Dumbledore Is Gay: Good Guys and Literary Closets

Every single person I have ever met in my life has sent me this piece of news.

I wonder why. 🙂

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The news: J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books (yes, I’m a fan, suck it up), announced recently that the headmaster character, Dumbledore, is gay. It came up at a recent reading at Carnegie Hall; a fan asked about Dumbledore’s love life, and Rowling answered, “My truthful answer to you… I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.” She went on to explain that Dumbledore had been in love with the wizard Grindelwald in his youth, and that Grindelwald turning out to be evil was the great tragedy of Dumbledore’s life.

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(As it turns out, the subject of Dumbledore’s sexual orientation had come up previously during the making of one of the movies; the director had some reference in the script to a girl in Dumbledore’s past, and Rowling had to pass him a note to gently point him off that track.)

I pretty much have just three things to say about this:

One: Neat.

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I think it’s cool that Dumbledore is the moral center of the book, the apotheosis of goodness, the one character that all the good guys look to for both political and ethical leadership.

And he’s gay.

That’s just nifty.

Two: I think it’s too bad she couldn’t have said so in the books themselves.

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Don’t get me wrong. I totally understand why she didn’t. If she’d made Dumbledore overtly gay in the books, then in the general public eye, that’s what the books would have been about. Everything else that the books are about — moral complexity, the realities of a resistance movement, what it’s like to be a child growing up and figuring out that the adult world is seriously messed-up, all the lovely and ridiculous magic stuff — would have become suddenly and dramatically secondary. It would have become the children’s book series about the wizarding school with the gay headmaster. It would have become the seven-volume fantasy version of “Heather Has Two Mommies.” I think it was the right decision, and if I’d been Rowling, I would have done exactly the same thing.

I just think that’s too bad.

I think it’s too bad that we live in a world where the mere presence of a major gay character in a children’s book automatically makes it a Kids’ Book About Gay.

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I think it’s too bad that I now have to wonder: How many other characters did Rowling envision as gay, but wasn’t able to say so? (My money’s on Draco…)

I think it’s too bad that the single most popular author in the known universe, the one author who could write her own ticket more than any author living today, still had to keep the gayness of one of her central characters a secret until the series was completed.

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It is better now than it used to be, forty years ago or even twenty. Imagine if L. Frank Baum had announced that Glinda the Good Witch was gay. Or Tolkein with Gandalf. Or Madeleine L’Engle with Mrs. Whatsit. There would have been a shitstorm. But it’s a different time now, and the people who are mostly going to be upset about Dumbledore are the fundies who aren’t buying the books anyway because they promote witchcraft.

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But I still think we have a long way to go. I still think it’s still too bad that a major children’s book can’t have a major gay character in it without that becoming the central defining feature of the book.

Maybe in twenty years.

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Three: Now I have to read the whole series again. Or the last book, anyway.

Damn. What a shame.

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Oh, and P.S.: Snape.

No, I’m not saying he’s gay. I’m just saying: Snape. Because I am constitutionally incapable of writing an entire Harry Potter post without mentioning Snape.

Dumbledore Is Gay: Good Guys and Literary Closets
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Why Religion Is Like Fanfic

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I was reading some unusually wacky Christian theology in Disinformation’s new book, Everything You Know About God Is Wrong (more on the book when I’m done with it — the thing is great, but it’s huge). Specifically: In the Middle Ages, there was all this theology about the immaculate conception virgin birth and how exactly Mary got impregnated by God, with several theologians putting forth the theory that — get this — the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary in her ear.

No, really. In her ear.

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What’s more, there’s other theology of the period seriously discussing the question of how, physically, Jesus was born. Did he just teleport out of Mary’s womb, or was he born out of her ear (since he was conceived there, after all), or what?

Because, after all, the pussy is a disgusting, putrid font of sin and evil, and God would never go there. Or be born out of there.

But I digress.

I was reading this, and I was suddenly struck with how familiar it all seemed.

