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Twitter users have joked about J. K. Rowling retconning everything from the Sorting Hat’s disinterest in sex (though, it can fuck), to Buckbeak the Hippogriff’s casual BDSM curiosity, to a great number of details about Dobby the house elf’s genitalia.
the generation that grew up alongside Harry Potter has grown up to be the gayest generation to date17 (only to then be handily out-gayed by Gen Z).
Dumbledore, the Wise Gay.
“Indeed, I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt,” Ulrichs wrote of his coming out, which is objectively metal as fuck.
We have a difficult time talking about kids playing doctor or masturbating or being curious or turned on in any way. It’s weird, it’s gross, it feels borderline predatory and pedophilic to even acknowledge that elementary schoolers have their own sexualities. Even writing about it, I feel a knee-jerk yikes on the topic.
And since culturally, we hadn’t untied the Gay Community in popular society’s mind from the image of hedonistic, meth-induced orgies in Berlin sex dungeons, there was no space for gay teenagers on Disney Channel.
I kept trying to find my place on that goddamn Futch Scale meme. And when I couldn’t, I felt sad that there was some supposedly core sense of my own identity that I didn’t have a handle on.
In other words: I wanted to U-Haul.
When a long-term relationship ends, the evidence for why two people don’t work is usually right in front of you; you’ve given it an honest shot, and it didn’t work. But lost potential felt like a referendum on what I’d admitted I wanted and why I didn’t deserve it.
I floored it in relationships because I craved self-worth. I spent much of my adolescence waiting for my life to start and thought that falling in love was the starting gun of real life.