I guess some people were excited to hear that J.K. Rowling announced that Dumbledore was gay. I guess there's a way to read it in which it sounds like one small step for wizards and one giant leap for gay people. I just didn't see it that way, though.

"It would be like...."one of my kids started during one of the million conversations at school that followed Rowling's announcement, "it would be like if she said, 'Oh, Harry and Hermione totally made out. I just didn't write it." It would be like that. Exactly like that. Once you write a text or paint a painting or film a movie, its out of your hands. Anything that's not explicit, and even things that are, are up to the audience to decipher. Its why Jackson Pollock never said, "This one's about a dead cat." and why we're free to read between the lines of Hays Code era movies for covert references to queer lives.

But it was more than that, too. I couldn't figure it out. Shouldn't I pleased to learn that one of my favorite children's book characters was queer? Wasn't this a step in the right direction? Why did it make me so uncomfortable? I couldn't put my finger on it.

Luckily, John Cloud could:

"Why couldn't he tell us himself? The Potter books add up to more than 800,000 words before Dumbledore dies in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and yet Rowling couldn't spare two of those words—"I'm gay"—to help define a central character's emotional identity? We can only conclude that Dumbledore saw his homosexuality as shameful and inappropriate to mention among his colleagues and students. His silence suggests a lack of personal integrity that is completely out of character."

And that was it, really. If Dumbledore was gay, we would have known. He wouldn't have been ashamed. Or closeted. Or silent. Dumbledore fought for what was right. He was not one to hide.

I wish Dumbledore had really been gay. Like, in the books. Where I know him. That would have been awesome.