J.K. Rowling confirms that Dumbledore and Grindelwald were doing it

J.K. Rowling gained fame as the writer of the tremendously successful Harry Potter books. These days, she’s mostly been in the news for rewriting them and adding context years after the fact. From cluing us in about wizarding bathroom habits to revealing that Nagini the snake was really an Asian woman all along, there’s no corner of her wizarding world she isn’t willing to rearrange, to the point where it’s become a meme:

So at least some funny has come out of Rowling’s obsessive need to posthumously edit her own creation, but sometimes it gets ridiculous. There’s no more frustrating example of this that what Rowling has said about Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts during Harry’s time at the school. Shortly after the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the series, Rowling famously held a press conference where she announced that the character was gay. At the time, fans took that okay, but over the years it’s gotten weird, particularly after Rowling and Warner Bros. started in on the Fantastic Beasts movies, which feature a younger version of Dumbledore played by Jude Law. You’d figure this would be the perfect opportunity to explore this side of Dumbledore’s life, right? Wrong. The latest Fantastic Beasts film, The Crimes of Grindelwald, at best tip-toes around the subject, leading fans to accuse Rowling of wanting credit for being progressive enough to include gay characters in her stories, but not brave enough to actually have them, y’know, be gay.

That brings us to the Blu-ray release of The Crimes of Grindelwald, which includes a featurette where Rowling talks about the relationship between Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp), a dark wizard with whom Dumbledore was very close in his youth. “Their relationship was incredibly intense,” Rowling say, per the Radio Times. “It was passionate, and it was a love relationship. But as happens in any relationship, gay or straight or whatever label we want to put on it, one never knows really what the other person is feeling. You can’t know, you can believe you know.

"So I’m less interested in the sexual side – though I believe there is a sexual dimension to this relationship – than I am in the sense of the emotions they felt for each other, which ultimately is the most fascinating thing about all human relationships."

Director David Yates also weighed in: “This is a story about two men who loved each other, and ultimately have to fight each other. It’s a story for the 21st century.”

So lemme get this straight: this is a story “about two men who loved each other,” but the two men never meet in Crimes, and we’re probably never going to explore their sexual relationship even though it’s surely tied up in their love for one another, and the movie establishes that Dumbledore can’t attack Grindelwald not because of his complicated feelings but because of some spell the two of them cast as kids. For someone who finds “the emotions they felt for each other” so fascinating, Rowling sure is pulling a lot of punches telling us what those emotions are and where they come from.

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The whole thing just smacks of dishonestly to me. Is Rowling afraid of endangering the movie’s PG-13 rating? Is she afraid of alienating fans, and if so, why is it okay to tell those fans details of these characters’ sex lives in a behind-the-scenes featurette but not onscreen? It’s just a mess.

Anyway, Fantastic Beasts 3: No Homo will be out in November 2020.

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h/t The A.V. Club, AltPress