Dumbledore's Sexuality and the Heteronormative Logic of 'True Love'

According to the AP, JK Rawlings, author of the Harry Potter series, recently verified Albus Dumbledore's sexual preference. I'm not an avid fan of the Harry Potter series, but I have to say that the manner in which Rawlings confirmed "what Potter readers already suspected.

There's two ways of reading Rawlings response--what the AP described as Dumbledore's "coming out" party--and I'm going to focus now on the first (and incorrect) interpretation. Before getting to what exactly my conception of the two possibilities entails, it's appropriate to recreate the context of Rawlings' coming out announcement.

I'm going to take the AP at its word; here's the actual description of the circumstance:

J.K. Rowling, author of the mega-selling fantasy series that ended last summer, outed the beloved character Friday night while appearing before a full house at Carnegie Hall. After reading briefly from the final book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," she took questions from audience members.

She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds "true love."

"Dumbledore is gay," the author responded to gasps and applause.

Disengage from the participants of the situation, for a second, and personalize the ramifications by conceiving of yourself as the responsible for the question. Imagine you're asked whether N (a particular not-so-far-removed socialized entity, whether fictitious or 'real') has found true love or is capable of finding true love. Your response, if it mimicked Rawlings', looks like this:

Q: Has N found true love [or is N capable of finding true love]?

A: N is gay

One could easily make the case that your response to the question presupposes a normative context, that is, a particular standard under which the expression "this person finds true love" obtains (that is, truly occurs). Doesn't it seem that the answer presupposes that "true love" occurs only for those who are not homosexual? The qualification that "no, N is gay" ('No' doesn't actually occur but it's implied given the meaning of the expression to follow) would be unnecessary.

Hopefully the person who brings this implication to the fore would be a bit more careful in constructing his response since the semantics can get tricky. More appropriately, he might say, A (the response that "N is gay") presupposes what one might call a conceptual backdrop. The conceptual backdrop here is simply the understanding that, in "the normal case", it is appropriate to "take" the subject of a true love relation as (already) heterosexual; alternatively, and at the very least, the conceptual backdrop makes it the case that anyone who may have 'true love' is also someone who is not homosexual.

Can we take Rawlings as presupposing that the true love relation obtains only between a man and a woman, both of whom have the sexual marker of "heterosexuality" (by the way, for a sufficient characterization of the term "heteronormative" see Wikipedia's description )?

We ought not to for the simple reason that it is premature to ascribe such an intention without completely reading the source of our stipulation. If you read the aforementioned AP article in its entirety you should leave with the sense that Rawlings posited the remark within the larger context of her own agenda regarding the public's acknowledgement--or failure of acknowledgement--regarding homosexuality in general. As the AP notes later on in the same piece, "she [Rawlings] regarded her Potter books as a 'prolonged argument for tolerance" and urged her fans to "question authority.'"

So what, then, is the point of bringing up this possible, but unwarranted interpretation? The significance of this exercise isn't in the ascription (or failure to ascribe) of a particular intention regarding an authors attitude towards "proper" sexual relations that obtain during an instance of "one finding true love with another". Not to sound overly dramatic, but the stakes are more elusive than that.

If we focus instead on "Dumbledore--the 'gay' character--as an instigator of dissent to the status quo (the status quo here being a failure to acknowledge the legitimacy of homosexuality), we ought asking ourselves just how close Potter's world is to ours if it can structure an environment where an audience can conceive of one's sexual preference as a marker for its dissent with a particular normative understanding of sexuality at larger.

The answer is that the world of Harry Potter is no different from ours where it concerns "the properly sexual" relation--where "the proper" means "hetero" and the deviation from that standard as the "instigator for social dissent".

The point I am making is this: we don't know a world where Rawlings' description of Dumbledore's function (as an agent to promote homosexual tolerability) fails to make sense; if we actually lived in that world, Dumbledore (more importantly, his sexual preference) just wouldn't be necessary.