Dumbledore rocks my world

So, this entry won't have much to do with Student Affairs and my job - except that anything can be related to Student Affairs because we love to talk about diversity, right?

Okay, so I was doing a round in the building and I ran into one of my RAs who told me that she just heard that Dumbledore (from Harry Potter) was gay. She had to tell me because she knew I'd be very excited. And oh, I was! I had to immediately check Mugglenet.com to see if it was true. And then, I made the big mistake of reading some of the reader's comments. Granted, many were positive - some were at least trying to be positive - and others were just disgusting. Someone said that they didn't like the serious anymore and would never be able to look at Harry Potter the same way.
The one comment that really got me thinking was one by a mother saying that as a mother, she would have expected JKR to dodge the question because she didn't want her children to hear that. Because sexual orientation brings up sex and kids shouldn't know about that. Now, I'm not about to explain the details of sex to five-year olds. But kids also see that there's a mommy and daddy...so why not tell them that some families have two daddies or two mommies. You don't need to talk about sex to explain that. You can just explain to your kids that Dumbledore, if he got married, would marry a guy. No big deal.
I think that would give you a great opportunity to talk to your children about how there are different kinds of couples and families.

Was it necessary to release Dumbledore's sexual orientation? Hmmm, maybe not. But why did we all assume that he was straight? JKR never said that either. Would it be such a big deal if she told us that Dumbledore liked vanilla ice cream? That's just as irrelevant to the story as that he was gay, but as fans we would have all been excited about learning more details about our favorite characters. And that's all JKR did...give us another detail about a character.

I know I will definitely have my children read Harry Potter - and they will know for sure that Dumbeldore is gay and what it means to be gay.