This isn't an article, this is a rant. Hopefully that should be obvious from the title.

That title again.

What the Fucking Fucking Fuck JK Rowling. I mean really what the Fucking Fucking Fuck.

Unless you've been distracted by little trivial details like the disintegration of Afghanistan and the US Presidential election, you're probably aware that JK Rowling announced some months ago that Dumbledore Is Gay.

Okay, fine, whatever you say you stupid, sanctimonious hack. Dumbledore's gay, I'll file that with "Harry is a Hero" and "It's all about choices" under "Shit I've been told about Harry Potter which is totally unsupported by the text".

Her latest statement on the subject goes like this:

"I had always seen Dumbledore as gay, but in a sense that's not a big deal. The book wasn't about Dumbledore being gay. It was just that from the outset obviously I knew he had this big, hidden secret, and that he flirted with the idea of exactly what Voldemort goes on to do, he flirted with the idea of racial domination, that he was going to subjugate the Muggles. So that was Dumbledore's big secret.

Why did he flirt with that?" she asks. "He's an innately good man, what would make him do that. I didn't even think it through that way, it just seemed to come to me, I thought 'I know why he did it, he fell in love.' And whether they physically consummated this infatuation or not is not the issue. The issue is love. It's not about sex. So that's what I knew about Dumbledore. And it's relevant only in so much as he fell in love and was made an utter fool of by love. He lost his moral compass completely when he fell in love and I think subsequently became very mistrusting of his own judgment in those matters so became quite asexual. He led a celibate and bookish life."

Clearly some people didn't see it that way. How does she react to those who disagree with a homosexual character in a children's novel? "So what?" she retorts immediately "It is a very interesting question because I think homophobia is a fear of people loving, more than it is of the sexual act. There seems to be an innate distaste for the love involved, which I find absolutely extraordinary. There were people who thought, well why haven't we seen Dumbledore's angst about being gay?" Rowling is clearly amused by this and rightly so. "Where was that going to come in? And then the other thing was-and I had letters saying this-that, as a gay man, he would never be safe to teach in a school."

Where to begin. I mean seriously, where to begin.

Okay, let's start from the beginning.

In fact, let's go through the execrable bullshit line by fucking line.

"I had always seen Dumbledore as gay, but in a sense that's not a big deal."

By "always seen Dumbledore as gay" she presumably means "had always seen Dumbledore as fundamentally asexual, and like all middle class fucktards I assume that anybody who isn't married by the age of thirty is a woofter."

Seriously. Look at the quote again. Notice how she says that she had "always seen Dumbledore as gay" but then makes it clear that she had never intended for him to actually be involved in any variety of homosexual relationship. More than that, until she pulled Gridelwald out of her arse in order to explain how Dumbledore could possibly have made a mistake, she clearly had no intention of his ever having been in a homosexual relationship.

So what can she possibly mean by "I had always seen Dumbledore as gay"? It's simple really. She means she'd seen him as having no sexual life whatsoever, as being without sexual desire or motivation. As not fancying women. Of course she'd also seen him as rather funny, rather quirky, somewhat outrageous in a non-threatening kind of way. An eccentric old duffer with a funny line in velvet suits. The fact that JK Rowling characterises all of these personality traits as "gay" is profoundly, profoundly offensive. You are a hack, JK Rowling, a small-minded, bigoted hack.

A couple of people, after the announcement came out, suggested that they "should have guessed after they saw him in that purple velvet suit". It's a joke, of course, but it's a joke based on an offensive homophobic stereotype. An offensive homophobic stereotype which appeared to be at the heart of JKR's conception of Dumbledore as a gay man.

Right. On to the next line then.

"The book wasn't about Dumbledore being gay. It was just that from the outset obviously I knew he had this big, hidden secret, and that he flirted with the idea of exactly what Voldemort goes on to do, he flirted with the idea of racial domination, that he was going to subjugate the Muggles. So that was Dumbledore's big secret."

Okay, where to begin with this little section. "He had this big, hidden secret, and he flirted with the idea of exactly what Voldemort goes on to do". So he's got a big secret and he wanted to take over the world. So Wizard society is institutionally homophobic then? Hence his keeping his sexual orientation a secret? In that case, you'd think his enemies would have found out and used it against him. Except of course that he never actually had any variety of homosexual experience, so maybe that would have been quite difficult for them.

Or maybe Wizarding society is totally okay with homosexuality, maybe it's completely acceptable for Wizarding men to bang each other. In that case why did he keep it secret? Either way, isn't "he's gay" significantly less important than "he tried to take over the world". Why mention them in the same breath? It's not like the two are directly causally related.

