http://www.hpana.com/news.20228.html

Also, if you type it into google, you'll get loads more on it.

Did anyone else just not see that coming? I mean, Dumbledore certainly was a secretive character and all, but he never seemed gay!

copied from my livejournal:

I'm sorry, Rowling, but Dumbledore is not gay.

I mean, he might be gay. I don't know. I don't care. You could've finished the series with the post script "oh, by the way, Dumbledore's gay." and that would've be fine. Bad writing, but otherwise fine. But you didn't. You gave up your chance to define his sexuality when you finished the last book. You can say what you like about him now but I won't accept any of it as canon. You probably think you're standing up for gay rights somehow, but all it looks like is a sad attempt to bring Harry Potter back into the headlines. It's over. Move on. If you want to make Dumbledore gay, have the script for the last film re-written by a slash fan. Anything less than that and you're just attention seeking.

I like that idea and I think I'm going to follow it myself. If she wanted these things to be the way she says they are she should have either put them in the book or write another one, to many peoples joy and many others dismay. Deciding things afterwards isn't really the best way to tell a story, especially some of the first few cases where she told about what happened to people after the series ends she actually changed her mind and gave a different story by the next time she was interviewed. I don't have the link for that but I think it was on these boards, if not I'll dig around the web for them if anyone wants to see.

That should so happen.

I agree with Nov, if it wasn't said in the books, then it's just idle speculation. Just 'cos she created Dumbledore doesn't make her any more qualified to say he's gay then anyone else, if it's not in the books.

Well, she did say that he and Grindelwald would send each other notes late at night...

Rowling has never been good at motivation in her writing. The simple question of 'why would they do that?' has never been one that she's good answering. She is very good at disguising this! It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that she's got vague, fluffy notions about things that never appeared in the books. She wasn't great at handling the things that were in them, let alone anything else.

I think that she's well within her rights to say that the reason she wrote the characters the way she did was based on things that she never revealed. I think that a lot of that can be seen if you go back and reread the first books with the knowledge of the later books. She had an idea of why people were doing things, but there was no need to tell us everything. Just like I don't know why people do things in real life, the reader doesn't need to know why people do things in the Harry Potter Universe.

I dunno, Dave. I find that readers generally expect a certain level of omniscience. You can't write a book and never explore the motives for action taken by the characters; that would just come off as very amateur-ish. Granted Rowling never needed to come out and blatantly say "Dumbledore was gay. And so was Voldemort. And it turns out that Dumbledore represented a facet of Voldemort's personality that he couldn't deal with himself. So he killed a bunch of people to compensate. And that's that." But she should have made her intentions more clear, or at least hinted at them a little harder if she thought that Dumbledore's sexuality actually mattered enough to warrant her telling everyone after the fact.

That's very well phrased.

To take a slightly defensive side for Rowling, she did only say that she 'always thought' of him as being gay. If she'd said 'of course he was gay!' then that would have been different. This could be described more as an insight into her process of characterisation than actually some attempt at revisionism by her. I'm not sure I'm convinced by my own point here, but I don't think it's entirely devoid of merit. She probably didn't really mean it to be a big thing, she was only answering a question.

And it's not like she just randomly told people - someone asked if Dumbledore had any girlfriends and she responded. And I don't think that it's necessary to reveal a person's sexuality in the book. It's rather unimportant, for the most part. If it doesn't make any difference to the story, why write it in? If she had, people would have been angry that she 'randomly' threw in this part about him being gay for no reason.