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J. K. Rowling at Carnegie Hall Reveals Dumbledore is Gay; Neville Marries Hannah Abbott, and Much More

J.K. Rowling
Posted by: Edward
October 19, 2007, 09:17 PM



Note: A preliminary transcript is now at the end of this post;please note that there may be some small errors in phrasing, and allquestions have been paraphrased to save time; this is not a finaltranscript, but the accuracy of the questions and answers have beenmaintained. Reminder: We are routinely deleting the(thankfully) miniscule percentage of comments that are hateful orintolerant. Debate on this topic is welcome but hate and name-callingis not. Please maintain the respect in this article that you all do inall others. Thanks.

Tonight, the one thousand grand prize winners (and their guests) of theScholastic's Open Book Tour Sweepstakes along with a companion got thechance to see Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling read from "Harry Potterand the Deathly Hallows," answer questions and sign books at New YorkCity's Carnegie Hall. We have exclusive information this evening on themyriad of "Deathly Hallows" questions she answered as well as in-depthdetails on a number of subjects she spoke about.



A caution now. Parts of the following WILL contain book seven SPOILERS.











First, the biggest revelation of the night came when Jo revealed to heraudience the fact that Albus Dumbledore is gay and had fallen in lovewith fellow wizard and friend, Gellert Grindelwald. This elicited ahuge reaction and prolonged ovation. So much so, it promoted Jo to say:

"If I had known this would have made you this happy, I would have told you years ago."

The question was: Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?
JKR: My truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore asgay. [ovation.] ... Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and thatthat added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what hewas. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little morebecause falling in love can blind us to an extend, but he met someoneas brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn tothis brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah,that's how i always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a scriptread through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a lineto Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair...[laughter]. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide italong to the scriptwriter, "Dumbledore's gay!" [laughter] "If I'd knownit would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!"
Jo also said after revelation: "I had to give you something to talkabout for the next 10 years...Just imagine the fan fiction now."



Jo also revealed that Neville Longbottom married Hufflepuff HannahAbbott and she was to become the landlady at the iconic Leaky CauldronPub. She thought that people would find the fact of Neville's livingover a pub particularly cool.



Equally large revelations were made concerning Petunia Dursley when Joanswered the question of what Petunia could not bring herself to saywhen Harry and the Dursleys parted ways before his seventeenthbirthday. She would have wished him luck, saying:

"I know what you're up against and I hope it turns out okay."

Informationon the original Order members was also revealed during tonight's event.Jo related the fact that Remus Lupin, prior to the third book, wasunemployable because he was a werewolf and upon his graduation fromHogwarts along with James and Lily, was supported by James using theirown money. In addition to this she shed more light on the early days ofthe Order, saying James, Sirius, Remus and Lily were full time Ordermembers. "Full Time Fighters," as Jo put it.



Jo also went into further detail about the many portraits in thewizarding world and their occupants. An occupant can only move freelyto other portraits in their dwelling or to another portrait in whichthey are depicted. She also revealed that Harry himself made sure thatthe portrait of Snape made it into the Headmasters Office, but doubtsthat he ever went to speak to it.



Life debts were another subject discussed during tonight's question andanswer session. It was revealed that Draco Malfoy does not owe Harry alife debt. While speaking briefly on the Elder wand, Jo did not detailthe the core of this extraordinary wand. Hagrid never married and Jamesand Lily went into hiding shortly after she first became pregnant withHarry.



Finally, speaking about her personal feelings and experiences of thepast seventeen years with the boy wizard, Jo said finishing the firstbook and the seventh book produced very similar feelings. She alsoadmits that she was very difficult to live with for the weeks followingher completing the last book in the "Harry Potter" series.



