It took me a while to recognize why Rowling’s outing of Dumbledore bothered me.

It’s not because a mega-billionaire author turned around and categorized a major character in a children’s series as gay.  I think that’s hilarious. I’ve never seen an author explicitly validate an entire sub-genre of slash fiction devoted to her work.  Can you imagine Gene Roddenberry standing up and saying “Yeah, you know, you guys were pretty much right about Kirk and Spock. There was a reason they always got themselves mind controlled so they could wrestle each other with their shirts off.”

No, my problem is the justification that Rowling gives.  She talks about Dumbledore’s youthful friendship with the dark wizard Grindelward, and remarks “He met someone as brilliant as he was and, rather like Bellatrix, he was very drawn to this brilliant person and horribly, terribly let down by him.”

I take issue with this reading because it continues a tradition of pointing at close, affectionate male relationships and basically saying “Yeah, that’s just suppressed gayness.” It has the effect of bringing back a different kind of homophobia by saying that anything involving deep emotional bonding between men can’t be affection for its own sake but rather subconscious sexuality.

I, myself, have suffered from this sort of viewpoint.  My friends can tell you that I’m the single worst hugger on the planet. I don’t really hug people; I kind of hang off them like a jacket that’s three sizes two small. It’s even worse when I hug my male friends. Sure, I can take responsibility for my own hugging inadequacies, but when you have a society that says “close male friendships = gay,” it doesn’t really help one to improve one’s hugging prowess.  I need society’s support in my attempts to hold my male friends close without suddenly being the love that dare not speak its name.

There are many famous male friends who shared close, intimate emotional relationships without being gay.  Lewis and Clark. Mason and Dixon. Penn and Teller.  Shatner and Spader.

When I was sixteen, my friend and I got drunk behind a supermarket. (We were subsequently arrested by a pair of Mormon cops, but that’s another story.) We had been a bit estranged prior to that evening, but the alcohol helped remove our emotional inhibitions and we admitted that we cared about each other and that we were, in fact, friends. And yes, we hugged.  Shouldn’t men in our society be able to do this without the influencing factors of alcohol or, worse, Mormonism?

Don’t get me wrong: Rowling is the writer and I completely accept her interpretation of her own character. I’m even entertained by it. I’m simply saying that her justification for the interpretation raises its own problems because it allows very little space for non-sexual male bonding.  To my mind, homosexuality isn’t simply a byproduct of male intimacy but something that specifically denotes sexual attraction.  Well, that and also an extremely intuitive ability to accessorize.