You know what - maybe Rowling is sneakier than we’re giving her credit for. I think Dumbledore has been living a chaste life since his infatuation with Grimblewald, which isn’t to say that he ever carried out that infatuation in a physical sense.
So what we have is a celibate, chaste man who experienced homosexual inclinations. He overcame them as he overcame his lust for power and ruling over others. Maybe Rowling believes that this is how people with homosexual inclinations should live, but she can’t say so straight out. Dumbledore’s love for Grindlewald was a sick love with evil consequences and he GAVE IT UP.
Personally, I wish she had kept this bit of backstory to herself, but Snape’s strategic/mercy killing of Dumbledore bothered me a lot more. That’s just wrong, and no time to atone after.
And you know what? Beautiful Tom Riddle never tried to seduce Dumbledore, and Dumbledore was never taken in by Riddle’s beauty. That’s a lot more to Dumbledore’s credit than Riddle’s.
I don’t see what you mean, he had time to atone and was acting on Dumbledore’s request. It was immoral true, but he did have time to repent (at least in theory since it’s not mentioned in the story).
Precisely what I was thinking. I'd rather this hadn't come, simply for reasons of taste - it was so nice to read hundreds of pages without having to think about homosexuality *even once*! (Well, there was Dudley's crack about Cedric's being Harry's boyfriend ...)
However, it seems to me to be a reasonable character development: late-blooming intellectual has a delayed-adolescent crush on a handsome young man. It doesn't work out. The intellectual then devotes his energies to the scholarly life, with generally beneficial results to other people, individually, and society, in general.
The real annoyance is the author's calling this character "gay," as if a single experience of a romantic urge toward the same sex was the defining point of a character. This is, of course, the whole point of homosexual activism - that this type of desire is the identity of the person.
As the mother of young people reading Harry Potter, this incident doesn't really bother me. My two oldest children (13 and 16) gave it a shrug and a chuckle. They're aware that people with homosexual inclinations exist. The younger children will likely not hear of it, as they don't read the news, and wouldn't understand if they did.
I never expected the books to be moral literature, in a religious sense, but rather general fiction in which characters exhibited both natural virtue and natural vice. There are moral lessons to be drawn by a reader, but that's true of any fiction; I'm on a Henry James binge right now, speaking of natural virtue and vice.
Perhaps but I doubt it. She probably wants to be invited to Sir Elton's castle.