"Harry Potter and The Closet Under The Stairs" Transcript

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It could be said that I'm a bit of a Harry Potter fan. I jumped onto the series when I was 12, just after coming out (yes, I came out that young), which was also just after the release of Goblet of Fire. I devoured the first four books between September and November of 2001, just in time for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to hit theaters.

Since then, I've watched every movie too many times to count, and I reread the entire series at least once a year. It's a bit of a tradition for me at this point! I also have the audiobooks read by Stephen Fry and listen to them every night as I go to sleep; they're like ASMR for me.

So maybe I'm more than just a bit of a Harry Potter fan. It eats at me every day that I haven't gotten to go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios yet. [sighs] Someday.

So, growing up gay during the years of the Bush administration, JK Rowling's books were a bit of a respite for me, a place I could return to when the real world bigots became too much to handle. It was a place where wizards of all races and backgrounds intermingled in the same school, and where the characters who hate muggles were obviously the villains. There was no "looking at it from both sides" arguments in Harry Potter like there was on CNN. Voldemort hated muggles and mudbloods, and he was the bad guy. Republicans hated gay people but that was their quote "religious freedom."

So it was a bit of a shock to me when I started seeing people online call out JK Rowling for being homophobic, or at the very least being supportive of gay erasure. The controversy over Dumbledore's gayness and whether or not it would exist in the new Fantastic Beasts films was getting some people a little... tilted. The fervor has died down for the moment, but I'm sure it'll be back up in full swing by the time the release of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald comes around in November.

So I decided to take this time to look at the world that JK Rowling created, the characters that inhabit it, and see what gayness I could gleam^{[sic: glean]} from it. To answer the question of: why was I, a newly out gay kid, so completely obsessed with Harry Potter when there was nary a gay character to be seen? What did I find so appealing about the Boy Who Lived...

[Picture of a shirtless Daniel Radcliffe.] Besides that.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was first published in June of 1997, and begun the story of Harry Potter, a child wizard who was orphaned when his parents, James and Lily, were murdered by Lord Voldemort. Harry is sent to live with his muggle aunt and uncle on his mother's side, the Dursleys. The Dursleys are completely aware of Harry's wizarding lineage, and here is where the comparison to growing up gay begins.

Many times, gay children are completely unaware that they're gay. They don't feel attraction to people of the same sex yet, and even though they may have characteristics that don't perfectly align with the gender norms (girls that are tomboys and boys that are sissy boys) they don't feel any different from anyone else, most of the time.

But sometimes the adults in their lives pick up on these characteristics, especially with little boys. A boy who likes playing with dolls, prefers Disney Princesses to Transformers, or likes to wear the color pink might be made fun of by his peers, even by adults. His own family might punish him for liking these things: not allowing him to play with girls, refusing to buy him toys or clothing that could in any way be construed as feminine. The child is made to feel ashamed of what they like. The adults in their life are shaming them for being who they are.

They know that Harry is likely a wizard, especially when odd happenings begin to take place in his early childhood, things that the Dursleys immediately spot as magic, even when Harry's a baby. To put a stop to it, they lied to him about his family, telling him that his parents had died in a car crash and that the lightning bolts scar on his head was also a result of said crash.

They wouldn't allow him to see pictures of his parents and even hid his existence from others by having him live in a cupboard under the stairs, stashing him there or whenever they had company. It's not a far stretch to see Harry's near imprisonment in the cupboard as being trapped in a closet.

The Dursleys also made sure to have no pictures of Harry around the house. He was made to feel shame by the Dursleys and everyone in their orbit for something he didn't understand, something he didn't even know he was.

This happens a lot to gay children, especially in particularly religious families. Pray-away-the-gay camps regularly have prepubescent children admitted by parents who think they might, possibly, maybe, could be, gay. Need to put a stop to it before they realize it for themselves. Create the shame that will, if not actually cure it (it doesn't), at least stop the child from eventually acting on their urges.

And so Vernon and Petunia Dursley did everything they could to keep Harry ignorant of his true heritage, to make sure he stayed in the closet so to speak. They took particularly drastic action when Harry begun receiving invitations to join other people like him. The Dursleys, especially Vernon who had a particular hatred of anything not quote "normal," wouldn't let Harry even leave the house. Eventually they stowed Harry away on a rock in the sea, quite literally in the middle of nowhere.

But try as they might, Harry could not be kept in the closet. With the help of Rubeus Hagrid, Harry was ushered into the wizarding world. How did he enter the wizarding world? Well, the same way a lot of gay people enter the gay world for the first time, via a bar. A bar that on the outside seems nondescript enough, but the inside is populated by people the outside world would not accept.

Remember, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was written in the early 90s, at the height of the AIDS crisis. Being gay was still very... behind-the-counter-in-a-nondescript-paper-bag. Secret, quiet, something you didn't necessarily broadcast to the world. Many gay men and women at the time never met another gay person, until they went to a gay bar.

And that's what Harry Potter does. He enters the Leaky Cauldron and is exposed to a magical world he had no idea existed. Not to mention, he joins this world by being brought into the back room with a big hairy guy, but we won't talk about that.

When Harry enters the magical world, he meets any number of new people who are just like him: people his own age who he learns things alongside of, people younger than him who would idolize him, and eccentric older mentor figures that look out for him. A lot like the gay community of the early 90s.