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It reads exactly like fan-written blueprints for the Enterprise in “Star Trek.” Or fan-written explanations for discrepancies in star dates, or why the Enterprise has completely reliable lie detectors that they only use in three episodes.

Continue reading “Why Religion Is Like Fanfic”

Why Religion Is Like Fanfic

Best Erotic Comics 2008 – Artist List Finalized! Plus Call for Submissions for Best Erotic Comics 2009!

Bec_2008

It’s at the printers! The artist list is finalized! After some predictable delays in production, my new anthology, Best Erotic Comics 2008, is moving forward, with an expected publication date from Last Gasp of December 2007!

Here’s the skinny. (Yes, in this case “the skinny” is the book’s official blurb, but I wrote the blurb myself, so it actually represents the book very accurately.)

A literary and artistic exploration of human sexuality — and a fun dirty book, featuring today’s smartest, raunchiest, funniest, filthiest, most beautiful, and most arousing adult comics! Best Erotic Comics 2008 smashes the divide between literary/art comics and adult comics by including both the hottest work from the literary/art comics world — and the highest-quality work from the adult comics world. Artists include Daniel Clowes, Phoebe Gloeckner, Gilbert Hernandez, Michael Manning, Toshio Saeki, Colleen Coover, Ellen Forney, and many others. The wide variety includes work that’s kinky and vanilla, sweet and perverse, and straight, lesbian, and gay. Features recent comics, a handful of vintage Hall of Fame gems — and some works never published before! Color and b&w.

Work by: Belasco
Marzia Borino & Mauro Balloni
Susannah Breslin
Katie Carmen
Cephalopod Products
Daniel Clowes
Vince Coleman
Colleen Coover
John Cuneo
Dave Davenport
El Bute
Jessica Fink
Ellen Forney
Phoebe Gloeckner
Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa
Justin Hall
Gilbert Hernandez
Molly Kiely
Ralf Konig
Dale Lazarov & Steve MacIsaac
Michael Manning
Erika Moen
Quinn
Sandez Rey
Trina Robbins
Toshio Saeki
and Dori Seda.

Cover art by Ellen Forney.

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I am enormously excited about this book. It really is both dirty and arty, mind-expanding as well as dick- and clit-expanding, which is exactly the line I was trying to walk with it. And everyone who’s looked at it so far has said that they’re struck by the sheer variety of the material… something that makes me very happy indeed. Variety — not just variety of sex acts and sexual orientations, but also variety of sexual moods and attitudes, relationships and settings, narrative tones and visual styles — was one of my top priorities in choosing the material, and it tickles me that this jumps out so clearly.

I’ll be blogging about Best Erotic Comics a lot more as it gets closer to publication. I’ll be posting artist interviews, explaining more about my selection process, gassing on about why I did the book in the first place, and more. But I wanted to start spreading the news now.

And I want to start spreading a related piece of news: Best Erotic Comics is an annual series, and the deadline for the next volume is fast approaching! For details, please check out the guidelines below the fold. (Even if you’re not a comic artist, you might be interested in the guidelines, as they explain a lot about the book.) Thanks, and see you in the funny papers!

Continue reading “Best Erotic Comics 2008 – Artist List Finalized! Plus Call for Submissions for Best Erotic Comics 2009!”

Best Erotic Comics 2008 – Artist List Finalized! Plus Call for Submissions for Best Erotic Comics 2009!

“Its offspring made small mewling sounds”: Edward Gorey’s “The Trouble With Tribbles”

This made me laugh harder than anything else all week.

It’s a… I don’t even know how to say what it is. Shaenon K. Garrity, a fan of Edward Gorey and Star Trek, discovered that the former had been a fan of the latter, and created this imagining — essentially a fanfic mash-up in comic form — of what Gorey would have done with “The Trouble With Tribbles.”

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The drawing doesn’t quite have Gorey’s touch (who does?), but it’s pretty darned good, with some very Gorey-esque compositions — and the writing is dead-on. Absolutely not to be missed.

Note to the artist: Gorey was also a Buffy fan. Can we get a mash-up of “Band Candy” next? Please please please please please?

