And they call me a homophobe

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I have a strong and increasing objection to using homosexual characters as designated victims in fiction. I am not likely to write many more gay characters than I have, but you can bet your lives that if I do, the said characters are going to live to ninety-five in perfectly good health, thank you.

Comments

Re: P.S.:

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Actually, I thought that JKR's account of Dumbledore's supposed homosexuality showed a variety of the same kind of cowardice. Many writers kill off their homosexual characters young; what makes this facile is that it involves a refusal to move them through life, to show them at thirty, at forty, at fifty (which is when quite a few male homosexuals actually do die, of AIDS and the like) or in old age, to deal with the homosexual lifestyle as it is. It is also fallacious to my experience, in that my closest homosexual friends only started having homosexual relationships in their late twenties/ early thirties; but that is my experience alone (and it brings in another ideological can of worms which I do not intend to open except in a forum for Catholics alone). What makes JKR's Dumbledore thingy a different version of the same pattern is that she seems to say that AD was gay because of a teen-age pash and then completely fades off the rest of his 150-year-long life, not even trying to give any idea of how this might have affected his attitudes, his career, or his relationship with male and female colleagues. It would, for instance, have been interesting to see a suggestion that sexuality, however repressed, underlay the peculiarly brittle relationship with Cornelius Fudge, which moved bizarrely from idolatry to suspicious hatred in a way that clearly could not be rational; but she did not even try, and so left a glaring unlikelihood in an important sub-plot. To me, the whole thing smells not only of afterthought, but of ill-conceived afterthought, even though she said the opposite.