Can I please exercise my right not to care?
Did you hear Dumbledore is gay?
Excuse me, but you've obviously mistaken me for someone who gives an expletive deleted.
I haven't read the Harry Potter books, but evidently there isn't the slightest hint in the text about Albus Dumbledore's sexuality, since it was never an issue until the author brought it up, for reasons known only to herself.
It doesn't advance the plot, nor does it seem a symbolic stand-in for any group - such as Ian McKellen insisted on reading into his character in "X-Men". What's the point? J.K. Rowling is already a billionaire, does she want to be a great Social Philosopher as well?
Sherlock Holmes fans are forever doing the same thing with their hero: inventing amorous interests, hetero- or otherwise. They can't accept that the Holmes stories are detective stories, adding a romantic interest adds nothing to the main theme of solving difficult problems with brilliant deduction.
Well, please forgive me but I am about to say something horribly cruel to the gay lobby - I don't care.
Long ago hetero men with my attitude would have been considered the ultimate goal of the "gay liberation" movement. I don't care what your private life is like - as long as it's private, and I expect to be treated the same.
When I was single, the existence of gay men just meant to me that the pool of unattached females was bigger. Now that I'm happily married, it's simply of no relevance to me at all.
But evidently that wasn't the goal of the lobby after all. Since the rights of gay people are now upheld by law and custom, everything should be pretty much hunky-dory, but evidently not. Every action of the "gay rights" movement these days screams, not "give us our rights" but "Notice me!"
Well sorry, I'm not interested in your private life any more than I expect you're interested in mine. That's why it's called "private."
And by the way, Dumbledore is not gay. He's not anything because he's a fictional character.
P.S. Just because I'm a trivia freak, I'm going to mention that "dumbledore" is an old English word meaning "bumblebee."
P.P.S. Yes, I have several gay friends. Some of them have told me that they value my friendship precisely because of my attitude.
Excuse me, but you've obviously mistaken me for someone who gives an expletive deleted.
I haven't read the Harry Potter books, but evidently there isn't the slightest hint in the text about Albus Dumbledore's sexuality, since it was never an issue until the author brought it up, for reasons known only to herself.
It doesn't advance the plot, nor does it seem a symbolic stand-in for any group - such as Ian McKellen insisted on reading into his character in "X-Men". What's the point? J.K. Rowling is already a billionaire, does she want to be a great Social Philosopher as well?
Sherlock Holmes fans are forever doing the same thing with their hero: inventing amorous interests, hetero- or otherwise. They can't accept that the Holmes stories are detective stories, adding a romantic interest adds nothing to the main theme of solving difficult problems with brilliant deduction.
Well, please forgive me but I am about to say something horribly cruel to the gay lobby - I don't care.
Long ago hetero men with my attitude would have been considered the ultimate goal of the "gay liberation" movement. I don't care what your private life is like - as long as it's private, and I expect to be treated the same.
When I was single, the existence of gay men just meant to me that the pool of unattached females was bigger. Now that I'm happily married, it's simply of no relevance to me at all.
But evidently that wasn't the goal of the lobby after all. Since the rights of gay people are now upheld by law and custom, everything should be pretty much hunky-dory, but evidently not. Every action of the "gay rights" movement these days screams, not "give us our rights" but "Notice me!"
Well sorry, I'm not interested in your private life any more than I expect you're interested in mine. That's why it's called "private."
And by the way, Dumbledore is not gay. He's not anything because he's a fictional character.
P.S. Just because I'm a trivia freak, I'm going to mention that "dumbledore" is an old English word meaning "bumblebee."
P.P.S. Yes, I have several gay friends. Some of them have told me that they value my friendship precisely because of my attitude.
posted by Steve @ 11:30 AM
3 Comments:
At 12:26 PM,
Charlotte Robinson said…
I'm glad you're happily married but that's exactly why there's need for Gay Rights. Why don't you view our trailer @ www.OUTTAKEonline.com
Then perhaps you'll get it....
At 11:13 AM,
TheWayfarer said…
Glad I never started reading that crap. It's probably full of all OTHER sorts of leftist jingoism...
Speaking of which charlotte, the real issue is not "gay" marriage, but marriage itself, which has it's roots in slavery, and in the modern day is nothing more than a licensed form of that:
Of the man to the woman and her "guardian" government!
At 9:47 PM,
trollsmyth said…
Actually, the books are full of surprisingly libertarian jingoism, with clueless government officials burying their heads in the sand and attempting to legislate away problems by changing how people talk about them.
Rowling knew because knowing all sorts of ancillary but not relevant details is one way to write well. The traditional example is knowing what your protagonist had for breakfast. It might never come up in the course of the story, but just knowing that sort of detail helps you understand who they are, and how they'll react to the situations that matter to the plot. It came up twice: once, when Rowling was editing the script to the next movie (the original script included Dumbledore reminiscing about past romances) and in a Q & A session in NY. It makes no difference to the story, and so it never came up in the books. I imagine Rowling also knows Dumbledore's favorite flavor of tea and where his family holidayed in the summer.
Speaking of New York, I had a gay friend down from there a few years ago to visit us in Austin. We went out to eat. The restaurant was your typical Austin place, with the expected mix of humanity. A pair of lesbians were sitting side-by-side in a booth, holding hands and kissing on occasion, as young lovers are wont to do. My friend was not shocked by this behavior, but by the way everyone else in the restaurant was ignoring them. He confessed to me that his friends in New York would be extremely frustrated that such behavior would induce outrage in those seated nearby. ;)
- Brian
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