Via Making Light, and also via my friend Rebecca.

“Its offspring made small mewling sounds”: Edward Gorey’s “The Trouble With Tribbles”

Literally

No, this isn’t about literal interpretations of the Bible. It’s about the word “literally.”

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Faithful readers of this blog will know that, when it comes to language, I’m a fairly ardent usagist/ descriptivist. I think language is a biological function that depends on constant change in order to work. I tend to embrace changes in the language rather than resisting them. I think grammar books would be more effective if they taught the rules of the language as it actually is, rather than as the authors think it ought to be. And I think that arguing “that’s not what this word really means,” when it’s how the majority of people using the language use it and understand it, is absurd. There is no objective, Platonic form of the word “nice” — it means what we understand it to mean.

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But while I am a passionate descriptivist, I’m not a hard-line one. I understand that, while language has to change in order to work, it also has to have some consistency in order to work. If we don’t agree on what the words we use mean (as well as on the structures we use put them together), then language becomes nonsense. And while I think it’s silly to resist changes in the language just on principle, I think it is worth discussing whether any particular change is necessary, desirable, comprehensible, and/or graceful.

Which brings me back to “literally.”

Continue reading “Literally”

Literally

Atheism in Pop Culture Part 4: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Just so you know: I’m kind of getting all my Harry Potter blogging out in one swell foop, so I can get it over with and move on. I think this is my last one. No spoilers here, but if you want your reading experience of the new book to be completely unsullied, you may want to skip this until you’ve read the book.

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You didn’t think I’d be able to keep atheism out of this, did you?

I suppose it’d be more accurate to call this “Skepticism in Pop Culture.” Although I do think it’s interesting that, for all the magic and ghosts and afterlife in the Harry Potter series, there’s a conspicuous absence of any sort of divinity. Another reason the Christian Right hates it, I guess…

Anyway, when I was reading the new Harry Potter book, this passage jumped out at me as a perfect and hilarious example of great skeptical thinking, and I wanted to pass it on.

“Well, how can that be real?”

“Prove that it is not,” said [X].

[Y] looked outraged.

“But that’s — I’m sorry, but that’s completely ridiculous! How can I possibly prove it doesn’t exist?… I mean, you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist!”

“Yes, you could,” said [X]. “I am glad to see that you are opening your mind a little.”

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Let me just say: I love Y. One of my favorite characters in the book. And they’re completely right. One of the most common fallacies in defenses of the metaphysical, paranormal, and spiritual is that, because you can’t prove that something doesn’t exist, therefore it’s reasonable to believe that it does… that because you can’t prove that something doesn’t exist, the proposition that it does exist and that it doesn’t are equally likely.

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And that, of course, simply isn’t the case. The classic example is Bertrand Russell’s china teapot orbiting the Sun: you can’t prove that it doesn’t exist, but the theory that it doesn’t exist and the theory that it does aren’t equally likely.

It’s like I said in my piece, The Unexplained, the Unproven, and the Unlikely. Even when you can’t talk about proof and certainty, you can still talk about evidence and likelihood. “Well, it could be true” and “You can’t prove anything” are arguments best left to ten year olds and stoned college students.

Tip of the hat to Friendly Atheist. This quote had jumped out at me, too, but I had to copy it from F.A.’s blog, since Ingrid has the book now and she’s in Chino.

Atheism in Pop Culture Part 4: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The Fake Spoilers?

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So what’s been your favorite fake Harry Potter spoiler so far?

Mine is the one from the Daily Show: Harry gets decapitated by Ron, who turns out to be Voldemort’s evil robot son. Although I’m also fond of the one I made up for Ingrid: Harry dies on Page 10, and the rest of the book is filled up with personal ads.

So what are your favorite fake spoilers — either ones you’ve heard, or ones you’ve made up?

The Fake Spoilers?

Abbey Road or Let It Be? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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WARNING — SPOILERS!

Well, sort of.

