Nobody Gay in Magical England

Ellie Hall, a staff writer for the Internet service, Buzzfeed, listed 28 things that J.K. Rowling said happened after the final events in Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows.  These have been culled from appearances and interviews Rowling made.  It is interesting and somewhat provocative that the editor of these quotes did not mention any sexual or gender diversity among the magical characters.  They all got married and produced one or more offspring.  All of them.

So what of the other Hogwarts staff?  To the contrary, none of them are married in any of the 4,175 pages of the Harry Potter books.  Not one.  There is no indication that in the entire first thousand years of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry any professor had ever been married.  However, Hall tells us in item #25, that as an afterthought, Rowling says the latent hero “Neville Longbottom became Hogwarts Herbology professor.  He married Hannah Abbott, who became the new landlady of The Leaky Cauldron.”  So that makes one confirmed married Hogwarts professor.

As in muggles (non-magical) society, marriage and families are standard for the magical world.  As in adolescent society, romantic involvements and teenage angst are frequent throughout the seven volumes of Harry Potter.  So, then, must be the LGBTIQ spectrum.

Was the magical world as homophobic as the muggles world?  Is that why nothing gay appears?  There is no way to tell for sure.  There is nothing LGBT about any of the characters, except what we might deduce in retrospect.

Wait a minute.  One of Rowling’s most controversial quotes was from Carnegie Hall where she drew an ovation for mentioning that she had always thought of Dumbledor as gay.  This was not mentioned before that disclosure.

Heterosexuality is portrayed, a little, in the positive image of the Weasley family and the negative one of the Dursleys.  Would it have hurt sales too much to have an identifiable homosexual or two?

It is statistically probable that some of the readers of the 450 million sold volumes of Harry Potter were gay young people needing a little positive reinforcement.  The best we can say is that they do not find negative stereotypes of themselves in Harry Potter, unless the narcissistic Gilderoy Lockhart was as much of a gay queen as I have always thought him to be.