Rowling Deserves Redemption for One Long-Despised Harry Potter Detail
We have known since 2007 that Dumbledore was gay, and this fact has largely been regarded as J.K. Rowling's clever way of promoting the last book (which came out that same year), but is that really so?
Perhaps not.
According to a Time journalist, Lev Grossman, the early script for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince featured a line where Dumbledore said, "I knew a girl once, whose hair…," suggesting that the Headmaster was a straight guy reminiscing about an old crush of his.
Presumably, this was part of the dialogue between Harry and Dumbledore during the now-infamous scene outside the coffee shop early in the movie (the one where Harry was acting completely out of character and flirting with a random girl when he was already supposed to be head over heels for Ginny).
While the scene is still awful without the line, it could have been even cringier if they had kept it.
Luckily, Rowling's keen eye for detail caught the line, prompting her to inform the people responsible that Dumbledore was gay and that his only love interest was Gellert Grindelwald, so there could be no girls in his past.
Dumbledore's love story could not have been more tragic – they first went from friends to enemies, and then he had to defeat his one true love in a duel to save everyone.
We don't know about you, but we won't be complaining about our crushes anytime soon… At least, they aren't planning to conquer the world!
Basically, Rowling revealed this detail about Dumbledore months before she made the information public to keep the movie's canon straight (or rather, gay).
Filming for the sixth movie began in September 2007, but Rowling must have gone over the script long before that (maybe even in 2006), while the world found out that Dumbledore was gay in October 2007, after the final book was published.
This proves that the peculiar fact about the Hogwarts Headmaster was not a publicity stunt (we mean, Rowling never really needed it, Harry Potter was popular on its own). Justice for Joanne (at least for this)?
Source: Time