I don’t actually talk much about the details of the book in this post. But if you haven’t yet read “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” and want to read nothing at all about it until you do, I suggest that you not read it — especially since we might talk about the book in the comments.

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Once upon a time, back in the old days of this blog when we were debating the relative merits of Harry Potter versus Lord of the Rings, I hit upon an analogy that I thought was very apt. I said that Harry Potter was like the Beatles and Lord of the Rings was like Wagner… and that, while I acknowledged that Wagner’s music was certainly greater than that of the Beatles by whatever objective standards might exist, I still didn’t personally like it. I still found it bombastic and heavy and humorless. I still enjoyed the Beatles more, by several orders of magnitude. And I believed that this was a reasonable and defensible position.

I still do, by the way.

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Since then, I’ve carried this analogy quite a bit further. I think the Harry Potter books are, in fact, a lot like the Beatles — something that started out as a well-done, tremendously fun, significantly-better-than-average bit of pop fluff that somehow tapped into a deep and wide vein in the culture, and that over time evolved into something more than that, into something that approached art — often awkwardly and clumsily and with a reach that exceeded its grasp, but nevertheless exploring interesting deep waters with pleasure and skill, and worthy of serious attention and consideration. (While at the same time still hitting that deep vein of pure pop culture fun.)

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I even had specific books matched up with specific Beatles albums (although not one-to-one, obviously, since the Beatles made more than seven albums). The first three books are the happy, poppy, early Beatles, with Book Three, “Prisoner of Azkaban,” being the pinnacle of that period in the same way that “A Hard Day’s Night” is. Book Four, “Goblet of Fire,” is the tired, fallow, grinding-it-out, “Beatles for Sale/Help!” low-point.

Revolver
And Books Five and Six, “Order of the Phoenix/Half-Blood Prince,” are the “starting to evolve and come into its own, as something new and worth paying serious attention to” books, a la “Rubber Soul,” “Revolver,” “Sgt. Pepper,” and “White Album.” (Ingrid points out that the analogy isn’t perfect, since the musical equivalent of the long, rambling, confusing, self-indulgent battle scene at the end of Book Five would be a 17-minute guitar solo from Rush or Yes or Spinal Tap, something the Beatles never did… but on reflection, I think “Magical Mystery Tour” might count).

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So ever since I read Book Six, I’ve been waiting for Book Seven with some trepidation. Would it be “Abbey Road” (the last Beatles album recorded) — a beautiful, inspired, nearly flawless example of the band at its best, and a grand and fitting note to go out on? Or would it be “Let It Be” (the last Beatles album released) — a messy, sloppy, kind of sad anticlimax with a few high points?

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I’m happy to report that “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” is Abbey Road. All the way.

It’s not quite flawless, to be sure. It’s certainly heir to many of Rowling’s usual foibles, including long awkward exposition passages, important plot points that are confusing or poorly thought-out (the whole thing with the wands at the very very end I thought was total bullshit), and obvious sops to the audience.

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But on the whole, I think it’s an extremely strong book. It’s got action, romance, politics, philosophy, moral complexity, humor… all well-executed and in good balance. It’s a serious page-turner — I pretty much didn’t do anything from the time I started it to the time I finished it except sleep, eat, and read. It’s even reasonably tight… well, for a Rowling book, anyway. And while the basic arc of the book is very much what you might expect, there are some serious surprises and shocks along the way.

I want to reserve final judgment until I’ve had time to let it gel (and until I’ve re-read it at least once). But right now, a day after finishing it, my initial assessment is: Best book in the series.

Abbey Road or Let It Be? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Harry Potter Prediction Contest — The Winners!

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SPOILERS!

SPOILERS!

OH, SO MANY SPOILERS!

DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU HAVE NOT YET READ “HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS” AND DON’T WANT TO FIND OUT HOW IT TURNS OUT!

And the winners of “The Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” Prediction Contest, or, The Most Trivial Thing On This Blog To Date, And That’s Saying Something” are:

Continue reading “Harry Potter Prediction Contest — The Winners!”

Harry Potter Prediction Contest — The Winners!