TORONTO — J.K. Rowling says she knew one of the most beloved characters in her best-selling Harry Potter series was gay “probably before the first book [Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone] was published” in 1997.
Speaking at a media conference yesterday in Toronto, the world's wealthiest author made the comment in the wake of her revelation last week that Albus Dumbledore, the late headmaster of Hogwarts, Harry Potter's training school, had what she terms a “tragic infatuation” with the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald.
People sometimes forget, she noted, that “I was writing for seven years before the first book was published.” During that time, she was able to bring “all of my characters . . . more and more into focus.”
As she told an audience last Friday at New York's Carnegie Hall, “I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.”
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Rowling, 42, has spent the last eight days visiting cities in the U.S. and Canada in support of her seventh and final Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Toronto, which she last visited in 2000, was the final and only Canadian city on her itinerary. As she did with her visits last week to Los Angeles, New Orleans and New York, she read from Deathly Hallows, answered pre-selected questions from the audience, then autographed more than 900 complimentary copies of that novel for each member of the audience at the Winter Garden Theatre. (It's been estimated that as of yesterday, Rowling had autographed more than 7,500 books during this tour.) None of the 12 questions from the respectful but enthusiastic Toronto audience — which included some 28 fans who'd flown in from as far away as Yukon, Nunavut, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia — dealt with the outing of Dumbledore.
They focused rather on Potter lore — Whose death was it hardest to write about? (Dobby, the house elf) Did she have any regrets about any of her Potter books? (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets “were tricky to write . . . too diffuse . . . [and] less satisfying as discrete entities” but overall she “wouldn't change anything big.” — and non-threatening personal bits (Favourite animal? Otter; “I'm a little bit anti-cat.”)