After all, a woman whose works are a protracted plea for tolerance wouldn't deliberately set out to establish a causal link between homosexuality and acts of evil and violence.

Oh wait.

"Why did he flirt with that?" she asks. "He's an innately good man, what would make him do that. I didn't even think it through that way, it just seemed to come to me, I thought 'I know why he did it, he fell in love.'

I'm going to take the cheap shot now and highlight the fact that she just blithely says that having introduced this really quite significant element into a character's personal history (he seriously considered the idea of subjugating humanity) she then blithely states that she "didn't even think it through."

Excuse me while I rant again. For fuck's sake JK Rowling it's the entire fucking plot of the seventh fucking book, what do you mean you didn't think it through you fucking talentless moron. I mean seriously, what does this woman get paid for. You're fucking well supposed to think things through particularly if they're, y'know, important.

There is just so much, so very very much, about this line that reveals JK Rowling's weakness as a writer. Dumbledore, apparently, is an "innately good man". I've already talked about how JK Rowling's personal morality seems weirdly Calvinist (or rather, weirdly similar to the way a complete outsider who doesn't really understand the doctrine of the elect would characterise Calvinism). Again we see the pathetic simplicity of Rowling's moral world. Dumbledore is "innately good" it is therefore completely inconceivable that he could ever do anything wrong ever unless he was being actively influenced by an evil external force.

And what force could be more evil than homosexual desire?

Okay, I know, it's another cheap shot. But - and yes I'm going to say it again - for fuck's sake. For fucking fucking fucking fuck's sake. For fuck's sake. Not only is she too pathetic and cowardly to let her precious, precious heroes show any signs of complexity or make any mistakes that aren't attributed to supernatural compulsion (any scene where Harry acts irrationally is the fragment of Voldemort's soul. The scenes in DH where Ron acts completely rationally are the influence of the Horcrux). Not only that, but Rowling then chooses to declare that the external compulsion which stops Dumbledore from following his otherwise infallible moral compass is homosexual love.

She elaborates, of course.

"And whether they physically consummated this infatuation or not is not the issue. The issue is love. It's not about sex. So that's what I knew about Dumbledore. And it's relevant only in so much as he fell in love and was made an utter fool of by love. He lost his moral compass completely when he fell in love and I think subsequently became very mistrusting of his own judgment in those matters so became quite asexual. He led a celibate and bookish life."

Again, she begins by reiterating the fact that as far as she is concerned "being gay" is in no way contingent upon having any kind of actual physical homosexual encounter. Again it seems that in Rowling's world "gay man" doesn't mean "a man who is sexually attracted to other men" but rather "a man who wears outrageous purple velvet suits."

Then she goes on to make it very, very clear that Dumbledore was in love with Wizard Hitler. The word "love" appears four times in the above paragraph. JK Rowling is totally obsessed with the concept of love. Lily's love for Harry, Harry's love for his friends, Snape's love for Lily. Voldemort seems to be doomed to be evil pretty much from his conception, because he wasn't born of a loving union.

Crucially, though, "love" in Harry Potter is an unambiguous force for good. All this stuff about how Dumbledore was "made an utter fool of by love" and "lost his moral compass completely" is at odds with the way that the great, redeeming power of love is shown to work at every other point in the Potter books. That, indeed, is the whole damned point of the books. Harry so loves Hogwarts that he sacrifices his only begotten ... sorry, I mean "himself" to save them, thereby protecting them all from Voldemort's curses with his Big Love Mojo.

In this context, Dumbledore/Grindelwald becomes quite horribly offensive (up there with HP Lovecraft presenting the Evils of Miscegenation as a supernatural threat in Innsmouth, or Enid Blyton casting the Gollywogs as the villains of the Noddy books). We are now presented with a great wizard, a truly good man (innately good in fact), who is debased and corrupted because he falls in love with another man. Love, which between a man and a woman, or between friends, or between a parent and child, brings out nothing but goodness and the finest qualities in all parties, between Dumbledore and Grindelwald however was baleful and destructive. In fact, you could almost say that JK Rowling presents homosexual love as an inversion of beautiful, uplifting, heterosexual love.

I'm quite sure this isn't deliberate. Prejudice never is. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves "hey, I think I'll be homophobic today!" Contrary to Rowling's simplistic portrayal of the issue, prejudice is not simply a matter of people being deliberately horrible to minorities. The most dangerous and pernicious forms of prejudice are, in fact, the things which people don't even think about. Things like perpetuating outdated, destructive stereotypes of a particular group and then trying to pass it off as empowering. The idea that an elderly gay man has to be a quirky, faintly outrageous basically asexual eccentric is hugely, hugely insulting.

Look. It really is this simple. You can't be both "gay" and "asexual" any more than you can be simultaneously "Catholic" and "Atheist". The moment you become an atheist, you stop being a Catholic, the moment you become a Catholic, you stop being an atheist. A man who has a single homosexual infatuation at the age of eighteen which might not even be consummated or requited and then lives an utterly sexless existence is not "gay" no matter how many brightly coloured suits he wears.

I've had about as much of this shit as I can take, but there's still more to deal with.

What's next, ah yes. Our sycophantic interviewer points out that some people were hostile to the idea of a gay character in a children's book. Rowling has this fabulous insight:

"It is a very interesting question because I think homophobia is a fear of people loving, more than it is of the sexual act. There seems to be an innate distaste for the love involved, which I find absolutely extraordinary. There were people who thought, well why haven't we seen Dumbledore's angst about being gay?"

Again, she is keen to stress that it is the love that homophobes object to, not the sex. First and foremost, this is bullshit. When the Christian Right has a go at homosexuality it's not "love" they complain about it's sodomy. You know, sodomy, from Sodom and Gomorrah, the bit of the bible which tends to be used to explain why some people think it's wrong, not for men to feel strong bonds of affection towards one another, but to actually fuck each other up the arse.

Sorry, that was crude, but Rowling seems to want to completely divorce the idea of "being gay" from the actual, physical act of homosexual sex. She wants the kudos of having a "gay character" in the book (because they're all about tolerance remember) without having to think about any of that dirty, nasty bumsex.

Indeed I might even suggest that maybe, just maybe, the reason JK Rowling is so keen to declare that homophobes are afraid of the love not the sex is because she, herself, is actually kind of afraid of the sex. Why else would she be so adamant that Dumbledore never, never, never, never had any kind of actual homosexual impulse or encounter other than his "infatuation" with Grindelwald.

Are you honestly telling me that if Dumbledore had been straight (that is to say, had dressed more conservatively and not kept saying things like "that flighty temptress, adventure!") and he had fallen in love with a woman that (a) it would have led him down the path of evil when all other heterosexual relationships in the series have been nothing but redemptive and that (b) he would have become completely asexual afterwards?

Now okay, I admit, that part of what makes this so creepy is JK Rowling's totally fucked up attitude to love, which stipulates that you meet the One Person Who Is Truly Meant For You In All The World at roughly the age of eleven, and then you are never allowed to feel anything for anybody ever again. Presumably once Dumbledore had pursued his disastrous infatuation with Grindelwald, the Monster in his Chest died a horrible lonely death, and Dumbledore never looked at anybody sexually ever again. Ever. For a hundred and twenty years after his eighteenth birthday.

And in fact, I think that's the basic problem with the whole "Dumbledore is gay" thing. Homosexuality (and - much like my last Fb article - this is going to sound really obvious) is contingent upon sexuality, a factor which is notably absent from the Harry Potter books. Oh sure, there's "snogging" (which appears to be the only verb fictional teenagers are allowed to use to describe kissing) but nobody in Harry Potter has any real sexual impulses. There's no sex in Potter, only "love". That's why when the mermaids take "the thing that is most important to you in the whole world" in GoF, they take the person the contestant is dating. No doubt if the tournament had taken place a year later, Ginny would have been in Ron's position under the lake. The idea that Krum might have been dating Hermione, not because he thought she was Wonderful and Special and Amazing, but because he fancied some tight muggleborn pussy ("You know vot zey say about muggleborn girls, Victor?") simply didn't enter into it.

In a world completely void of any sexuality whatsoever - homo or hetero - where children seem to be produced magically out of thin air after two people have avowed their devotion and married (hell, maybe that's how Wizards do it, they seem to use magic for everything else, it wouldn't entirely surprise me if they had an inferior magical substitute for sex to go along with their inferior magical substitutes for everything else us muggles have invented to make our lives better) it simply makes no sense to say "Dumbledore was gay and was in love with Grindelwald".

