Can we refrain from constantly saying "bullshit" and sarcastically referring to people as "genius," please.
BrownEyedBoy said:
Nobody here would even concede the fact that it was unnecessary for her to do something like that.
Necessary, unnecessary...what does
that have to do with it? The character as she imagined him
just is gay, and you have no sound reason for
assuming that Dumbledore took form in her mind in that way because she felt he "had to" in order for her to be "PC" and have that "token gay." People who love or have loved someone of the same sex are part of authors' (and readers') social worlds in real life, just like people who love or have loved someone of the opposite sex are--why should it be forced or "necessary" for an author's characters to reflect that?
It almost comes across as if you're saying, "Being gay used to be seen as unspeakably shameful and perverse, therefore a gay character would never have been included in a children's book any more than a rapist or pedophile would've been, and while I don't personally agree with that view of gay people, I still don't think we should acknowledge they exist in front of children, because then we're setting kids up to believe that being gay
isn't unspeakably shameful and perverse, and I've really got a problem with that." Which doesn't make any sense at all. Yes, of course it's a fairly new thing to have gay couples appear in children's literature (setting aside for a moment that Dumbledore's one 'known' relationship never, in fact, actually appeared)--precisely because gay relationships were automatically seen as too intrinsically perverse for children to know about...whereas having heterosexual couples appear was fine. So, yes, naturally there had to be a 'first time' for it, just as (in the US at least) there had to be a 'first time' for showing an interracial couple in a children's book. But we no longer live in the social world the Brothers Grimm did, one where children certainly weren't seeing two men holding hands at the mall, so that time has come. Unless, of course, you don't
really accept that two men holding hands at the mall, where children might see, is OK, because you're still holding on to the idea that it's innately perverse and somehow says SEXSEXSEX in a way that a man and a woman holding hands doesn't.