{"id":131715,"date":"2018-12-10T08:43:14","date_gmt":"2018-12-10T13:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=131715"},"modified":"2023-09-19T11:53:09","modified_gmt":"2023-09-19T15:53:09","slug":"harry-potter-and-the-secret-gay-love-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/12\/10\/harry-potter-and-the-secret-gay-love-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Harry Potter and the Secret Gay Love Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

In our new monthly column, YA of Yore, Frankie Thomas takes a second look at the books that defined a generation.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Joseph Christian Leyendecker, Man Reading Book<\/em>, 1914<\/p><\/div>\n

My micro-generation\u2014that is, the subset of millennials who were born in the second term of the Reagan administration and graduated face first into the Great Recession, and of which the most famous member is probably Mark Zuckerberg\u2014has very little to brag about, so you can hardly blame us for our possessive attachment to Harry Potter. Harry Potter is to us what the Beatles were to our baby boomer parents. To say that we \u201cgrew up along with Harry\u201d is far too corny to convey the actual experience of being the world\u2019s first children ever to read those books. I remember attending a classmate\u2019s twelfth birthday party in 1998, thrusting into her hands a gift-wrapped copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\u2019s Stone<\/em> (at the time the only Harry Potter book available in the United States), and informing her with something like personal pride, \u201cThis book has been on the New York Times<\/em> best-seller list for five weeks<\/em>!\u201d It would probably still be there today if the Times <\/em>hadn\u2019t, shortly thereafter, created a separate best-seller list for children\u2019s books on the grounds that J.\u2009K. Rowling\u2019s success was unfair to the other novelists. It was a classic everybody-gets-a-trophy policy, a fitting legacy for the foundational text of millennial childhood.<\/p>\n

The fifth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix<\/em>, was published in the summer of 2003, by which point Harry was fifteen and those of us growing up along with him had discovered sex. The Harry Potter years also happened to coincide with the Wild West era of the internet and the rise of abstinence-only sex education; as a result, for better or for worse, erotic Harry Potter fan fiction played a major and under-discussed role in millennial sexual development. This was especially true if you were queer\u2014or, not to put too fine a point on it, if you were me\u2014and had picked up on the secret gay love story that existed between the lines of Rowling\u2019s text.<\/p>\n

I refer, of course, to Sirius and Lupin.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A quick refresher: book 3, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban<\/em>, introduces us to Sirius Black, the titular prisoner, on the lam after twelve years of incarceration for mass murder, and to Professor Remus Lupin, a wry, gentle schoolteacher carrying a terrible secret (he\u2019s a werewolf). At the novel\u2019s climax, the two of them come face to face and, much to Harry\u2019s surprise, fall into each other\u2019s arms. In an awkward info-dump of a monologue (the only structural flaw in what\u2019s widely agreed to be the best book of the series), Lupin reveals that he and Sirius were very close friends in their school days\u2014so close, indeed, that the brilliant young Sirius secretly taught himself to shape-shift into a large dog, just to keep his werewolf friend company during the full moon. It turns out (naturally) that Sirius was framed, and even after their twelve-year separation he and Lupin remain fiercely devoted to each other. By book 5, the two of them are living together in secret. Despite their outlaw status (Sirius is still a fugitive) and poverty (Lupin was fired from teaching after being outed as a werewolf), they begin to take on a quasi-parental role for the orphaned Harry. Then Sirius is killed in battle, Lupin is undone with grief, and so ends Order of the Phoenix<\/em> and the tragedy of Sirius and Lupin.<\/p>\n

I have exaggerated nothing: all this is directly stated in the text. You could be forgiven, though, for having blinked and missed the point in your own reading. Sirius and Lupin are minor characters, and everything we learn about them is filtered through the point of view of Harry, who is, like most kids, too self-involved to notice anything that doesn\u2019t directly affect him. Queer kids, however, were<\/em> directly affected by the suggestion of a gay love story happening in the background of Harry\u2019s life\u2014and so we noticed it. Oh, did we ever.<\/p>\n

The summer of 2003 was the summer of noticing. It was the summer I sat alone for hours in my mother\u2019s parked car, blasting Queen\u2019s \u201cThe Show Must Go On\u201d (track 17 on my favorite CD) and luxuriating in body-racking sobs of grief for Sirius Black, sorrow for Remus Lupin, and ecstatic rapture that I\u2019d noticed<\/em>. We took to the internet, those of us who had noticed, and compared notes. Often these notes took the form of fan fiction, which I read ravenously, hungry not so much for erotica as for the full novelistic experience Rowling had invited us to imagine\u2014a boarding-school romance turned wartime tragedy, Maurice<\/em> meets Atonement <\/em>by way of Animorphs. (Seriously, can you imagine?) But for much of that summer we simply studied Rowling\u2019s text, searching, scrutinizing, noticing.<\/p>\n

To put it another way: we invented close reading.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure whether any of us understood this at the time, since it didn\u2019t feel at all like schoolwork. It was pure pleasure; it was pure joy. One of the definitive works of scholarship to come out of the summer of 2003 was a 7,800-word essay titled \u201cThe Case for R\/S,\u201d<\/a> posted on LiveJournal by a British schoolgirl writing under the name elwing_alcyone. \u201cCurrent mood: jubilant,\u201d the essay begins (opening with one\u2019s \u201ccurrent mood\u201d was LiveJournal house style, the equivalent of the MLA header), and then proceeds to track, cite, and analyze every mention of Sirius and Lupin in the entire series. At one point she counts the lines of text that appear between two phrases: \u201cLupin\u2019s eyes were fixed on Sirius\u201d and \u201csaid Lupin quietly, looking away from Sirius at last.\u201d The number is forty; Lupin stares at Sirius for forty lines\u2019 worth of plot action. \u201cJKR didn\u2019t have to write that in,\u201d she gushes. \u201cI can\u2019t think of any other examples of one character spending so many lines simply looking<\/em> at another.\u201d Current mood: jubilant, indeed.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to forget how fully we trusted Rowling back then, how total her authority appeared when the series was still in progress and its ending known only to her. In those days, we were Talmudic scholars and she was God. \u201cThe Case for R\/S\u201d still holds up as a stunning achievement in Potterian exegesis, but what\u2019s striking about it now is its unwavering faith in \u201cJKR\u201d and her control over her material.<\/p>\n

