Not to mention the strict gender segregation in the dormitories, at the dance, etc....and the boggart-defeating hilarity of Snape in Neville's grandmother's dress (granted, yes, we may also talking about a more socially-accepted ageism in poking fun at old-lady fashion)... There is little wiggle room within the binary-gendered, heterosexual assumptions at Hogwarts.
As for how to introduce a bit more of the queer, it needn't be presented by a student, even. A teacher or a member of the Order would be a sufficient first step. Forget werewolf metaphors for difference, misunderstanding, and ravaging diseases.....let's bring out the big guns, JK.
PS. Rowling rhymes with bowling.
You know, I bet she thought about it and asked herself the same questions you asked yourself. While inclusion of a queer character would have been fun, the possibilities for backlash, and the amount of space and subplot it would require, would be huge. Besides, a good portion of Harry Potter is left up to the imagination of the reader. Not everything is explained, even in the last book. Therefore we as readers can assume that if statistics are any indication one or more of the characters would be queer. Hogwarts is a big school, after all.
And, when we use our own imagination to determine which characters are queer in the books, things are much more fun. Personally, I'm cheering for Severus Snape, Viktor Krum, Madam Hooch and Professor Grubbly-Plank.
You may be interested in Bronski's piece in the Boston Phoenix from a few years back, about how Harry Potter may not be gay, but he is pretty queer:
http://bostonphoenix.com/boston/...ts/
02977459.htm
re: Cray - while i agree with a lot of your points, i still think that, particularly with movies for some reason, there's a lot of pressure to diversify the cast. for example, if harry potter didn't have any racial minorities, i think they would have been under a LOT of heat -- yet, notice that in the book that there are RARELY any racialized descriptions. why shouldn't this pressure also apply to queer peeps?
also, can i rant again for a second about how JK Rowling basically jerry maguired us into the final thought: marriage + children = the ideal future?
That's a good point that there are few racial minorities described in the books. Perhaps that means JKR was ignoring them, in a good way. Does that make sense? She was writing a book about Harry Potter and magic, not race and queers. It wouldn't matter to the plotline if Harry was a black, Jewish tranny fag with a differently-abled lesbian polyam mom. He still would have been 'The Boy Who Lived.'
As far as the movies go, I pay no attention. The 'movie people' have always screwed over the queer community (and for that matter POCs too) and will continue to until something changes.
And for marriage, and the strict gender binary/roles in the book, that's kind of tricky. While it certainly looks pretty narrow-minded and all that jazz, the Wizarding community is pretty old-school, so one could expect their to be ridged gender roles and all that comes with those. However, we have to look at some other issues before making a final judgment on this topic. Half of Hogwart's founders were female, and numerous powerful Healers in the books were female. Professor McGonagall (Hogwarts glass ceiling as another point for another day) was by far one of the stronger characters in the book, and Mrs. Weasley used the 'worst' curse word in the entire series. Perhaps the Wizarding community is just waiting for its suffragettes and gender radicals, just as the Western world did in the early 1900s.
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