Hi, I've seen your reply to jalesidor's post on how fandom becomes ever more important the more one realises how disappointing jkr is. In it, you spoke about how both Harry and Draco are queer-coded in canon. Would you mind to expand on that? Or if you already have, would you mind linking that post or the tag under which I can find it? Absolutely no pressure to do so, just if you like! Thank you!
Hi anon! Sorry for the delay in answering; I wanted to do the question justice. I could have thrown some stuff at you off the top of my head, but that didnât feel rightâat my core, I am a Ravenclaw, and I could not bring myself to half-ass this. (For those who havenât seen the referenced post, you can find it here)
Before I get into my personal analysis, I want to note that there has been a lot of discourse on this topic over the years, so many of my ideas didnât actually originate with me, they just got incorporated into my mental cache of HP analysis. If you search the tags âcanon drarryâ or âdrarry in canonâ or any variation thereon, youâll get a bunch of posts where people pull excerpts and explain how extremely not heterosexual the things happening in them are. @iamnmbr3 in particular has written a ton of these (which I didnât realize were all by the same person until I started trying to track them down!), a few favorites being Arthur Weasley clearly thinking Harryâs got a crush, this hilarious list of canonical interactions, Narcissaâs very accurate understanding of how aware Harry and Draco are of each other, and that time Harry got beaned in the head by luggage because he was watching Draco change. Others classics include when @big-draco-energy got an ask about how Harry assumed that Draco must be a Death Eater if he was preoccupied enough to not care about their rivalry (and was right) and when @northward had a great observation about their obsessions with each other.
Seriously, this scene, yâall!
Possibly the most quoted line in Drarry fandom
And now, on to my own thoughts!
So first off, I want to say that some of the things that Iâm going to flag as unintentional queer coding are rooted in stereotypes, and that that doesnât mean that I believe in or condone said stereotypes. However, media often uses stereotyping as a lazy shorthand, and I think that that should be taken into account in this context, because it means thereâs a reasonable assumption that people would interpret some character traits and scenes through that lens.
Secondly, so much credit to my amazing friend @mxmaneater, who actually HAS A FOLDER of photos of super gay moments from the books, which saved me a lot of time trying to dig up quotes that I knew existed but wouldnât have been able to easily track down.
And finally, these are my personal interpretations. Iâm not any sort of academic, and weâre all aware that JKR does not believe that she wrote Harry or Draco as queer. Iâm hoping folks can be chill and take this in the spirit that itâs intended: as one possible reading. Your beliefs about the series and the characters are your own, and Iâm not here to tell you youâre wrong just because they arenât mine, so please extend me the same courtesy!
Now, without further ado, here we go:
Letâs start with Harry, because thatâs the easier lift here. The Harry Potter books are written from a third person limited perspective, which means we only see things from Harryâs point of view and are privy to his thoughts. I canât find a link, but I know that itâs widely quoted that JKR at some point used the fact that the books are from Harryâs perspective as justification for the ways in which some people or events were portrayed. The answers on this Quora post about pro-Gryffindor bias in the books do a good job of explaining the idea of Harryâs point of view skewing the point of view of the series.
So if we accept that the books reflect Harryâs thoughts and feelings about things, weâre left with the unmistakable fact that he frequently observes how handsome various boys and men are. We have physical descriptions of Cedric Diggory, Bill Weasley, Sirius Black, and even Tom Riddle that clearly illustrate admiration. Additionally, although itâs largely unflattering, itâs often noted amongst fans that we get full physical descriptions of Draco extremely regularlyâwe know his hair and eye color pretty much from the get go and hear about them often, as well as his outfits, his swagger, his smirking and âleeringâ (yes, she really uses that word), etc.
Some very heterosexual observations on men from the perspective of one Harry James Potter
Sure, Harry never explicitly says heâs into men, but letâs keep in mind the time period the books were placed in and the type of family that Harry was raised by: there is a very real chance that Harry wouldnât have been aware of the idea of bisexuality and therefore would never have questioned his own orientation. Because he knew he liked girls, so of course he wasnât gay! To many folks who later realized they were some form of not-straight, particularly bisexual and/or pansexual folks, this is a pretty common experience: not really registering that checking out people of multiple genders is not actually something that everyone does. *Stares vaguely into the distance while pondering all of the girls I didnât realize I was crushing on until many years later*
Plus, as Iâve mentioned before, thereâs the symbolism of the whole âliterally being raised in a closet, abused for being a âfreakâ, and forced to keep his truth a secret because the people he lived with were ashamed of himâ thing. To queer people raised by homophobes (or anyone who knew people in that situation), this isnât even the slightest bit subtle, and the fact that JKR either didnât notice or is in denial about it is truly bizarre to me.
Draco is a little harder to pin down without delving into stereotyping, so Iâm just gonna go for it: Draco is a textbook Drama Gayâą. Heâs performative in his speech, using a lot of flamboyant gestures; he constantly performs over the top reenactments for his friends; he makes buttons and sews costumes and does drawings and generally just goes through a lot of effort to pick on his ârivalâ. The only scenes where we see him in something that could be read as a heterosexual romantic relationship are with Pansy Parkinson, whom he doesnât seem remotely interested in; she reads more like a prop that he puts up with to project a particular image. Also, at one point we see him flopped across her lap to have his hair pet, which is definitely a thing that I remember happening during rehearsals back when I was involved in high school theater (and almost never by people with compatible orientations).
And then thereâs this scene:
Someone once made a post about just how gay this whole thing is: pointedly grabbing the biggest bowtruckle, whispering in Harryâs ear, smirking over his shoulder while walking away, etc. (If anyone can find it, please send me the link and Iâll add it to the list of other peopleâs thoughts that contributed to all of this.)
So, thatâs what Iâve got for you! Someone could probably write a whole research paper on this (and hell, maybe they have), but hopefully this at least somewhat explains my assertions of queer coding. As a reward for reading all of this, please enjoy a bonus scene of Harry NOT being attracted to a man:
Poor Ron. Maybe next time, buddy.