A full transcript of this evening's event will be available on TLCsoon. TLC will update throughout the evening with the latest from thisevent.
Some highlights have been transcribed:
Q: Did Neville ever find love?
Of course. ... To make him extra cool he marries the woman who becomes,eventually, the new landlady at The Leaky Cauldron, which I think wouldmake him very cool among the students, that he lives above the pub. Hemarries Hannah Abbott.
How did you decide that Molly Weasley would be the one to finish off Bellatrix?
I always knew Molly was going to finish her off. I think there was somespeculation that Neville would do it, because Neville obviously has aparticular reason to hate Bellatrix. ..So there were lots of optios forBlelatrix, but I never deviated. I wanted it to be Molly, and I wantedit to be Molly for two reasons.
The first reason was I always saw Molly as a very good witch butsomeone whose light is necessarily hidden under a bushel, because sheisn't in the kitchen a lot and she has had to raise, among others, andgeorge which is like, enough... I wanted Molly to have her moment andto show that because a woman had dedicated herself to her family doesnot mean that she doesn't have a lot of other talents.
Second reason: It was the meeting of two kinds of - if you call whatBellatrix feels for Voldemort love, I guess we'll call it love, she hasa kind of obsession with him, it's a very sick obsession ... and Iwanted to match that kind of obsession with maternal love... the powerthat you give someone by loving them. So Molly was really an amazingexemplar of maternal love. ... There was something very satisfyingabout putting those two women together.
How different would the last two books be if Arthur had been killed in the middle of book five?
I think they would have been very different and it's part of the reasonwhy I chose my mind. ... By turning Ron into half of Harry, in otherwords by turning Ron into someone who had suffered the loss of aparent, I was going to remove the Weasleys as a refuge for Harry and Iwas going to necessarily remove a lot of Ron's humor. That's part ofthe reason why I didn't kill Arthru. I wanted to keep Ron in tact ... alot of Ron's humor comes from his insensitivity and his immaturity, tobe honest about Ron. And Ron finally, I think, you see, grows up inthis book. He's the last of the three to reach what I consideradulthood, and he does it then [ when he destroys the horcrux] andfaces those things. So that's part of the reason. The only other reasonI didn't kill Arthur was that I wanted to come full circle. We startedwith an orphan, someone who lost their parents because of the war. ANdso I wanted to show it again. ... Even though you don't see Teddy, Iwanted to express in the epilogue, that he gets an even bettergodfather than Harry had, because Sirius had ihs faults, I think wemust admit. He was a risky guy to have a s a godfather. Because Teddygets someone who really has been there, and Harry becomes a reallygreat father figure for Teddy as well as his own children. I hasten toadd that I didn't kill Lupin or Tonks lightly. I loved them ascharacters...so that hurt, killing them.
Q: In the Goblet of Fire Dumbledore said his brother was prosecutedfor practicing inappropriate charms [JKR buries her head, to laughter]on a goat; what were the inappropriate charms he was practicing on thatgoat?
JKR: How old are you?
Eight.
JKR: I think that he was trying to make a goat that was easy to keepclean [laughter], curly horns. That's a joke that works on a couple oflevels. I really like Aberforth and his goats. But you know Aberforthhaving this strange fondness for goats if you've read book seven, camein really useful to Harry, later on, because a goat, a stag, you know.If you're a stupid Death Eater, what's the difference. So, that is myanswer to YOU.
[loud applause]
Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?
My truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.[ovation.] ... Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that thatadded to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was.To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more becausefalling in love can blind us to an extend, but he met someone asbrilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn tothis brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah,that's how i always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a scriptread through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a lineto Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair...[laughter]. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide italong to the scriptwriter, "Dumbledore's gay!" [laughter] If I'd knownit would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!
Q: Since Ron is able to speak Parseltongue in the last book, does thatmean that parseltongue is a language that most witches and wizards canlearn or must a person be born with some ability to speak Parseltongue.
JKR: I don't see it really as a language you can learn. So few peoplespeak it that who would teach you? This is a weird ability passed downthrough the Slytherin blood line. However ROn was with Harry when hesaid one word in Parseltongue, which I do not know so I cannotduplicate for you, but he heard him say "Open," and he was able toreproduce the sound. So it was one word. Whether he could learn tospeak to snakes properly is a separate issue. I don't think he could.But he knew enough, he was smart enough, to duplicate one necessarysound.
Q: [Speaker thanks Jo for the Dumbledore answer.]
JKR: You needed something to keep you going for the next 10 years! Oh, my god, the fan fiction now, eh? [Applause.]
Q: What did Dumbledore write in the letter to make the Dursleys take Harry?