There was no protection for sexual orientation in England until 2003, so at the time of Harry Potter's writing, you still had to keep your gayness hidden for the most part, unless you wanted to run the risk of being outed and possibly losing your job, your family, your friends, everything. And so gay men and women created their own social networks, their own support networks to help each other through the tough times, separated from the (quote) "normal" world, or as Rowling would put it, the muggle world.

In the 1980s, the Thatcher government was almost as hesitant as the Reagan government to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic.

As people dropped dead from this bloodborne plague, Thatcher and Reagan went about their lives business as usual... much like how the Ministry of Magic refused to acknowledge the return of Voldemort until they simply could not turn a blind eye anymore.

And much like in the real world, it was too late. The damage had been done. People were dead, and more were dying every day, both wizards and muggles alike fell at the hand of Voldemort. Gay people and straight people both died from a disease that could have possibly been slowed down, if not stopped... if only the government had cared enough.

There actually is a direct allegory for AIDS in the Harry Potter books, and that is lycanthropy, or being a werewolf, a condition thrust upon Remus Lupin at a young age when he was attacked by Fenrir Greyback, in a none-too-subtle rape allegory. Remus was terrified to disclose his condition to his friends and did everything he could to hide it from them, much like many gay men in the 1980s who were diagnosed with HIV.

Rowling herself confirmed the allegorical meaning of lycanthropy in her eBook, Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship, and Dangerous Hobbies, released in 2016.

Not everything gay-related in Harry Potter is allegory, though. Some things are actually written in the text themselves, such as the relationship between Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald. The story of the two men is told in pieces in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows.

After Dumbledore's death in the sixth novel, a salacious in-universe biography of Dumbledore is published, The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore by Rita Skeeter. In this book, it is revealed that Dumbledore had a very close relationship with Gellert Grindelwald, who would go on to become the equivalent of wizard Hitler. In the book, this is the biggest controversy, which turns out to be pretty accurate, right down to Dumbledore refusing to stop his old friend even as he murdered his way across Europe during the years of World War II. Though the two did eventually face off, with Dumbledore winning and Grindelwald being locked away until his death at the hands of Voldemort in 1998.

But the real controversy sprung up in the real world, when JK Rowling was asked if Albus Dumbledore had ever known true love. Rowling stated that Dumbledore was, in fact, gay and over time went into some detail in regard to his love for Grindelwald as a young man, a love and infatuation that lasted well into adulthood. She has said that the feelings... were not entirely mutual, and that Grindelwald may have been using Dumbledore's love for him to control the young wizard. Other theories say that the feelings were mutual, but that Grindelwald's lust for power was greater than his love for Dumbledore.

The pair split after the death of Dumbledore's younger sister Ariana, a death that Dumbledore blamed himself for. This trauma, on top being so tragically betrayed by Grindelwald, led to Dumbledore becoming, as Rowling put it, "quite asexual." Between 1945 and his death in 1997, Dumbledore did not take any lovers, as far as we know. So though he is confirmed to be gay, he may have only ever actually loved one man.

Many straight fans felt betrayed that the Dumbledore they grew up with thinking was straight was suddenly gay. "Ah, you have inserted politics into my children's novel!"

And many gay fans felt betrayed that Dumbledore sexuality was never actually stated outright in the books. The betrayal of gay fans was compounded when Dumbledore was announced to be a leading character in the new series of Fantastic Beasts movies. But director David Yates stated that they will not explicitly mention Dumbledore sexuality in the second film, The Crimes of Grindelwald.

Some fans took this to mean it would never be addressed in the five film series. Others, like myself, are willing to give it a bit more breathing room, especially since there was already a lot of homoeroticism in the first Fantastic Beasts movie.

In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Grindelwald has taken on the guise of Percival Graves and infiltrated the MACUSA, or the Magical Congress of the United States of America, to hunt down an Obscurial, an extremely powerful young wizard whose magic is literally exploding out of them due to it being suppressed. He recruits Credence, played by out-actor Ezra Miller, to help him track it down. Their relationship is more than just a little close.

Watching it, it's quite easy to see the Grindelwald is doing exactly to Credence what he did to Dumbledore decades before: creating an emotional connection with the fragile young man, using him, and then dropping him as soon as he appears to no longer be useful.

But as it turns out, Credence himself was the Obscurial, and in the end of the film, Grindelwald is so distraught at his apparent demise at the hands of the MACUSA that he begins to lose control of his disguise, eventually being discovered and arrested.

The relationship between Credence and Grindelwald isn't exactly subtle in the film. You'd have to try pretty hard to ignore the homosexual undertones between the two characters. I read this as Rowling, who wrote the screenplay, laying the groundwork for more overt homosexual themes in later films, ensuring that the audience would allow her to tell the story of Grindelwald and Dumbledore properly without straight-washing it.

That's how I read it. But maybe I'm being optimistic. We'll see this November when The Crimes of Grindelwald is released.

And finally there's the issue of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and the gay love affair between Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy... that never was. But I think that's a whole other video.

So what do you think about the gay themes in the Harry Potter universe? And do you think Rowling, Yates, and Warner Brothers will actually show Dumbledore's gayness in the upcoming movies, or will he be straight-washed?

Let me know in the comments below. Don't forget to like and subscribe, and if you've got some Sickles, Knuts or even Galleons burning a hole in your pocket, check out my Patreon in the description below. You can vote on which videos I do next and even suggest ones you'd like to see. You have no idea how much I would appreciate it.

So until next time, my fellow witches and wizards: mischief managed.