The sex secrets of ‘Harry Potter’
J.K. Rowlings’ children series has gender magic
One day in June 1990, while on a train from Manchester to London, a young woman had an idea for a main character in a children’s story.
Recalling that first mental glimpse of Harry Potter, she said:
“Whether it was my stomach or my heart, I don’t know, but something turned over. It was a feeling I’d never had before — like seeing someone attractive from across the room.”
But I’m not sure if that’s the beginning of the story of J.K. Rowling and ‘Harry Potter’.
It might start on July 31, 1965, when a girl was born in South Gloucestershire, England. Her parents were horrified. As their first child, Pete and Anne Rowling had wanted a boy.
They had a name ready, ‘John’, but reluctantly changed it to ‘Joanne’.
She grew up the shadow of the boy she ‘should’ have been.
She kept thinking she should be, as she’d put it, “the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.”
She would view her thought processes as being distorted by the experience of navigating her parents’ yearnings for the John she couldn’t be. As a result she grew up “mentally sexless,” she’d say.
It was state she found reflected back in certain books, like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. She “met” herself, she’d say, in the character of Jo March, the ‘tomboy’ who becomes a writer.
Joanne took to going by the name “Jo.”
As a teenager she loved Punk music and style.
The idea of ‘dark’ costumery that disguised gender was interesting to her. She particularly liked Siouxsie Sioux, and dressed like the singer, with heavy eyeliner. She’d look back on the period as feeling, as she put it, “anxiety around my body.”
She recalls thinking some female friends were pretty. Did that mean she was lesbian? “I questioned my sexuality,” she’d recall.
A name she never mentions is David Bowie, and yet for all her interest in androgyny and she surely knew of the British popstar very well. Indeed, when she says she first saw Harry Potter one might examine the memory.
She did not see a boy — she saw a man.
That seems to be clear in the romantic suggestion she gives to the first idea of Harry. In a 2001 interview with the BBC, she again discussed the moment in sexual terms:
“It was that incredibly elated feeling you get when you’ve just met someone with whom you might eventually fall in love.”
She is not confessing to pedophile tendencies. Rather, she indicates she is seeing her character as a man. Details would fill in, like a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead.
Doesn’t that sound like David Bowie?
If looking for the origins of Harry Potter, one could hardly ignore the famed cover of Bowie’s 1973 Aladdin Sane album.
There are more possible links to Bowie.
Rowling’s story will end up being about a boy of androgynous or possible gay disposition becoming a straight married guy. That was also David Bowie’s story.
He had been straight as of 1969, then says goodbye to his girlfriend in “Letter to Hermoine,” and embarks on a career as a gender-bending freak.
A few years later, he swore the sexual freakery off, and said he’d realized that he was straight all along.
In early 1990, Bowie was much in the media.
He’d just toured the British isles on his Sound+Vision tour (and would return in August for more dates in England). The theme of the tour was a career retrospective as he said he’d never again play his early songs.
A promotional image used for the tour had Bowie standing in front of his Aladdin Sane album. It was the mature heterosexual part of him saying goodbye to his younger self.
If reading Harry Potter as a gay-to-straight storyline seems unusual, let’s follow the cues.
Early on, at least, there is something rather girlish about Harry. He’s ever feeling, sensitive, ‘fragile’, and different than his friends Ron and Hermione, who are more traditionally gendered.
Rowling wondered if she should make Harry a girl. She’d recall: “By the time I thought about it, it was too late to change him.”
Female readers often identify with Harry. His story is a female story. He’s a male Cinderella, in being a poor orphan whose life is transformed by magic and he has adventures that get him to the point of being married.
“Harry, in essence, is a boy caught in a girl’s story,” as the scholars Ximena Gallardo C. and C. Jason Smith trace in a 2003 paper on ‘gender trouble’ in Rowling’s work.
The wizarding world in Rowling’s work is given overt queer suggestion.
The set-up is that a secret subculture of magical people exist who keep just out of sight of regular people. When regular people see them and think about them, the words used are period terms used for queer people.
Aunt Petunia says magical people are “abnormal.” Other words used of magical people: “freak,” “strange,” “abnormal,” or “their kind.”
The magical world reads, then, as a fictionalized version of the ‘gay world’, an alternate set of businesses and locations — from bars to bookstores — that would’ve been thought walled off from the regular world.
Harry can seem…magically androgynous?
He is identified with the magical object at the center of the first book’s plot. The Philosopher’s Stone is associated in alchemical lore with androgyny.
He can also seem just gay. He lives in a ‘cupboard’. Isn’t that like a ‘closet’? In a 2007 paper, the therapist David Nylund would recall a session with a young gay man who’d been reading the books, and finding his own story.
“I think Harry is sort of coming out in a way.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, he’s an outcast in his own family. He is abused by the Dursleys because he is different . . . sort of like me,” Steven reflected.
Harry seems to like a girl, but their first kiss is experienced as just “wet.”
He tells his friends: “She was the one who started it…she just sort of came at me…I didn’t know what to do.”
Though the two will not kiss, Harry seems to have an infatuation for Cedric Diggory, a student who is called “extremely handsome” and “exceptionally handsome.” Often talking in his sleep, Harry talks about Cedric. His cousin Dudley mocks him: “Who’s Cedric — your boyfriend?”
Rowling herself was trying to be straight.
She recalls the period as making a huge effort to normalize herself. She married and had a daughter.
But the feminine rituals of domesticity — including domestic violence — weren’t working for her.
In 1993, she divorced her husband and moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, to be near her younger sister. Rowling then found herself a single mother on welfare. A depression came over her. It might seem that she’d gone through all the gendered scripts that were offered to her, and none were for her.