What, precisely, about Grindelwald was Dumbledore attracted to? Was it - as it is presented in the actual novel - a meeting of the minds? The thrill of meeting another young wizard who was his equal in ability and ambition? In that case how is it functionally different from a heterosexual friendship (one of the things that really annoys me about fiction in general, actually, is the way that friendship is portrayed as utterly meaningless compared to romantic love - it's why I love the Denny Crane/Alan Shaw relationship in Boston Legal)? If Dumbledore "fell in love" with Grindelwald for purely intellectual reasons, then how does that explain why he was attracted to Grindelwald in the first place? Surely if Dumbledore's attraction to Grindelwald was based on an intellectual simpatico he must have been open to the whole idea of subjugating the muggle race already. On the other hand, maybe he was just attracted to Grindelwald's long blonde hair and boyish good looks. In that case the relationship was overtly sexual, and Dumbledore shouldn't have just been able to switch off those sexual impulses because he "didn't trust his judgement". Just because you get burned once at the age of eighteen, that doesn't mean that you then stop fancying people. But Dumbledore (like most of the adults in Harry Potter) is portrayed as an utterly sexless being (which isn't inappropriate, adults in children's stories are normally played as asexual). It is simply meaningless to say "Dumbledore is gay" just as it is meaningless to say "Professor McGonagall is heterosexual". People who don't have sexual appetites don't have sexual orientation, it really is that simple. Yes, we live in a society which happens to assume that a person of nonspecified sexual orientation is straight, but that's simply incorrect. Sexuality isn't like race, you don't just get one automatically. If a character in a work of fiction is not presented as having any kind of sexual or romantic impulses, that character cannot be considered "straight" or "gay" or anything else.

In this sense, in fact, sexuality is very much the opposite of race (as I discussed in my previous article - I'm afraid I'm turning into a bit of a Joss Whedon wannabe with all this standing up for minorities I know nothing about). Race affects everything about a person's physical appearance, and if a character's race isn't specified, they'll wind up being white by default. You have to imagine a character looking like something, after all, and odds are what elements of description the author does give will wind up implying a white person rather than a black person.

Sexuality works rather differently. If a character's sexuality is not defined in the text, then it really is entirely up to the reader to decide. While it doesn't really make sense to imagine Professor McGonnagall as black (it just doesn't fit the description of the character, and besides, Rowling tends to mention when her characters have black skin) it's perfectly reasonable to imagine her being straight or gay or bi or whatever as you choose. There is simply no evidence in the text to support most of the characters having any sexuality whatsoever (at least the unmarried ones). Starting to declare that any given character is straight or gay makes no sense at all. (This is exactly why the girly posters on Sirius' wall were so annoying).

Rowling expresses her amazement that people wonder why we "haven't seen Dumbledore's angst about being gay." No Jo, that's not what they're wondering. They're wondering why we haven't seen Dumbledore's "angst" about the fact that the only person he ever loved was an evil mass murderer who he was eventually forced to face down and lock in his own prison. Particularly when - during Harry's Second year - he hires a teacher who looks exactly like the his lost love, only to have the guy turn out to be evil, and get driven mad. All it would take was one sentence in which Dumbledore admits that Lockhart reminds him of somebody he used to know. As it is the idea of Dumbledore having any kind of past at all comes kind of out of left field. The idea of him having a tragic past is even more surprising and the idea of him having a tragic past of thwarted homosexual love is utterly unsupported by the text.

Rowling's final word on the subject is this:

"And then the other thing was-and I had letters saying this-that, as a gay man, he would never be safe to teach in a school."

Again, she expresses surprise at this, but again, her surprise rings hollow. Clearly the only way she herself was comfortable with portraying a gay man was to make him completely celibate. Obviously Dumbledore was safe to teach in a school, he had no sexual drives whatsoever. Certainly there is nothing about Rowling's portrayal of homosexual love that could lead us to believe that she felt it was harmless in general. It was a destructive force in Dumbledore's life, it caused him to lose his otherwise infallible moral compass and flirt with the idea of racial domination.

To be - well perhaps fair is too strong a word - but to at least admit that there exists doubt of which miss Rowling could theoretically be given the benefit, I am sure that she did not deliberately create a situation in which her only canonical homosexual relationship was primarily sexless and ultimately destructive. I am sure she did not mean, by "outing" Dumbledore, to perpetuate the idea that homosexuality is only acceptable so long as it is not acted upon. That doesn't change the fact that this is exactly what she did, and by repeatedly asserting that Dumbledore's flirtation with genocide was not attributable to a flaw in his character, but only to his "infatuation" with Gellert Grindelwald, she makes matters worse.

Ultimately, this article concludes much the same way my last article began. It is all very well for Rowling to say that Dumbledore's sexuality "shouldn't matter" just as it is all very well for the Sci Fi channel to say that it "shouldn't matter" whether Ged is played by a white actor. But the fact is that it does matter and it matters deeply, and the fact that Rowling cannot tell why it matters, why maybe the fact that her books - albeit accidentally - send the message that homosexual love is perverse and unnatural might cause problems, is only further evidence of her failure as an author.

A plea for tolerance indeed.