It’s true that it was fairly innovative to have the white guys (or rather the whitest guys) not being the nice guys. (Tolkien’s “sallow” Orcs and evil White Wizards notwithstanding).

Confession: I’m not particularly stirred by LeGuin’s fiction, though I like her essays. I think my parents read Earthsea to me when I was four or five. I remember a little girl who lived in a tomb. C’est tout.

Yes, with the innovative idea of having one (1) black character, Vetch, who is inferior in intellect and ability to the hero, and spends his time eating fried chicken.

I’m curious how people imagine Rowling might have put more discussion of Dumbledore’s sexuality into the books without it seeming out of character and inappropriate–considering that his relationship to the protagonist for most of the series is that of a distant teacher and occasional mentor, and the focus of most of their conversations is Harry and his personal destiny.

I agree that the series was mostly about Harry and thus Dumbledore being gay is mostly irrelevant. However, I admit my own bias - as a lesbian - that I’d rather have seen an explicitly positive portrayal of a gay or lesbian character than information revealed after the fact.

I’ve made similar comments before and had similar responses (how do you think it should be done?) but I don’t really have a strong opinion on how it should be done, or even a strong opinion that it should have been done. It’s just wishful thinking, not an imperative.

re: re-imagining characters, when I first read Hermione’s description, I thought she was biracial — it was the description of her hair that did it. Now I’m kind of upset that I can’t get Emma Watson out of my head.

Just to spread the diverse recommendation lurve, and especially as most of (all?) the names that have been invoked so far are attached to white folk.

There are a bunch of authors who work with non-white default who actually are non-white. Top recommendation: Octavia Butler, whose integration of race into character and description is always subtle and smart. While reading her work, I’ve several times had that mental shift you describe, where one realizes that a character to whom one had assigned one race or another looks different than you expect.

Also: Samuel Delany, Nalo Hopkinson, Tananarive Due, Tempest Bradford, Tobias Buckell, N. K. Jemison.

About half way through the book, you realize that most, if not all, of the characters are black. (Actually, Fat Charlie’s love interest is half black, half Asian- and you only know that because Gaiman off-handedly comments on the color of her skin, mixed in with a flashback to her parent’s courtship). This revelation is not overt, and some of the characters could still be plausibly pictured as white, but overall the racial picture is undeniable.

This mistake I made in picturing the characters as white, and then realizing I was wrong to do so, was my favorite aspect of my experience of the bo0k. It was fun to reread it with my updated mental pictures.

i also want to second the virulently heteronormative epilogue. the lack of homosexuality did not bother me nearly as much as an ending where all we need to know about the characters is that they all get married and have lots of babies. not only are they straight, but that straightness (and their nice nuclear families) is the happy ending in and of itself. i found the whole epilogue outright obnoxious.

since the book was about harry, and he spent most if it depressed for lack of a family I think the ending made complete sense. Grow up, be part of a happy family that lives next door to your best friends from school. Sort of what he was looking for all along. I’m more concerned with how Nevile for the sword of Gryfindor away from the goblin.

http://www.themedicinewheel.net/HP_novellas/aorist_subjunctive.html

(Very well done, too. There’s lots of rather bad Harry/Cedric stories out there, but this is a good one, and more to the point, it really deals with Cedric being *gay* and coming out [especially the second installment] — not just hot Harry-Cedric sexual tension … although it’s got that too. (G)

first of all, although i typically disregard anything said outside the text of a book, i think harry potter may be the exception. rowling has said so much about the characters’ later lives that it is being treated as an unwritten sequel. so outing dumbledore in this case is very legitimate; just look at the headlines it’s made. no one will read the books now without reading his homosexuality, whether it is in the text or not.

although i read so many characters in harry potter as potentially gay, (i thought the sexual tension was between harry and cedric diggory) i have to admit that i never considered dumblemore. i think i was afraid of the consequences. it’s bad enough for him to be the elderly gay man doomed to be alone, whose one relationship was with one of the most evil wizards in history. but i especially did not want ideas of homosexuality getting mixed up in his relationship with harry. although it is brave do depict a fatherly mentor figure who is gay, i shudder to think of all the readers now branding dumbledore as a child molestor. i suppose i’m still torn whether or not his presence as a gay character is damaging or rewarding. (seriously though, if cedric hadn’t died…)

i also want to second the virulently heteronormative epilogue. the lack of homosexuality did not bother me nearly as much as an ending where all we need to know about the characters is that they all get married and have lots of babies. not only are they straight, but that straightness (and their nice nuclear families) is the happy ending in and of itself. i found the whole epilogue outright obnoxious.

Finally, as for race in harry potter, i want to bring up the character of kingsley shackelbot. although race is very downplayed in the books (many characters i didn’t know their ethnicity until i saw them in the films) kingsley seems to be the exception. rowling has a tendency to attach one or two adjectives to each character and use them constantly (see the bottom of page 45 in book 7!) kingsley’s descriptors are “bald, black, broad-shouldered,” and he is always described as having a deep, soothing voice. i’m very curious as to why the other characters are so racially neutral, while with kingsley it’s his most obvious trait. (even his name seems like an indicator.)

I remember reading an interview with LeGuin where she explicitly stated that the reason she only mentioned Ged’s skin color in passing was because she wanted the readers to focus more on him as a person, and at the time A Wizard of Earthsea was published there were practically no main characters in fantasy who were not white males.

Well, except for Hagrid and Snape, of course. Though they could be bi…

Two words: Dark Revels.

(Why am I still on this blog? I pre-programmed my articles to do a time release so I could ignore it, and yet I’m here. Mandolin! Go work on stuff.)

I’m sure it’s no subterfuge on LeGuin’s part - more simply that, as a young reader, I was prone to missing details like that.

In addition, not only does his relationship with Grindelwald end in heartbreak, it’s actively evil while it’s going on. He neglects family members who need him. He toys with evil. It IS very 19th century in that gay apparently means turning away from your family and becoming evil. Good thing for him it ended poorly and he could go back to being good.

Perhaps to make it more tiredly homophobic, she could have made Grindelwald a vampire and Dumbeldore could be half vampire, set free when his boyfriend dies. Or Grindelwald could have been killed by an insane ex lover of his!

It’s probably for the best that she left the explicit declaration out of the series. FWIW, I did suspect that was where she was going with that relationship.

I thought, though, that Tonks and Werewolf-guy were the most queer characters in the series. Tonks was the most non-normative female. And werewolf-guy (I suck at names) has his line about “people like me” in the third movie. I know the movies aren’t cannon to the books, but when she wrote the final book, the movie was already out and she knew he was a queer metaphor. Which is why it was disappointing to see him married to Tonks.

The whole last book is like a celebration of heterosexuality. Those two get married- and then die, which is certainly a common fate for queer figures in literature. The first few chapters are all about how great a straight wedding is and the epilogue features only heterosexual characters.

Great, Dumbledore was gay temporarily and it made him evil and broke his heart. This makes the final book MORE normative, not less.