Dumbledore is gay....*Yaaaaaaaawn*

I don't understand why this is front page news. For god's sake I am more surprised the man is 300 years or whatever old. Now *that* is news. Being gay...not so much. Especially the outing of a fictional character from a now-dead series. WTF?

Let me backtrack. I am not a great Potter fan. I've watched the movies and read five...that's five pages of the first book. I could not make it through. This is not because I don't like children's books. I do. But I find nothing really new in Rowling's imagination. She has recycled and re-used things that other authors had. And I don't care for her writing style. But that's just me....thank god there are the million others who hang on her every word.

Don't get me wrong. I am glad that there is something that made kids and adults read (of course, most of them read only HP and nothing else which is a shame, but still) . But this half-assed *revelation* when the books are done but the movies remain seems oddly calculated to me. Not to mention pandering to the liberal types (I am one so I resent being manipulated) to defend gayness (which is not the issue here at all) and to create an adversarial relationship, yet again, with the conservatives.

If she had made his gayness openly stated in the book and used that storyline to teach tolerance or whatever in a sensitive manner I would have been all for it. But this re-writing of the backstory seems calculated to make rabid fan-fiction folks go nuts imaginging old Dumbledore in various states of undress and to make controvorsy for the sake of controvorsy.

The fact that the whacko Christian right went nuts over the magic elements in the books just shows me how whacko they are. The fact that, after the fact, the author outs a character just for the sake of courting controvorsy seems rather pathetic to me.