I was tickled when I read that J.K. Rowling had outed Albus Dumbledore. Gay may not be perverse anymore, but it hasn’t quite graduated from the funny, not-quite-normative phase of its social evolution to complete, prosaic normativity. Gay + most things is still, to the 11-year-old in me, funny, and Gay + Wizard is really funny.
That said, I’m not convinced by the textual evidence, which seems to consist largely of some innuendo in Rita Skeeter’s unauthorized biography of Dumbledore—which should really have no more probative value than the lesbian-innuendo in Ed Klein’s silly biography of Hillary Clinton—and various passages about the unusually intense relationship between Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald. As an article at Salon.com describes it:
And then there is the publication of an original letter from Dumbledore to Grindelwald, in which the wizard chides his friend for getting kicked out of his foreign school, concluding, "But I do not complain, because if you had not been expelled, we would never have met." When Harry has a chance to chat with the deceased headmaster toward the end of the book, Dumbledore tells him his version of the story: "Then, of course, he came … Grindelwald. You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me … Did I know, in my heart of hearts, what Gellert Grindelwald was? I think I did, but I closed my eyes."
What is this but the kind of langauge that certain kind of men used to use to talk about close male friendships? It’s the language of British boarding schools, of Oxbridge, of British literary friendship, in the time before the outing of homosexuality made it sound, to worried ears, too gay. It’s precisely the language that an Englishmun like Albus Dumbledore, a product of early 20th century English public school culture, might use to talk about an old close male friendship, straight or gay.
It’s also, incidentally, the language that was often used by young (straight, though the term didn’t really exist at the time) men in America in the 19th century to talk about friendship, as E. Anthony Rotundo explains in his article “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900” (why I’m reading articles by E. Anthony Rotundo is another, not very interesting story):
The friendship between James Blake and Wyck Vanderhoef was certainly one that had a romantic aura. These two young men -both engineers -met in 1848, when they were in their twenties. Their friendship did not blossom immediately, but when it did, Blake wrote of the event as if he had just been engaged to be married. In his dairy, he exulted: "I have found a friend! one upon whom I can repose every trust, and when in trouble and affliction can seek relief."
Blake’s account of events between himself and Wyck sounds more like the choice of a wife than the start of a friendship: "After an acquaintance of nearly three years I have chosen PJClyck] as my friend, and he has reciprocated; May he live long and happy, and may the tie of pure friendship which has been formed between us, never be severed, but by the hand of death."
Just as these words have the ring of marriage vows, so too Blake’s description of their relationship sounds like a statement of the union of husband and wife. He prayed that God would "ever keep us as we now are in oneness, one life, one interest, one heart, one love." And when James described the place of this bond in his life, he used the rhetoric of nineteenth-century marriage and domesticity: "Long have I desired a friend, one whom I could trust myself with upon this journey of life; long have I endeavoured to find and select one from this cold self-interested world." Having found such a friend in Wyck, he realized what "a beautiful thing" it was to "retire from the cold selfish arms of the world, and receive the pure embrace of friendship."
The marital overtones of James and Wyck’s relationship were not confined to words and imagery, but extended as well to their actions. Like other devoted young friends of the time, they made a pact of friendship as a promise of lasting devotion. ? Whenever they separated, James acted like an abandoned husband, and even his stepmother picked up the maritalcomparison. One day after Wyck had returned toNew York, she told James that he "went about like a widower. Most surely do I feel so," James himself added, "for I feel as though I had lost my companion, my supporter and my friend.""
Of all the similarities to marriage in the Blake-Vanderhoef relationship, though, the most striking to the twentieth-century eye is their physical affection. For these two young men, "the embrace of friendship" was not just a figure of speech. As James noted without comment on one occasion, "We retired early and in each others arms did friendship sink peacefully to sleep." In other words, the two friends not only shared a bed, but they shared embraces there as well. Apparently, this was a common occurrence for them, and James noted their nocturnal embraces in his dairy with no hint of an apology. The most revealing of these diary entries came just after Wyck and James had parted company, and James was describing their last night together:
We retired early, but long was the time before our eyes were closed in slumber, for this was the last night we shall be together for the present, and our hearts were full of that true friendship which could not find utterance by words, we laid our heads upon each other’s bosom and wept, it may be unmanly to weep, but I care not, the spirit was touched.
All of which is to say, with regards to Dumbledore, that at various times in history men have been much more expressive about their love of their male friends, and although we can assume that the attraction in many of those cases was physical as well as emotional, in no sense was it exclusively “gay.” That Rowling doesn’t quite get this – that she thought she was dropping hints when in fact she was just drawing on an older literary tradition of depicting male friendship – just goes to show that writers don’t always know where they’re getting their material.
