Harry Potter: Gay Icon?

Religious conservatives are regularly profiled for their opposition to the Harry Potter books written by J.K. Rowling. Their complaint: the books portray witchcraft in a positive light. They may be able to come up with a new reason to hate these books ban them: they allegedly carry a positive message about homosexuality and the process of coming out of the closet about who you really are.

At least, that's the theory offered by Michael Bronski. He doesn't argue that Rowling has deliberately created pro-gay stories; instead, he believes that she has tapped into some common themes that are also applicable to the lives that gays lives: trapped, persecuted because they are not normal, seeking a life where they are understood and valued for whom they are:

The Christian right just might be, at least partly, right. The Harry Potter books are a threat to accepted ideas about the social welfare and mental health of children. Not because they romanticise witchcraft and wizardry, but because they are deeply subversive in their unremitting attacks on the received wisdom that being 'normal' is good, reasonable or even healthy. It would be lousy literary criticism simply to claim that the Potter books are gay; they can obviously be read in a myriad of ways. But they are profoundly queer in the broadest sense of the word. They are at heart an attack on the very idea of normality. The Harry Potter books tell children again and again that being normal is dull, unexciting, unimaginative and deadening.

The best literature is almost always subversive on some level. Why? Because the best literature normally asks us to look at our world in a new and different way, challenging common assumptions and norms. By asking us to reconsider what we have taken for granted, it also asks us to grow and change - a vital part of the process of continuing education and the ongoing project of becoming more human.

 

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