{"id":1168,"date":"2007-10-22T09:19:38","date_gmt":"2007-10-22T09:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1168"},"modified":"2007-10-22T09:19:38","modified_gmt":"2007-10-22T09:19:38","slug":"the_secret_lives_of_wizards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2007\/10\/22\/the_secret_lives_of_wizards\/","title":{"rendered":"The Secret Lives of Wizards"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"funny<\/a><\/p>\n

I finished the Harry Potter series back around the end of August — I meant to write a nice long entry about the experience and my reactions to the whole Potter phenom, but, as you may have noticed, I haven’t been able to write many nice long entries lately; the short version is that I liked these books, far more than I ever anticipated — and I’ve got to admit, it never occurred to me that Dumbledore was gay<\/a>. His sexuality never entered into my conception of him at all, actually, just as I never really wondered what kind of trouble Gandalf got himself up to after smoking a big old bowlful of, ahem, “hobbit leaf,” or whether crazy old Ben Kenobi occasionally liked to visit the famous “Bantha Ranch” House of Hospitality in Anchorhead’s red-light district. The respective texts simply don’t provide — nor do the stories require — this level of characterization for these guys, who we all know are little more than archetypal mentor figures, no matter that we love them so much. But hey, if Rowling says Dumbledore is gay, then so be it. She would know better than us, and it doesn’t trouble me in the least if he is. It’s just not anything I imagined, and I personally don’t see any hard evidence for it within the story. (I will grant that Dumbledore is probably the best fleshed-out of the three mentors, in terms of having a detailed backstory that the reader is allowed to experience as part of the book’s main plot, but there’s still nothing there that suggested any kind of a sex life, gay or straight, in my opinion.)<\/p>\n

That doesn’t mean, of course, that other people won’t see whatever they want to see now that the idea has been planted. I imagine this will only add fuel to the fire for those busybody whackjobs who are already down on the Potter books because they’ve got our kids thinking about that evil, nasty witchcraft<\/i>. Um, yeah… and all the other beloved classic stories that people have been exposing their kids to for generations, from the Brothers Grimm to The Wizard of Oz<\/i> to, yes, Star Wars<\/i>, have absolutely nothing to do with magic or the supernatural…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I finished the Harry Potter series back around the end of August — I meant to write a nice long entry about the experience and my reactions to the whole Potter phenom, but, as you may have noticed, I haven’t been able to write many nice long entries lately; the short version is that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-bookshelf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}