Fantastic Beasts: Are We Ready for a Gay Dumbledore?

J.K. Rowling taught millions of people about tolerance and acceptance. With more than 450,000,000 copies sold worldwide, Harry Potter is the best selling series of all time. And research led by professor Loris Vezzali of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy proved that children who read Harry Potter passages dealing with prejudice (Draco saying that Hermione was a "filthy little Mud-Blood") had become more tolerant towards immigrants compared to people who read neutral passages of the book. Now that a whole generation is more open to people of different culture, fans want J.K. Rowling to do the same thing with queer characters.

Harry Potter has always been prone to heteronormativity. Teenage girls have been dating teenage boys, men have been marrying women, and Umbridge forbade boys and girls from being within six inches of each other. Gay couples in Hogwarts must have been laughing at this one. No matter what, we didn't see any sign of some kind of queerness until J.K. Rowling gave Dumbledore the chance to come out of the closet during a Q&A session in New York.

A student asked, "Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?" and Rowling answered:

"My truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent, but he met someone as brilliant as he was and, rather like Bellatrix, he was very drawn to this brilliant person and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that's how I always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read-through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying, "I knew a girl once, whose hair..."

Some fans were shocked to hear about this. And once again, the writer answered in the best way on Twitter:

Being gay doesn't have to be something special. This is just part of what someone is. And the writer perfectly portrayed that by making this difference look like something normal that doesn't even have an impact on most of the story. But this surprising news also inspired many fan fictions from Potterheads, including some drawings:

Yaytime on DeviantArt

Onionsmakemecry on DeviantArt

By Pojypojy on DeviantArt

All the books were already written. But then, we had the chance to hear more about what happened to Dumbledore in the past in the Fantastic Beasts series. Even though the most powerful wizard wasn't in the first film, it's in November 2017 that we had the chance to see what the young Albus Dumbledore would look like in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.

Via @FantasticBeasts

Jude Law, the two-time Academy Award nominee, will have the chance to play Albus Dumbledore way before he became headmaster at Hogwarts, which is at that time when he had to fight Grindelwald, played by Johnny Depp, the man that he used to love. The synopsis reads: “The only one who might be able to stop him is the wizard he once called his dearest friend, Albus Dumbledore. But Dumbledore will need help from the wizard who had thwarted Grindelwald once before, his former student Newt Scamander.”

When she spoke about the second Fantastic Beasts movie, Rowling said that she saw Dumbledore as a younger and "quite troubled man." She even said that "We'll see him at that formative period of his life. As far as his sexuality is concerned, watch this space." Does that mean that we will finally get the chance to see how he loved the man who turned out to be the most terrible wizard of this century?

However, we might not have the chance to see it in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. That's because it is only the second film in a long series and Rowling said, "I would like to say because this is obviously a five-part story, there's lots to unpack in that relationship." So we can say that she did confirm that we are going to learn more about what is going to happen between these two, but it might take a couple of years.

Unfortunately, we have already seen that not everyone is open to queer characters in kids movie with Disney's Beauty and the Beast in 2017. The film that featured the first openly gay character in a Disney movie, in a really subtle way, was banned in many countries where homosexuality is illegal. This better not stop J.K. Rowling who has to fight to make sure that the LGBTQ community will finally be part of the Harry Potter universe.

Albus Dumbledore is already one of our favorite characters and seeing him as a courageous young man who is not afraid to show his true colors (of the rainbow.) We need to see queer people on the big screen so they will feel like they are not alone in this world and others will learn how to understand them. J.K. Rowling had the power to make a whole generation more tolerant to people from different cultures with her first series. She can do it again.