Timeline of JK Rowling’s Interviews about Dumbledore/Grindelwald
Reveal happened October 2007 during Deathly Hallows Book tour which was released on July, 2007. So she didn’t reveal “YEARS LATER” to jump on some gay moment. Just know your facts before you criticize first.
This is all I could find. If there is more interviews she did about this topic, let me know.
Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?
My truthful answer to you… I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. [ovation.] … Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent? But, he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that’s how i always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair… [laughter]. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter, “Dumbledore’s gay!” [laughter] If I’d known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago! X
Pottercast did an interview on December 2007
MA:Yeah. It’s inter- the reaction was so astronomical to that.
JKR: Well, I said it to you, Melissa, before, I think, that to me it’s wrong not to answer a question honestly. I just think that’s immoral. (MA:Right.) And I was asked that question by a young woman at Carnegie Hall who prefaced her question by saying, “These books have helped me be more fully myself.” Well, that’s just one of the most wonderful things anyone has ever said to me about the books. And then she asked, “Has Dumbledore ever been in love?” Now, I- so I was absolutely honest about how I saw the character. I always imagined that Dumbledore was gay. How relevant is that to the books? Well, it’s only relevant if you considered that his feelings for Grindelwald, as revealed in the seventh book, were an infatuation rather than a straight full friendship. That’s how I think- in fact, that I know- that some, perhaps, sensitive adult readers had already seen that. I don’t think that came as a big surprise to some adult readers. I think a child would see a friendship and a very devoted friendship. But these things also occur. So I- how relevant is it? Well, to me it was only relevant in as much as Dumbledore, who was the great defender of love, and who sincerely believed that love was the greatest, most powerful force in the universe, was himself made a fool of by love. That, to me, was the interesting point. That, in his youth, he was- he became infatuated with a man who was almost his dark twin. He was as brilliant. He was morally bankrupt. And Dumbledore lost his moral compass. He wanted to believe that Grindelwald was what he wanted him to be, which I think is what particularly a young person’s love tends to do. We fill in the blanks in the beloved’s personality with the virtues we would like them to have. So Dumbledore was wrong and his judgement was entirely- was very suspect in that time. And of course it was more than being infatuated. Grindelwald appeared to be offering him a solution to this horrible dilemma. Dumbledore was not cut out, to his shame, to be a carer. He was cut out to go out on the world stage and be a brilliant man. He knows that about himself and he’s ashamed of it. So it’s a complicated issue, but yeah, that’s the way I always saw Dumbledore. It wasn’t a particularly big deal to me. And I’d never once before been asked at an event about Dumbledore’s romantic life. I’d been asked other things about him, but I have to say until Hallows was published, people were mostly interested in the trio’s futures and Dumbledore’s backstory. In fact, I remember, Melissa, when you and Emerson interviewed me after Half-Blood Prince was published. We were talking about what fans should be asking, and I said Dumbledore’s family. I didn’t want to say Dumbledore’s past, but Dumbledore’s family would be a profitable line of inquiry, because I always knew that he had this tragic story from his late teens. There. That was a long answer. Pottercast interview
Edinburgh Student Newspaper did an interview w/JKR on March 2008
On the matter of Dumbledore, Jo candidly states the following:
“I had always seen Dumbledore as gay, but in a sense that’s not a big deal. The book wasn’t about Dumbledore being gay. It was just that from the outset obviously I knew he had this big, hidden secret, and that he flirted with the idea of exactly what Voldemort goes on to do, he flirted with the idea of racial domination, that he was going to subjugate the Muggles. So that was Dumbledore’s big secret.
Why did did he flirt with that?” she asks. “He’s an innately good man, what would make him do that. I didnt even think it through that way, it just seemed to come to me, I thought ‘I know why he did it, he fell in love.’ And whether they physically consummated this infatuation or not is not the issue. The issue is love. It’s not about sex. So that’s what I knew about Dumbledore. And it’s relevant only in so much as he fell in love and was made an utter fool of by love. He lost his moral compass completely when he fell in love and I think subsequently became very mistrusting of his own judgment in those matters so became quite asexual. He led a celibate and bookish life.” X
Melissa Anelli’s interview w/JKR released on Feb 2010
JKR: [re: Grindelwald] I think he was a user and a narcissist and I think someone like that would use it, would use the infatuation. I don’t think that he would reciprocate in that way, although he would be as dazzled by Dumbledore as Dumbledore was by him, because he would see in Dumbledore, ‘My God, I never knew there was someone as brilliant as me, as talented as me, as powerful as me. Together, we are unstoppable!’ So I think he would take anything from Dumbledore to have him on his side.
I wanted to ask you about that, because Grindelwald resembles - the golden curls, the first person I thought of was Lucifer.
JKR: Mm-hm. So you can call it a fraternal bond, but I think it makes it more tragic for Dumbledore. I also think it makes Dumbledore a little less culpable. I see him as fundamentally a very intellectual, brilliant and precocious person whose emotional life was absolutely subjugated to the life of the mind - by his choice - and then his first foray into the world of emotion is catastrophic and I think that would forevermore stun that part of his life and leave it stultified and he would be, what he becomes. That’s what I saw as Dumbledore’s past. That’s always what I saw was in his past. And he keeps a distance between himself and others through humour, a certain detachment and a frivolity of manner.
But he’s also isolated by his brain. He’s isolated by the fact he knows so much, guesses so much, guesses correctly. He has to play his cards close to his chest because he doesn’t want Voldemort to know what he suspects. Terrible to be Dumbledore, really, by the end he must have thought it would be quite nice to check out and just hope that everything works out well. [Laughter.]
Because he’s set up this massive chess game -
JKR: Mm, this massive chess game. But I said to Arthur, my American editor - we had an interesting conversation during the editing of seven - the moment when Harry takes Draco’s wand, Arthur said, God, that’s the moment when the ownership of the Elder wand is actually transferred? And I said, that’s right. He said, shouldn’t that be a bit more dramatic? And I said, no, not at all, the reverse. I said to Arthur, I think it really puts the elaborate, grandiose plans of Dumbledore and Voldemort in their place. That actually the history of the wizarding world hinged on two teenage boys wrestling with each other. They weren’t even using magic. It became an ugly little corner tussle for the possession of wands. And I really liked that - that very human moment, as opposed to these two wizards who were twitching strings and manipulating and implanting information and husbanding information and guarding information, you know?
Ultimately it just came down to that, a little scuffle and fistfight in the corner and pulling a wand away. X
Press conference for Fantastic Beast on November, 2016
JKR: “Well, I can’t tell you everything I would like to say because this is obviously a five-part story, so there’s lots to unpack in that relationship. I will say that you will see Dumbledore as a younger man, and quite a troubled man because he wasn’t always the sage. He was always very clever, but we’ll see what I think was the formative period of his life. As far as his sexuality is concerned, watch the space.” X
Everything we know about The Crimes of Grindelwald
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