Reading the Dumbledore article and some of the posts has me asking, "What year is this?" Have we not moved beyond thinking of gay people as aberrant and mono-stereotypical? Yes, Ms. Rowling had in mind that Dumbledore was gay as she created the character and wrote from that perspective. Yes, we gay folks missed it too--proving our gaydar isn't much better than straight folks', particularly when it comes to fictional characters! But she certainly created a gay character in a way that probably differs from the way that Mr. Weisberg (or several posters) would. She didn't use phrases such as "accused of aberrant sexual practices" and "flamboyantly gay character." Dumbledore's gayness was realized only in references to his affection for another man. Period. As for Winky Tinky, when the Teletubbies played only in Great Britain, I remember reading that the Winky Tinky character was created to point out that we can have differences and tolerate each other's differences--hence the different antenna and the purse (or 'murse,' since WT is a boy). Only when the show hit the US shores did the American producers deny that there was anything different about WT. Right.

It's 2007. Can we begin to tolerate differences and not resort to identifying something different as 'aberrant" and focus on the presumed flamboyance of gay folks? (Paraphrasing Sienfeld: "Not that there's anything wrong with flamboyance.")