Warning! Spoilers ahead!

Two weeks ago, J.K. Rowling outed Albus Dumbledore, former Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, as gay. Her audience applauded when they heard the news, but Time contributor John Cloud isn't so easily convinced:

Why couldn't he tell us himself? The Potter books add up to more than 800,000 words before Dumbledore dies in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, yet Rowling couldn't spare two of those words to help define a central character's emotional identity: "I'm gay." We can only conclude that Dumbledore saw his homosexuality as shameful. His silence suggests a lack of personal integrity that is completely out of character.

Even though I'm more of a New Historicist when it comes to literary interpretation, one must still acknowledge the supremacy of the text. Even though historical context can aid in understanding a literary work, there is no information in a work of fiction that is not in the text. While it may be arguable that Orwell was writing about the BBC canteen when he described the Ministry of Truth cafeteria in 1984, the fact remains that the words on the page describe the Ministry of Truth cafeteria, not the BBC canteen.

Now that the disclaimer is aside, I can safely say that Cloud makes a pertinent point: from the structuralist point of view, Dumbledore is not gay. Homosexualty was never explicitly in the text; in fact, it wasn't even implicitly in the text, which is why Rowling's statement was so surprising. In structuralism, this is called the "intentional fallacy": the idea that the author's own intentions or interpretations mean anything to the text as written. But this isn't a typical case of the intentional fallacy; not only is Rowling's interpretation of her own work not relevant to the text, it isn't even supported by the text! If Rowling herself were to write a paper on Dumbledore's latent homosexuality, she'd probably get a failing grade, as she would be unable to find textual support for her claim.

For all intents and purposes, then, Dumbledore -- despite what her creator claims -- is not gay. Dumbledore, you see, doesn't live in Rowling's mind. As a character in published fiction, Dumbledore lives in the pages of the text, and if the words on the page don't support an assertion of homosexuality, then it doesn't exist.

Which brings us back to Cloud's conclusion: "We can only conclude that Dumbledore saw his homosexuality as shameful. His silence suggests a lack of personal integrity that is completely out of character." Assuming for the moment that Rowling's assertion is true and Dumbledore is gay (which, as I've said above, isn't true, because it isn't in the text), one possible explanation for a lack of any mention of homosexuality by Dumbledore is, in fact, that he's ashamed of it.

Two-and-a-half years and over 400 (!) entries ago, I wrote that whether or not Spongebob Squarepants was gay was irrelevant to the show, since the characters' sexualities were irrelevant to the show. (Thankfully, my posting lives on in posterity; "spongebob sex" is one of the most-searched-for terms that leads people to my website. Hooray!) We cannot assume that a similar irrelevancy is at work in Harry Potter, as the characters' sexualities clearly are relevant to the story. The romantic tension between Ron and Hermione is a mainstay of the plot of all seven books; Harry's relationship with Cho Chang after the murder of Cedric Diggory adds an important dimension to Order of the Phoenix. In any case, the characters' sexuality is not unimportant.

Given Dumbledore's past, it is not unreasonable to assume that he kept silent about his homosexuality because he was ashamed of it. Remember that he kept silent about his sister's death because he was ashamed of it. With all this information, what kind of homosexual role model is a man who has kept quite for over one hundred years about his homosexuality? In adding this abrupt, and theoretically false, footnote to Dumbledore's life, Rowling has, perhaps unknowingly, turned her character into a model for what homosexuality should not be. She's opened up a can of worms that she won't be able to close again. "But it would have been better if she had just let the old girl rest in peace," Cloud concludes.