Dumbledore is Gay?

According to J.K. Rowling, Dumbledore is apparently gay. I'm not sure why recent information, added after the fact by J.K. Rowling at a press conference-type event, annoys me, but to some degree it does. Maybe I'm just a raving homophobe (I don't consider myself to be one) but this new information just doesn't seem to fit with all the information about Dumbledore we received in the now-completed series. It's as if Rowling just wanted to add in some juicy controversial background info after the fact, just for kicks, even if it wasn't background character material that was in her head from the beginning.

In any case, If J.K.Rowling's version of Dumbledore is gay, that's perfectly fine. The Dumbledore in my head isn't, because one of the wonderful thing about novels is that each reader brings something into it, and half-creates the world in their head alongside the author. The physical picture in my head of Harry and Ron and Hermionie and all the other characters may be quite different from the one in yours (well, until the movies came out, at which point we all probably saw the characters in our minds begin to resemble the corresponding actors... but that's another point entirely), because all descriptive information and essentially everything in a novel is interpreted differently with each person that absorbs it.

Many times, as I read about "extra material" authors put in about characters after the fact, in fact I would say most of the times that happens, I don't care. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say I don't care... that much. I build the characters and events in my mind as I read along. And if I mispronounce a character's name for an entire series, well, in my mind that now IS the character's name. If an author tells me after the fact that a character was abused as a child, or once had a pet dog named spot, or is homosexual, and that information just doesn't seem to jive with the character I've created in my mind, then frankly, I disregard it. On the other hand, if that added information makes me think to myself "wow this explains why character X does Y and Z all the time! It all makes sense..." then I do incorporate that information into my personal fictional world. Still, if it was vital to the plot, that info would be in the book. The fact that it's not, means that it wasn't, so I'm going to continue right along with the character I have in my mind.

Sometimes I'll even go farther than that. I recall when the last Star Trek: Next Gen. movie came out, I personally thought that the film reeked of "fanfic" type plotlines, and (SPOILER ALERT if you care but somehow haven't seen this movie, Star Trek: Nemesis, then don't read the rest of this paragraph!!!) when Data died at the end of it, I was sufficiently fed up with the plot of the movie, and I decided that this movie "didn't happen." In the Star Trek universe in my head, Data is alive. But that's an extreme, when compared to having a heterosexual Dumbledore in my personal Harry Potter universe, instead of homosexual.

For that matter, I don't really have a heterosexual Dumbledore in my head. I have essentially an asexual Dumbledore in my head. One who was so overwhelmed with the problems of the world on his shoulders from a relatively early age that he went without love or physical intimacy for his entire life. A kind of celibate monk-wizard type figure. Kinda like my vision of Gandalf. But that's my Dumbledore. Some people may have had a homosexual Dumbledore in their heads before Rowling even said anything. Some will change their Dumbledore after hearing this announcement, bowing to the will of the author. And some, like me, don't really care what the author wants to throw into the series, after the fact. What's done is done, and the image of my Dumbledore stopped evolving with the last book. She can say Dumbledore was actually a frog-turned-wizard by some magic spell for all I care, it's not going to affect the world in MY head unless I so choose.