The Importance of Outing Dumbledore

Today I guest blogged at Gay YA:

While the Harry Potter series was still being released, I kept crossing my fingers one of the kids would turn out to be gay.

It didn’t seem that far-fetched an idea. After all, the series was otherwise doing a great job of representing diverse characters.

But more importantly, when I was reading the books for the first time, I was in my early 20s, and I was still getting used to the idea that this whole being-gay thing might indeed be a lifelong deal. I was eagerly looking around for representations of people like me. Seeing gay characters and gay celebrities made me feel normal. It made me feel like someone had noticed I was there. …

If J.K. Rowling had outed Dumbledore in the books themselves instead of doing it after the fact:

1. It would’ve made Deathly Hallows a stronger book, because readers would have had better context for understanding Dumbledore’s relationship with Grindelwald.
2. Readers of the book ― kids and adults alike, gay and straight alike ― would’ve seen a major gay character in the biggest book series of all time.

When people talk about gay visibility? This is what they’re talking about.

Check out the rest of my post there.

In Which I Mercifully Skip the Whining in Favor of Sharing Awesome Linkspam

Things I am not going to blog about today:

• The fact that people are STILL stumbling across my blog via Googling “Harry/Pippa fanfic” after I made ONE joke about that on Twitter the night Osama Bin Laden died. (Look, Obama took his sweet time stepping up to the mic and I had to do something to keep myself entertained.)
• The fact that my WIP simply will not refrain from kicking my ass, no matter how many times I tell it to, and insists on being reoutlined so many times I may just give up and become a pantser after all.
• My sudden irrational fear that my as-of-last-week favorite character will die in some horrific fashion on tomorrow night’s Glee prom episode (they wouldn’t do that to us, they wouldn’t, dang it!).

And so, because I am not going to blog about those things, I will instead point you to some fun stuff on the interwebs:

• “Nobody is simply the sum of the aspects of their identities,” says Everett Maroon in this post for Gay YA, which is the best post I’ve seen (in that I agree with it the most, ha) about (among other things) the importance of ensuring that your LGBTQ characters are, above all, sufficiently layered.
• I’ve had this post by Susan Beth Pfeffer, my favorite author blogger, open in one of my Chrome tabs for weeks now because it sums up everything I want to keep in mind as I revise my WIP.
• This collection of ancient British Baby-Sitters Club covers, courtesy of What Claudia Wore, is now what I look at whenever I feel the need to lighten up [via].
• And finally, because I recently saw Tangled for the first time and can’t stop thinking about this song, I will go so far as to embed it here. The relationship between Rapunzel and her “mother” in that movie is, to me, emblematic of the very best YA writing, and I only wish I had thought of it myself. The romance plot in the movie left me going “Eh,” but this was pure gold: