by Harry Lamer

Created on: November 29, 2009   Last Updated: November 30, 2009

Did Albus Dumbledore and Grindelwald ever make love?

Thankfully, that little detail will never be revealed in the popular Harry Potter fiction series on magic and teen wizardry. But celebrated author JK Rowling did have this to say about the famous and beloved old wizard:

"My truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore as gay... Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent? But, he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that's how I always saw Dumbledore."

So she always THOUGHT he was gay.

What bearing does her startling revelation have on Dumbledore the character, his relationship with Grindelwald and his own canonical history in the whole Potterverse?

It certainly helped us to understand Dumbledore better - but otherwise very little actually. At the time she made that statement, most, if not the full Harry Potter series had already been published by then.

Certainly, Dumbledore's homosexuality never made headlines within the wizarding community itself. When Rita Skeeter came up with that horrible biography on Dumbledore (in The Deathly Hallows), she did not add: And guess what folks? He's gay!

We really need to take Rowling's statement into perspective.

First off, it is not really a formal announcement. She was simply stating her opinion or view of her own character. When novelists write stories, they do indeed think up the back history of their key characters. They decide on one hand, the things that their character will have done, and on the other hand, things that the same character MIGHT have done.

Dumbledore's sexual history clearly falls in the latter category.

So a teenaged Dumbledore was thrilled when Grindelwald came along. So he hero worshipped his more exciting and proactive peer. And yes, in Rowling's own words, Dumbledore did fall in love with Grindelwald. They probably spent hours together rubbing shoulders. Maybe they even went skinny dipping in the Hogwarts lake.

But does that mean that something did happen between them - that they actually had sexual relations? Or that Dumbledore would go on to have illicit affairs with other men? Very unlikely.

Canonically speaking, it was more likely that Dumbledore developed a crush on his close friend

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