Lupin, who was staying in the house with Sirius but who left for long periods to do mysterious work for the Order, helped them repair a grandfather clock \u2026<\/strong>
\nOotP, p110, UK; p118, US<\/p>\n

\u201cLupin, who was staying in the house with Sirius.\u201d Not \u201cLupin, who was staying in the house to be closer to the Order,\u201d or \u201cLupin, who was staying in the house because he had nowhere else to go,\u201d or even just \u201cLupin, who was staying in the house.\u201d He is staying in the house with\u00a0Sirius<\/em>.<\/p>\n

JKR didn\u2019t spend three years writing this book to shove in things that didn\u2019t matter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cWhy?\u201d elwing_alcyone writes at the conclusion of her essay. \u201cWhy has JKR left it so open-ended? She could have sunk this ship in a sentence. She didn\u2019t, and now, the odds are that she won\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smash cut to the summer of 2005, when book 6 was released.<\/p>\n

Hello, darkness, my old friend \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Those of us who were growing up along with Harry were by then college age\u2014old enough, in other words, to put away childish things\u2014so when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince <\/em>unexpectedly paired off Lupin with a random woman, we were not only shattered but ashamed to be shattered. It was, after all, just a children\u2019s book. Surely the whole Sirius\/Lupin thing had only ever been a game to us; surely we had never believed it. Elwing_alcyone quietly appended an afterword to \u201cThe Case for R\/S\u201d acknowledging that, clearly, she had misread the entire series. Some of us tried to reassure her that Lupin\u2019s sudden heterosexual romance didn\u2019t contradict the possibility of an earlier romance with Sirius\u2014after all, Lupin could be bisexual!\u2014but no one\u2019s heart was really in it. The straight romance was explicit in the text; the gay one was not and never would be. The author had spoken. The spell was broken.<\/p>\n

To this day, I continue to ache over this in an unironic, unfunny way that I can\u2019t quite explain even to myself. I was so sure. We were all so sure. How could Rowling have written those words and failed to notice what we noticed in them? This beautiful, delicate palimpsest that we\u2019d read between the lines and so lovingly restored on our own\u2014how could it be that it had never existed except in our heads? On some level I still don\u2019t believe that we were wrong. If anything, it was Rowling who was wrong.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t help that Rowling refuses to let the subject die. In 2007, after the series was officially complete, she announced that Dumbledore, of all characters, was actually gay the whole time; it just never came up in the books. In 2013, as if determined to add insult to injury, she wrote in a blog post<\/a> that Lupin\u2019s werewolf condition was, as we had always suspected, \u201ca metaphor for \u2026 HIV and AIDS<\/small>,\u201d but also that he \u201chad never fallen in love before\u201d meeting his heterosexual wife in book 6. Come on, JKR, can\u2019t we have anything?<\/p>\n

Rowling is, like all her best characters, a gifted and flawed and profoundly silly human being\u2014a fact that has become increasingly<\/a> apparent<\/a> in recent years. As a new generation of fans grapples with their complicated love for her imperfect work, I\u2019ve noticed the phrase \u201cdeath of the author,\u201d coined in 1967 by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes, invoked with surprising frequency in online discussions of Harry Potter. I doubt many Harry Potter fans are steeped in critical theory. Nonetheless, if you search the phrase \u201cdeath of the author\u201d on Tumblr (the social-networking site that has replaced LiveJournal in fandom circles), the site auto-suggests \u201cJ.\u2009K. Rowling\u201d and \u201cHarry Potter\u201d as related search terms before displaying countless blog posts arguing that Rowling\u2019s authorial intentions are irrelevant to her readers\u2019 interpretation of her writing. It\u2019s almost as if her fans have invented post-structuralism, just as we invented close reading\u2014necessity, in both cases, being the mother thereof.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, when I meet women my own age, I can guess within minutes whether they noticed Sirius and Lupin in the summer of 2003. There are certain signals we give off, certain coded questions one can ask. Often, upon identifying each other in the wild, we\u2019re reduced to schoolgirlish squeals, lapsing into an ancient but well-remembered shorthand: \u201cThe forty-line stare!\u201d \u201cAnd the joint Christmas present!\u201d \u201cTogether? I think so<\/em>.\u201d Such encounters are especially common with my fellow writers and academics\u2014which is to say, those of us who have gone on to make a living in close reading.<\/p>\n

Close reading is queer culture, always has been, so perhaps we would have gotten good at it regardless of Rowling. Still, I like to think that our fate was sealed in the summer of 2003. Of everything the Harry Potter books have given us, this might be the most precious gift of all, one that can never be taken away: the discovery that a text can contain more than the sum of its words, that a whole other story\u2014a whole other world\u2014may exist in the cracks and spaces between sentences, accessible to any reader paying the right kind of attention. It\u2019s a form of magic. Even now, I\u2019m jubilant.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

James Frankie Thomas is the author of \u201cThe Showrunner,\u201d which received special mention in the <\/em>2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has also appeared in <\/em>The Toast, The Hairpin, and\u00a0<\/em>Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He is currently studying fiction at the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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