CU sophomore talks about outing Potter’s Dumbledore
Harry Potter creator, J.K. Rowling outed the beloved Harry Potter character Dumbledore to a stunned crowd at Carnegie Hall Oct. 19 and CU student Danielle Lirette asked the question that made it all happen.
Lirette, 19, a sophomore engineering physics major, was given a version of the “golden ticket” when she won two passes, sponsored by Scholastic Books, to attend part of Rowling’s first U.S. tour since 2000, during which she visited Los Angeles, New Orleans and New York City.
On Oct. 17, Lirette packed her bags for New York City and brought along her roommate, Crystal Page, a freshman physics major, as she crossed an item off of her list of life goals.
Rowling’s first stop was the Carnegie Hall date. Scholastic created a highly publicized sweepstakes to choose a limited number of audience members who would be invited to ask questions. The criteria for the winning contestants were that they had to submit a question to be posed to the famous author.
Lirette submitted a lengthy thank-you note to Rowling, followed by the question that would unveil Harry Potter’s mentor and Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore’s hidden homosexuality to the world.
“Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?” Lirette asked, after praising Rowling.
“Well, my truthful answer to you, which you deserve for what you just said to me, is that I always saw Dumbledore as gay,” Rowling responded as uproarious applause erupted in Carnegie Hall.
“I was dancing at the microphone and (Rowling) pointed and laughed and said, ‘If I had known this would make you this happy, I would have announced it years ago,'” Lirette said.
Rowling continued to answer the question as applause died down.
“Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was,” Rowling said.
Critics have questioned Rowling’s decision to out the beloved wizard after the release of the seventh and final book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows.”
“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,'” Time Magazine columnist John Cloud wrote in a recent opinion piece published on Nov. 5. “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.”
Others disagree.
“I think it’s wonderful to see positive GLBT images in the media,” said Stephanie Wilencheck, the director of the GLBT Resource Center at CU. “In general, the GLBT community is often times positioned in the media in ways that aren’t always appropriate.”
As Lirette took her seat in the front row at Carnegie Hall after asking her question, Rowling let the audience in on another little secret.
“Recently, I just had a script read-through for the sixth film and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early on in the script, something like, ‘I knew a girl once who’s hair…’ so I had to write him a note, in the margin, and slide it along to the scriptwriter, ‘Dumbledore’s gay!'”
Contact Campus Press Staff Writer Sarah Stern at sterns@colorado.edu