JKR: Very, very good question. As you know, as we find out in bookseven, Petunia once really wanted to be part of that world. And youdiscover that Dumbledore has written to her prior to theHowler...Dumbledore wrote to her very kindly and explained why hecouldn't let her come to Hogwarts to become a witch. So, Petunia, muchas she denis it afterwards, much as she turns against that world whenshe met Uncle Vernon, who is the biggest anti-wizard you could ever metin your life, a tiny part of her, and that's the part that almostwished Harry luck when she said goodbye to him in this book, she justteetered on the verge of saying, I do know what you're up against and Ihope it's OK. But she couldn't bring herself to say it. Years ofpretending she doesn't care have hardened her. But Dumbledore appealedin the letter you're asking about, so that part of Petunia that didremember wanting desperately to be part of the world and he appealed toher sense of fair play to a sister that she had hated because Lily hadwhat she couldn't have. So that's how she persuaded Petunia to keepHarry. Good question.
Q: When Harry was stabbed by a basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets,since he was a Horcrux shouldn't it have been destroyed then?
JKR: I have been asked that a lot. Harry was exceptionally fortunate inthat he had Fawkes. So before he could be destroyed without repair,which is what is necessary to destroy a horcrux, he was mended.However, I made sure that Fawkes wasn't around the second time aHorcrux got stabbed by a basilisk fang, so the poison did its work andit was irreparable within a short period of time.... I establishedearly in the book, Hermione says that you destroy a Horcrux by usingsomething so powerful that there's no remedy. But she does say there isa remedy for basilisk poison but of course it has to be administeredimmediately and when they stab the cup later - boy I'm really blowingthis for anyone who hasn't finished the book - there's Fawkes, is myanswer. And thank you for giving me a chance to say that because peoplehave argued that quite a lot.
Q: Why couldn't Harry speak to a portrait of Dumbledore throughout the last book>
Well there are two reasons, three reasons actually... Teh last bit, whydid he have to decode? As Dumbledore says to Harry...to tell Harryabout the Hallows was to tempt him. And Harry, throughout all sevenbooks has been incredibly impetuous and reckless. That's one of Harry'sbiggest flaws. He does tend to act without thinking, and Dumbledoreknows this about Harry. He wants him to work it out slowly enough togain wisdom along the way. That's why he passed the information throughHermione, who is the most cautious person in the books, as you know.And Dumbledore says explicitly, so your good heat isn't overcome byyour hot heads. Or I may have paraphrased myself slight there soforgive me. "She doesn't even know her own book!" [laughter] Yes sothat's one reason. Harry needs to decode. He said, he does say in thisbook, he's frightened by his decision not to race for the wand, becausehe had never chosen not to act. So that's Harry's real big coming ofage moment, that he's decided to hold back for the first time very inhis life. So the other two reasons that i have for him not t speak toDumbledore's portrait, first of all, I crated a lot of rules for thisworld and then later had to navigate my away around them. But this rulewas always good, and the rule was that portraits could only movebetween portraits in the same building. so if I'm in a picture andyou're in a picture and we're both in Carnegie Hall, then we can moveinto each other's pictures. Otherwise we can only move only to otherplaces where we have a portrait. You can't just move willy nillythrough all the - the Louvre, the Met - you can't do a world tour, as apicture person. You are limited by geography. So there was that reason.And then lastly of course, the third reason, is it really would be tooeasy and I wouldn't have had a plot.
Q: Many of us older readers have noticed over the years similaritiesbetween the Death Eaters tactics and the Nazis from the 30s and 40s.Did you use that historical era as a model for Voldemort's reign andwhat were the lessons that you hope to impart to the next generation?
It was conscious. I think that if you're, I think most of us if youwere asked to name a very evil regime we would think Nazi Germany.There were parallels in the ideology. I wanted Harry to leave our worldand find exactly the same problems in the wizarding world. So you havethe intent to impose a hierarchy, you have bigotry, and this notion ofpurity, which is this great fallacy, but it crops up all over theworld. People like to think themselves superior and that if they canpride themselves in nothing else they can pride themselves on perceivedpurity. So yeah that follows a parallel. It wasn't really exclusivelythat. I think you can see in the Ministry even before it's taken over,there are parallels to regimes we all know and love. [Laughter andapplause.] So you ask what lessons, I suppose. The Potter books ingeneral are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for anend to bigotry, and I think ti's one of the reasons that some peopledon't like the books, but I think that's it's a very healthy message topass on to younger people that you should question authority and youshould not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all ofthe truth.
[Loud applause.]
Q: What did it feel like completing your first Harry Potter book versus completing the last.
