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 Jason Foster reflects on the portrayal of fantasy boarding-schools.
So, Professor Dumbledore is gay. Out of the multitude of characters in the Harry Potter saga, the resident homosexual turns out to be a venerable figure of magical authority. Bravo to the author for outing a positive role model.
If I’d been asked to pick the gay guy in J.K. Rowling’s mega-successful series, I’d have chosen Lord Voldemort as being a nasty old queer; or even geeky little Potter himself. In fact, I still can’t believe that Harry’s romantic flirtations with the opposite sex are anything more than an adolescent phase. Surely he’d come to his senses if he met his knight-on-shining-broomstick? (But then, what would I know? I only watch the movies.)
Of course, making the bad guy gay would look like pandering to homophobia, while queering Harry would offend the sensibilities of many Potter fans. By contrast, revealing the unconventional sexuality of a much-respected character – but one too old to require an active love-life - is a safe option that balances the books nicely; and who can blame a young readers’ author for playing it safe?
Rowling is under no obligation to invent non-heterosexual characters, and most of her predecessors in children’s literature never dared, even when their heroes and heroines went to boarding schools.
There are plenty of fags but no boy-on-boy romance in Tom Brown’s Schooldays; and one never hears the Famous Five or C.S. Lewis’ more pubescent heroes mooning over their classroom crushes. Willans and Searle’s Molesworth derides Fotherington-Thomas as a sissy, but he never confesses to buggering him behind theshelter-sheds; and even the riotous girls of St. Trinians seem as innocent as nuns when it comes to lesbian high-jinks.
Yet the complete absence of such shenanigans is rather suspicious, given that single-sex boarding-schools are notorious for educating their charges in the pleasures of adolescent homosexuality.
Of course, Rowling side-steps this issue by making Hogwarts a co-ed institution, which seems odd given that the French and Bulgarian schools featured in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire are unisex. What a shame Harry doesn’t go on exchange to the Durmstrang Institute and share a dorm with Quidditch champion, Viktor Krum…
As it happens, the problem of sexual mores at sorcerers’ academies isn’t new. In Ursula Le Guin’s novel A Wizard of Earthsea, her adolescent hero, Ged, attends a wizards’ school on Roke island which only trains boys. Written over 30 years ago, the book and its early sequels are, unsurprisingly, innocent of any sexual innuendo. Nevertheless, the silent chastity of a story set in a college full of teenage boys begs the question as to what was really going on behind magically-locked doors; as does Ged’s amorous reticence in The Farthest Shore, in which he takes a young man as his companion on an otherwise solitary quest.
Years later, Le Guin wrote three more Earthsea books that were much less coy about sexuality of the heterosexual kind. In them, the problem of Roke’s homoerotic potential is dispelled by the revelation that Earthsea’s wizards use spells to suppress their libidos, believing that total celibacy enhanced their sorcery. Only in her Tales of Earthsea does Le Guin acknowledge same-sex attraction, when she mentions that village witches sometimes lived as couples. It’s a surprisingly tiny gesture, given that her award-winning science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, featured a planet of people who could change and choose their gender; but at least it fits plausibly with her brilliant myth-making.
As for Rowling’s world of magic, I’m wondering who else has a bent broomstick hidden in the closet. Surely there’s at least one lesbian lurking in Hogwarts’ halls?
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