People Are Furious At JK Rowling For Her Latest Comments About Dumbledore’s Sexuality

J.K. Rowling has come under fire for comments made on the special features for the upcoming Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald Blu-ray.

According to the interview, which was unearthed by Radio Times, Rowling delved deeper into the relationship between Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald and revealed that the two men had an “incredibly intense” relationship with a “sexual dimension” in their youth.

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Rowling casually confessed Dumbledore’s sexual orientation during a Q&A session with Harry Potter fans in 2007, despite never having in any way alluded to it in the Harry Potter series. The revelation later morphed into her admitting that Dumbledore’s love for Grindelwald became his “great tragedy,” cementing Rowling as an author infamous for adding details about her characters years (decades!) after publication.

(In fact, a Twitter meme went viral in January trolling Rowling’s retroactive and often sexual additions to the Harry Potter canon.)

“Their relationship was incredibly intense. It was passionate, and it was a love relationship,” said Rowling. “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.”

Rowling adds that unlike the rest of us, she is “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.”

The accusation that Rowling was employing “half-assed inclusivity” in never once explicitly stating the sexual orientation of the two men in her books is not novel, but it it one that returned with a vengeance in the wake of her commentary.

Director David Yates explained that “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,” adding that he “wanted” to “try to suggest that Dumbledore still held this affection for Grindelwald.”

“There was not just regret, but there was still a love that existed between the two men.”

However, the intimate history between the two wizards was not even remotely hinted at in The Crimes of Grindelwald.

(Skip to ~ 6:49 to hear Rowling’s commentary.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKxuMe8PhCg

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald will be released March 18 on 3D, 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD.

h/t BuzzFeed