Chels

This week I’m rounding out my queer tropes series with one that’s quite annoying. It’s roasting hot, too, which really puts me in the mood to complain. Word of Gay is a play on Word of God – and the way you feel about the matter likely depends on where you sit regarding the death of the author debate.

If you’re unfamiliar, death of the author is not a threat (as some misinformed fans have claimed). The term refers to how far one believes authors’ intentions matter when it comes to a text. Some people believe that only what is written in the text matters, others take literary biography and authorial intent into account – for example, Mary Shelley’s diaries talk of a dream where her deceased infant is brought back to life shortly before she wrote Frankenstein, so the novel is often read as a manifestation of her grief. There’s an extension of authorial intent in the modern age – we have much more access to authors, and they have more access to their audience. They no longer have to release novels to share their views, they can simply join Twitter/X and clarify their intentions.

I sit, rather annoyingly, on the fence. I believe in death of the author to an extent – while I don’t care for retroactive clarifications, I am interested in literary biography, and those who research the topics provide real insight into deeper meanings of stories I love. What I do not believe in, is Word of God.

Word of God is the idea that the creator of a work has final say on meanings, clarifications, and disputes. Fans may directly ask creators for clarifications on meanings, or creators may release additional information over time. Word of Gay parodies this idea. It specifically refers to creators declaring a character to be queer outside of the canon material, often without ever acknowledging it in future stories.

The most famous example of this has to be JK Rowling and Dumbledore in Harry Potter. Way back in 2007, she revealed that Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts and father-figure to Harry, was actually gay. It was quite a revolutionary thing to say in 2007, only a few short years after Section 28 was repealed, and before we achieved marriage equality. There’s one problem, though – she said this after the publication of the final book in the series, and five films into the adaptation franchise. There’s no evidence of Dumbledore’s queerness in the books. The justification at the time was that they’re children’s books, so why should the headmaster be openly queer? Fair enough, it probably wouldn’t have fit in with the rest of the narrative, but when the plots revolve around an uprising of an extremist group, an attempted murder of an infant, and spells dedicated to torturing, killing, or controlling the mind of victims, the notion that a queer relationship being mentioned would be too mature for readers is laughable.

If the franchise had ended with the original series, the gay Dumbledore revelation would have likely remained as a piece of pub quiz trivia, unfortunately, Harry Potter is a giant moneymaker, so we’ve had multiple spinoffs. One of which is the Fantastic Beasts film series – one set several decades before the original story, and intended for older audiences. Dumbledore appears in the second of the series, with no mention of his queerness. The third film was given the subtitle The Secrets of Dumbledore, but it was quickly established that the film would not be delving into his private life. To be honest, the title felt a bit too close to queerbaiting, and after giving the first two films a go, I didn’t even bother watching the third. In the end, there were two references in dialogue referring to Dumbledore’s queerness, but there was no physical relationship between him and Grindelwald – despite the film taking place around the time Word of God Rowling decided they had been lovers.

To me, Word of Gay is just a way to score diversity points without having to put any effort in to create diverse characters. Of course, saying this often results in people arguing that it’s actually a good thing, because ‘gay people are just like everyone else, they don’t have to be different’. Yawn. I get the sentiment, but that’s not the point. You can’t just declare a character to be gay after the fact. And, I have a feeling those people wouldn’t have the same attitude to queer people claiming random characters as queer despite no evidence in the source material – to that, they’d say there’s no evidence, you can’t just decide they’re gay. 

Word of Gay was definitely a more successful marketing technique 20 years ago, when we were starved for representation, but these days, just asserting that a character is queer isn’t enough. People want to see our own stories reflected in the media we enjoy, we’re no longer satisfied by an off-screen or off-page revelation that adds nothing to a story.