterates How Gay Dumbledore Is and How She Plans To Never Show That in any ‘Harry Potter’ Work

J.K. Rowling wants you to know that Dumbledore is gay. What she doesn’t want to do is write him as a gay character in any piece of media she’s written for the Harry Potter series. Even when his romantic and sexual relationship with a man forms the core of an entire movie, Rowling wants to not show it in any way and then talk about how important it is on the commentary track.

Here’s what Rowling said, via Vanity Fair:

“It was passionate, and it was a love relationship,” she said of the characters (played on-screen by Jude Law and Johnny Depp). “But as happens in any relationship, gay or straight or whatever label we want to put on it, one never knows really what the other person is feeling. You can’t know, you can believe you know.”

…

She added that she personally was “less interested in the sexual side, though I believe there is a sexual dimension to this relationship, than I am in the sense of the emotions they felt for each other, which ultimately is the most fascinating thing about all human relationships.”

I don’t know why Rowling keeps doing this, but at this point it feels almost pathological. She wants to be so progressive and have everyone praise her for how diverse her books are, but she doesn’t actually write diverse books. If she’s so interested in the emotional relationship between Dumbledore and Grindelwald, why doesn’t she explore that in the two hours and thirteen minutes that The Crimes of Grindelwald ran for?

I’ll tell you why: money. See, there’s still a stigma around having gay characters in children’s books and movies (though judging by Twitter the average Harry Potter reader is a 42-year-old white woman who just drank half a bottle of pumpkin spice merlot) so Rowling doesn’t want to actually have a gay character in her series. But gay people have money too and want representation, so if she just tells hem that Harry Potter is full of gay characters who are running around being gay just off page, maybe she can get their money, too.

What’s surprising is she’s kept this grift up for so long. It’s been like a decade of Rowling telling us how gay Dumbledore is while writing movies where he is not in any way gay. That’s even longer than The Simpsons made gay jokes about SMithers while insisting he wasn’t gay in interviews.