This fact came as no surprise to women and gender studies professor Michael Bronski, who gave a speech at the College seven years ago about the Harry Potter series' "queerness."
Bronski said he used the word "queer" as meaning strange and having homosexual subtexts. In his speech, however, he never said that any specific character was gay.
"It became clear to me that maybe Harry was gay," Bronski said. "He lives in a closet and is going to go to Stonewall High School. He's clearly a sort of outcast. Of course, it's panned out that he's not."
The alternative newspaper The Boston Phoenix published a piece by Bronski in 2003 that was very similar to his original speech. After an Edinburgh newspaper published an article about Bronski's ideas, European tabloids picked up the story and falsely alleged that Bronski had argued that Harry was gay.
Bronski was invited to be the keynote speaker at Sectus, the largest Harry Potter conference in Europe, last summer. While there, he spoke on the queerness of Harry Potter and listed characters that he thought could be gay. This list included Dumbledore, who loved Grindelwald, Rowling confirmed on Friday.
"The books are really about the abuse of children and their sometimes triumph over that abuse," Bronski said. "That's why it makes sense that there's this tragic love story."
The idea of a tragic love story goes back to the earliest Babylonian epic, Gilgamesh, Bronski said.
"We really find out what made Dumbledore Dumbledore because he had to kill his love," Bronski said. "Rowling says that this is his defining moment. It has to explain his actions though all seven books. But if the books taught us anything, it's that nothing is black and white."
Rowling also said that in the script for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, there was a reference to a female love interest of Dumbledore that had to be omitted, according to the Associated Press.
"It's not something off the top of her head," Bronski said. "She doesn't need gimmicks to sell books. For her, it's part of the fabric of the story. I wouldn't be surprised if she said more things in the future, but I won't predict."
Bronski is now working on a book of his own called The World Turned Upside Down: The Queer Subversiveness of Children's Literature, focusing on the "queerness" of classic children's stories such as Peter Pan and those by Dr. Seuss.
"As adults and society, we do everything to have children grow up normal," Bronski said. "On the other hand, we have created this literature that gives children the idea that growing up is not good and being normal is not good. Oh look, the cow jumps over the moon, but don't ever think this can happen. It's a deluge of mixed messages."
In his book, which is scheduled for release in 2009, Bronski argues that children's literature promotes chaos which children must eventually outgrow.
"These books are profoundly about anarchism," Bronski said. "We say 'children's literature,' but it has nothing to do with children. It's written, published, marketed and bought by adults. From inception on, it's based on what they think children might want or should want."
Like the other stories analyzed in his book, Harry Potter's message is largely unconventional, Bronski said, although the final chapter of the series reverts back to tradition.
"In Harry Potter, the normal people are abusive and narrow-minded," Bronski said. "It tells children it's better not to be a Muggle. It's better to be a renegade. In the epilogue of the seventh book, Rowling fails because she turns these interesting and extraordinary characters into suburban dads and Quidditch moms."
