Harry Potter fansite The Leaky Cauldron has an interview with GLAAD director Sean Lund who discussed JK Rowling's recent announcement that Dumbledore is gay.

Lund compares the potential impact of Rowling's revelation to the romance between Willow and Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

"Joss Whedon, who revealed in a very gradual way and in a way incredibly authentic for that character that she was gay and introduced her girlfriend Tara, and the two of them became a really wonderful couple on that show. That was a really perfect example of how to do this sort of storytelling and how to create these characters right...

I think very much with how J.K. Rowling has brought Dumbledore out, I think that sort of quality of maintaining the authenticity and maintaining the truth of the character really goes a long way in terms of making sure people stay invested in those characters."

Lund also finds an optimistic perspective in Rowling keeping the information out of the books, saying that, at this point, it doesn't really matter. Even if it's not made clear in the books, anyone who reads them will view Dumbledore as a gay character thanks to the widespread media coverage:

"...for many readers who are coming into these stories now, they are coming into a series of books where the character of Dumbledore will always have been known to be gay...

It sends a message that heroes and people who we respect, and people that we look up to, come in all different shapes and sizes. And I think for the readers of the books, for the people who will see the movies in the future, I think that's a tremendously important message for them to carry forward."

Finally, Lund emphasizes one of the greater messages of Rowling's books is one of general inclusiveness, a lesson, that if understood fully, leads to LGBT tolerance:

"I think one of the most important themes of the Harry Potter books is J.K. Rowling's message about making sure that we treat all people, whether they are the same as us, or whether they are different than us, with dignity and respect.

The comments section is overwhelmingly positive but one commenter made a very interesting observation, one that certainly adds some additional depth to Dumbledore even if that's all based in fan speculation:

"She has now given Albus’ DoB as 1881 (no birthday yet), meaning that the events surrounding Gellert’s visit and the deaths of Kendra and Ariana are conceived of as happening in 1899, when Oscar Wilde was wandering Europe after his release from Reading Gaol before his death the following year. In other words, a very different world from our own, folks.

By the time homosexual activity between consenting adults was leagalised in the UK in 1967, Dumbledore would have been 86 and Hogwarts’ headmaster for some years."

You may have noticed that the Harry Potter: Lovable Boy Pagan series has hardly gotten mention on AfterElton.com, except for rare occasions where fanfic writers have gotten him pregnant or painted him in compromising positions with Draco Malfoy. (Did I say "rare"? I meant "blissfully rare".) That's because the biggest moneymaking book and movie franchise of the millennium is utterly and thoroughly heterosexual. There are no gay men or women to speak of at all in J.K. Rowling's world of wizards and witches and muggles and increasingly annoying house elves.

And should there be? Arguments that this is a kids' series and that "adult topics" like homosexuality shouldn't be a part of children's fantasy books are utter Hufflepuff -- by the end of the series a slew of beloved characters have been horribly murdered, trusts have been betrayed and all three of the main characters have played their share of tonsil-tennis. It's not like we're talking about the Rugrats here.

In fact, in a school full of incredibly progressive teenagers flexing their magical muscles for the first time, it's pretty ridiculous to imagine that there aren't a few gay kids. And given that one of the overall aims of the books is to promote understanding of the strange or different (in interviews, Rowling comes across as strongly socially liberal, even though her books may ultimately reveal her to be philosophically conservative), it's undeniably a missed opportunity that there wasn't one gay kid in the mix.

But there wasn't, and that's that. Still, there are lots of gay folks (myself included) who read and enjoyed the books and suffered through the Chris Columbus-directed movies to get to the good ones (Azkaban!!), and I thought I'd open up a discussion here for folks who wanted to chat about the final installment. (I was disappointed -- sorry!) If you don't want to have any surprises ruined, you may not want to click through, as spoilers will undoubtedly come up. But if you'd like to weigh in with your thoughts or don't care if we give away that it's revealed that Voldemort is Harry's real father -- OOOPS! (oh, I keeed! I keeed!), click through for the spoiler-filled discussion...

I don't know when or where I first heard of something called "mpreg," although I know it was online. I didn't know what it was, and oh, how I long for those innocent days of yesteryear.

"What do you mean?" I bleated to the friend who explained it was fan fiction written about male pregnancy.

She patted my hand. "It's stories about men from television shows, books, and movies who get pregnant." She looked at me, as if wondering whether to go on. "They have the babies out of their butts." (She didn't actually say "butt.")

After I soaked my brain in bleach for a few hours, I called her just to make sure it wasn't a hallucinatory nightmare. No, apparently it's real.

Now, I did go to journalism school and I sincerely try to investigate all my stories. I actually watched reality TV once. I'm brave like a war correspondent. And yet ... I couldn't bring myself to read even one mpreg story.

Instead, I emailed a fan fiction author who, under the pen name “vamphile,” writes fan fiction set in the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Queer as Folk worlds, and asked what she thought of mpreg.

"Oh, that," she snorted contemptuously. "Yes, you see, the author is in love with some guy in her fandom, say Brian Kinney, and so she writes her ultimate fantasy, pregnancy. The fact that this requires assbabies, medical impossibilities, turning Brian into something he's not, turning Justin into, essentially, a woman, makes not a bit of difference to her. You see, being pregnant is no fun and the guy of her dreams being there would make it fun and thus, she would write the ultimate in fantasy, she would make pregnancy sexy."

I rubbed my aching head.