JKR: What a great question. It felt strangely similar actually. Bothfeelings were more alike than with any of the other books. When Ifinished the first book, there was this incredible sense of achievementthat i'd actually written a novel, i"d actually finished my book. Andit was after seven years of writing and making notes and rewriting. Andthen when I finished the seventh book, that was 17 years. WIth theseventh book there was a huge feeling of loss as well. I couldn'tbelieve I was done. And it took me weeks, as my poor, long-sufferinghusband will attest. He's here. [applause] Yes, you should clap him,he's very patient! [ovation] He's not the type to stand up and takeabout but trust me. Toward the end of a book i'm not that easy to livewith. Yes Neil would bear witness to the fact that for weeks, really...it felt like a bereavement. I knew it was coming. I was prepared, Iknew it would hurt, and it was huge. So, that's why I'm glad to be hereand talk about it. Thank you.
Voice: Excuse me, Ms. Rowling?
JKR: Hello.
Voice: I have a question.
JKR: God? [laughter] And they say I don't believe in you! [Ovation.]
Voice: May I approach teh stage?
JKR: Sorry, I missed that, what was that? You may approach the stage, I always wondered what oyu looked like.
Announcer: Actually I don't have a question but I do have a littlesurprise. [Explains that they've picked some more questions fromcompetition winners, randomly chosen to surprise sweepstakes winners.]
Q: Does Malfoy owe Harry a debt?
JKR: That's a great question and a lot of people wanted to know that.When Dumbledore said to Harry, Voldemort won't want a close associatewho is in your debt, I wasn't implying by that there was any kind ofmagical bond there. It was more that Dumbldore's extensive wisdom andknowledge of human nature, he knew as Harry later thinks in book seven,he knew that Pettigrew would react a certain way to having saved hislife. ... He's weak, fundamentally weak. Pettigrew is a very weakcharacter. He's not someone I like at all. He's a weak person and helikes to gravitate to people who are stronger. Dumbledore is right.Pettigrew had an impulsive mercy... would Malfoy e in Harry's debt? Ithink the very worst burden Harry could have put Malfoy under was thisone, that Malfoy has to feel any kind of gratitude. So I tried to showthat slightly in the epilogue when they look slightly at each other andthere's a, "Hi. It's so embarrassing, you saved my life. No one willever let me forget it." I think, does he owe him a debt, probably not.I think Malfoy would go back to being an improved version of what hewas but we shouldn't expect him to be a really great guy any time soon.
Q: Harry often wondered about his parents lives before he died. Whatdid Lily, James, Remus, Lupin and Sirius do after Hogwarts?
JKR: To take Remus first, Remus was unemployable. Poor Lupin, prior toDumbledore taking him in, lead a really impoverished life because noone wanted to employ a werewolf. The other three were full-time membersof the Order of the Phoenix. If you remember when Lily, James and co.were at school, the first war was raging. It never reached the heightsthat the second war reached, because the Ministry was never infiltratedto that extend but it was a very bad time, the same disappearances, thesame deaths. So that's what they did, they left school. James has gold,enough to support Sirius and Lily. So I suppose they lived foff aprivate income. But they were full-time fighters, that's what they did,until Lily fell pregnant with Harry. So then they went into hiding.
Q: Did Hagrid ever get married and have children?
[Aww from crowd] JKR: Oh, did Hagrid ever get married and havechildren? No. [awwws again] I may change that immediately due to thelook on your face. Yes! He had 22! - No, no, Hagrid never did marry andhave children. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. Oh I feel terrible now.I'll write another book! [Ovation] Realistically, Hagrid's pool ofpotential girlfriends is extremely limited. Because with the giantskilling each other off, the number of giantesses around isinfinitesimal and he met one of the only, and I'm afraid, she thoughthe was kind of cute, but she was a little more, how should I put it,sophisticated than Hagrid. So no, bless him. [Awws] I kept him alive,come on! [Applause.]
Q: Is Severus Snape's portrait in the headmaster's office? JKR: Somehave been asking why hasn't the portrait appeared immediately. Itdoesn't. The reason is that the perception in the castle itself andeveryone who was in the castle, because Snape kept his secret so wellwas that he abandoned his post. So all the portraits you see in theheadmaster's study are all headmasters and mistresses who died, it'slike British royals. You only get good press if you die in office.Abdication is not acceptable, particularly if you marry and American.I'm kidding! [laughter] I digress. I know, because I thought this onethrough, because it was very important to me, I know Harry would haveinsisted that Snape's portrait was on that wall, right besideDumbledore's. [Applause.] As for whether Harry would go back to talk tohim, I think, I'm not sure he would have done. Snape, I was really [?]the week after I finished the book. And I went to a chat room - not achat room, what am I talking about? [laughter] I never go in chatrooms. I went onto a fan site because I was looking for questions toput up on my Web site, which is sometimes difficult. And I was soheartened to see that people on the message boards that people werestill arguing about Snape. The book was out, and they were stillarguing whether Snape was a good guy But that was really wonderful tome, because there's a question there, was Snape a good guy or not? Inmany ways he really wasn't. SoI haven't been deliberately misleadingeveryone all this time, when I say that he's a good guy. Because eventhough he did love and he loved very deeply and he was very brave, bothqualities that I admire above anything else. He was bitter and he wasvindictive... but right at the very very end, he did, as your questionacknowledges, acheive a kind of peace together and I tried to show thatin the epilogue.