Rowling Brings Dumbledore Out

Most of the 1,000 sweepstakes winners would have got more than they bargained for when they came to Carnegie Hall for a personal audience with Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling. This was where Rowling put to rest speculations about Dumbledore’s sexuality.

The sweepstakes contest organizer was Scholastic, the publisher of the Harry Potter series. The contest was open for all fans from the age of 7 upwards. Winners were drawn from a total of 50,000 participants, and got to meet and interact with Rowling during a read-and-greet.

During the question and answer session, members from the audience wanted to know about the sexual leanings of Dumbledore, who was Potter’s mentor and guide besides being the headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and whether he had ever fallen in love.

The question was something fans of Harry Potter across the globe have often times wondered about Dumbledore. In all the Potter books, he has always been depicted as someone who had no close associations or relationships with women, someone with an enigmatic past and a hint of issues lying therein.

Rowling replied that Dumbledore was actually gay, laying to rest once and for all speculation about the master wizard’s sexuality. She went on to explain that Dumbledore had, in the past, had an affair with Gellert Grindelwald. Grindelwald was a wizard from the dark side and the predecessor of Voldemort. She had brought in Grindelwald only in the final installment of the Potter saga – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Carnegie Hall was the last stop of Rowling’s Open Book Tour across the United States. The last time she had crossed the Atlantic to come to this part of the world was in 2000. Rowling asked Potter fans to stand up and question authority, stating the Harry Potter books she wrote were something she considered a ‘prolonged argument for tolerance.’

Rowling also said that not every one in the world was a fan of her Harry Potter books, and that her revelation of Dumbledore’s sexuality would give one more reason to her books’ detractors to renew the clamor for banning them. This was an obvious reference to Christian groups that have been at loggerheads with her, accusing her of glorifying witchcraft.

The Harry Potter books have made Rowling a cult figure and brought her legions of fans around the world. One such fan is Melissa Nelson, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and a member of the Carnegie Hall audience. Nelson said she literally ran through the last of the Harry Potter books, The Deathly Hallows, in her eagerness to get to the end.

That is more or less the story of most Harry Potter fans. All Harry Potter books have been phenomenal sellers at the stands as well. Deathly Hallows, with 8 million copies sold in the UK and another 3 million in the US on the first day of publication became the fastest selling book of all times. The earlier record belonged to the previous Harry Potter book –The Half Blood Prince.