She thought she’d train to be a schoolteacher. But she gave herself two years to finish the first Harry Potter book. Though it’d eventually be, she thought, seven books. Harry would start out a poor orphan, and in the end be a hero, grown and married.
Rowling celebrates the process of growing up, and would speak in interviews of loathing Peter Pan, the eternal boy. “I find it a sinister idea,” she says in 2000. “I wouldn’t want to go back to childhood.”
It’s tempting to think of Harry Potter as Rowling’s own male self.
It’s been a fan theory. As one put it, he can seem to be “the male version of Rowling herself during her adolescence.”
But Harry’s two friends, Ron and Hermione, could each be read as aspects of ‘Jo’ Rowling. In interview she would stress her identification with Hermoine as a “caricature of what I was at eleven.” She explains: “A right little know it all. But underneath very insecure.”
Ron Weasley could be Rowling’s male side.
The Weasley family has Rowling’s own appearance, with red hair.
It’s not unusual for her to invest herself in male characters. When discussing her next pseodonym ‘Robert Galbraith’, she says: “To be honest, I think I’m quite blokey — at least I’m told I am — and I like writing both.”
She seems to conceive of herself as male and female, with Harry being the point in between.
Harry’s problem is that he was sexually abused.
The lighting scar on his forehead came from a violent interaction with the evil Lord Voldemort. The two keep being drawn toward each other, abuser to victim, and their eventual meeting is given overt shadings of sexual molestation.
I was startled to read that case made in a 2014 paper by Antonio Sanna. He traces how Voldemort’s invasion of Harry’s mind and body uses the language of sexual violence.
After it happens, Harry feels “dirty, as though he were carrying some deadly germ…” A shadow of HIV?
Rowling sat writing in cafés in Edinburgh.
She has never mentioned David Bowie as an influence, but fans have noticed curious affinities to his 1986 movie Labyrinth. The names ‘Hogwart’, ‘Hedgewart’ and ‘Hoggy Hogwarts’ float by, plus an owl figures into the plot.
Rowling finished Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1995. It was rejected by twelve publishers, then accepted by a small publisher called Bloomsbury after the CEO’s 8-year-old daughter picked up the manuscript, read it, and approved of it.
The typical audience, however, was seen as boys, so there was concern about her name. Rowling recalls the publisher telling her: “we think we’re not sure boys will want to read a book by a woman.”
She became ‘J.K. Rowling’ and her book was published in 1997.
Early on she was perceived as a male writer.
Rowling would recall her first fan letter — from a girl — began: “Dear Sir…”
Then when the book became a hit, as she’d put it, “no one could pretend I was a man anymore.”
And so J.K. Rowling debuted as a woman.
As Voldemort developed, did he seem…Bowie-ish?
Rowling’s second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, introduces Voldemort as a “handsome” teenage boy named Tom Riddle who refers to himself by initials: T.M. Riddle. As initials conceal gender for J.K. Rowling, Tom seems to be ‘unmanning’ himself.
The ‘queerish’ cues pile up. Tom Riddle has an uncanny ability to manipulate older men. The homoerotic cues remind me of a teenage David Bowie in Christopher Sanford’s 1996 biography Bowie: Loving the Alien.
The photo of Bowie on the cover of Sanford’s book might even oddly resemble Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies.
In photos as of 1998 Rowling was looking like a lesbianish college student.
But she began to play with her image. Around 1999, she did several photo shoots in which she was styled as a ‘witch’, as if a character in her books.
Appearance by appearance, she seemed more ‘female’ all the time.
A 2007 fan discussion calls it the “magical transformation of J.K. Rowling.” It might be described, as Simone de Bouvouir would say, as ‘becoming a woman’.
She married and seemed happily matronly.
Though she’d on occasion do public appearances in mannish attire.
As she’d developed the Harry Potter plot, there were a lot of queer cues.
Indeed, it’s surprising how much the books read as a queer narrative. In 2007, Rowling said publicly that Harry’s elder mentor, Albus Dumbledore, was gay. She had “always thought” of him this way.
The character probably read to most as daffily sexless, but his homosexuality is implied going back at least to 2003 in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The tabloid reporter Rita Skeeter mentions Dumbledore’s “murky past” and thinks him not “exactly broad-minded.”
The word ‘broad’ is functioning as a pun for a ‘woman’.
Skeeter insinuates that Dumbledore’s interest in Harry is an “unnatural interest,” and might be “unhealthy, even sinister.” It seems Dumbledore is seen in the wizarding world as a gay pedophile.
Rowling would later evoke Dumbledore’s early romance with another wizard, Gellert Grindelwald.
Grindelwald had wanted to disclose the existence of magical people to the regular world. Like a gay activist on steroids, he wanted to ‘out’ everyone, but also then to dominate regular people.
In sympathy with regular people, Dumbledore then had to battle his lover. The effort left him hollowed out.
As the history of Rowling’s magical world can seem to be a fictionalized version of queer history, one might be thinking of real-life Victorian models for the two — like Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas?
A 1997 bio-pic, Wilde, seems to weave into Rowling’s work. The actor playing Wilde, Stephen Fry, was her first audiobook reader. Jude Law, playing Douglas, would play Dumbledore in the Fantastic Beasts movies.
In 2020, when Rowling began to comment on transgender issues, many fans were confused.
Somehow there was an expectation that she would be accepting of trans issues? I think the opposite was true: that Rowling was always conservative, and the the purpose of the story was to rid Harry of his queerness.
But how heterosexual is the story, in the end? One could only be disappointed by the finale. It’s not clear that Harry and the red-haired Ginny Weasley — who looks rather like Rowling herself — ever do fall in love. Their movements around each other are just so awkward.
Daniel Radcliffe, the actor playing Harry, wrapped up his work on the movies by saying his “dream role” would be David Bowie. 🔶
