Why I Can't Read Harry Potter Right Now

From the wilds of Wisconsin in a blog devoted to Southern Queer things, maybe it's only fitting I throw all geography to the wind and simply write about Harry Potter.

I have a Harry Potter tattoo. Right arm, below the elbow, "inside" so that when I'm out for a run, I can turn my wrist out and see it. This placement was the point—the tattoo reads "Expecto Patronum," which is a spell one can only conjure by thinking of your happiest memory. In the series, a patronus has some crazy powers (apparently, they can even be directed to hide swords in the bottoms of lakes). They are first introduced to readers in Book 3, The Prisoner of Azkaban, when the Dementors ostensibly on the look-out for Sirius Black take a fancy to Harry, so Remus teaches him the patronus spell. A Dementor does not like a patronus. Happiness is anathema to them. The spell and the shining white spirit animal associated with it function as a shield against darkness. Only later in the does the role of a patronus turn into something like a shiny minion. 

One of the most brilliant things about the Harry Potter series is the elegance of its metaphors. Dementors are only visible to the magically inclined, but even muggles can feel their presence. For wizards, the Dementor is a physical being that would like to "kiss" its victims, drawing out their soul and leaving them in a lifeless catalepsy, not unlike a victim of the most severe depression unable even to believe in happiness, much less feel it, much less respond to it at all.

Non-wizards do not see the Dementors in their ragged, floating awfulness. Muggles only feel them, as if all the happiness has gone from the world. No mere pleasant memories can wade through and overpower the sensation of a Dementor. Only the most powerful memories, summoned from some deep place down inside that is below the superficial layers shadowed by the initial encounter with these demons, can push them back. A patronus has enormous power. Conjuring one is no easy task.

The metaphor is clear; the metaphor is never blunt nor boringly allegorical. The Dementor—a word that combines "demented" and "tormentor"—represents depression, something that can visit anyone, not just the magically inclined. A patronus is something inside of us (selfhood? a soul? the most naked and personal memory of one untouchable moment of inner joy?) that we can use to fight back against the darkness of depression.

No doubt, depression can smother even those perceived as immune to it or too strong to succumb to its gravity. Without powerful assistance, we can all fall victim to the Dementor's kiss. A patronus is not Zoloft nor a suicide hotline, both of which are some of the resources those who suffer from depression can call on sans magical powers—in a world without magic, one can't simply will the Dementors away. Still, a patronus can save you that one time, in that one dark moment; it can be the stay against absolute darkness. To call on your patronus takes extreme effort. When you are under fire from more than one Dementor, a lone patronus can only do so much. At that last moment, right when the darkness seems almost completely unbearable, as we wait for a hero to save us ("expecto patronum" translates as "I need a hero" from Latin, btw), it is worth remembering, though, that the patronus is inside us. We save ourselves. In that last spark of a survival instinct, what emerges can be a thing of such splendid beauty. It can save your life (because it is your life; and that's the thing of beauty—a patronus is very much like reaching into the darkness for a hero and grasping your own hand).  

I got the tattoo for a general pick-me-up in the late stages of a long run. I had hopes of running another marathon, though as I prepared for the specific marathon in question, as always happens to me when I train for a marathon, as soon as I made it over ten miles on my long runs, I once again realized a marathon is a long way. I had previously attempted three marathons. I finished only one, of which I walked eleven miles. In this case, I was aiming for a marathon just over the Mississippi River in Dubuque in honor of veterans and active-duty soldiers. I wanted to run the marathon, without making a big deal of my more personal motives, in honor of a friend from high school who had died not during her tours of duty in our current endless wars but back home as a result of a drug overdose. From my understanding, based on what I was told when the news finally reached me about her death, she and members of her regiment had gotten into some hardcore drugs during their deployments and used them upon returning stateside to cope or adjust or escape, or something like that. One night she OD'd. I don't think about her death every day, but when it does cast a shadow over my inner vision, it does so as a simple question: how is it possible that I am living in a world in which she is no longer present? It is a question I cannot make sense of. When it crosses my mind, it seems like all happiness has gone from the world, having left with her departure from it.

I also got the tattoo because I love Harry Potter—every book in that series is magical to me. I did not read them until I was in college, until I worked at a Books-a-Million when Book 6 was released and I helped with the festivities for the midnight release party. Familiar with the story from the films, I bought a copy, sat down to read it, and failed to eat for the next 12 hours. I didn't go to bed either. I sat up enthralled. When I finished it, I went downstairs and pilfered my mom's copies  of the other books (she was an early convert and has a full collection of first edition hardcovers—in fact, I had bought Book 6 for her). I started at the beginning. For the next five days, I loathed falling asleep. My mom would call up for dinner, and I'd scorn to come downstairs. By Book 5, I was so totally into the story that I was having violent reactions—the mere presence of Dolores Umbridge on a page filled me with venom and hate (as an English major who had plans to attend grad school, I could step back enough, even during that first reading of the series, to respect a writer capable of creating so entirely loathsome a character). The death of Sirius, with whom we spend considerably more time in the novels than the films, crushed me, even though I knew it was coming. The metaphor of that crushing moment—passing through an arch to oblivion—would be worth a lengthy blogpost of its own.

But to speak of Sirius and metaphor brings me back to the patronus. The scene from the books I love the most—a scene that is translated very well into to film—is the ending of Book 3, when Harry saves Sirius (and himself) from the Dementors. The metaphors in this scene run deep, and they also highlight one of the most striking aspects of the series to me: its profound embrace of queer self-affirmation.

Throughout the novel, Harry has assumed Sirius murdered his parents, but upon slowing down enough to listen to Remus (and meet Peter Pettigrew out of his mouse costume), he realizes just how wrongly he has viewed his own personal history—as if all he thought he knew about his life had only been received through external sources telling him their speculative but entrenched narrative, which must always be correct because, through repetition, it has become compulsory. There were certain bad guys and good guys. The (male) friend of Harry's father must obviously have betrayed him; such conclusions are easier to reason than allowing for more feelings than just the flow of heterosexual desires between men and women and masculine competitiveness between men and men. But we are all wrong, as Harry comes to discover. Sirius, emblematic of your garden-variety gay uncle, has been swept away from any direct contact with Harry. He is the bad guy! Harry internalizes his pain associated with his lost parents and then externalizes it not only on "he who must not be named" (only a minor rephrasing of another famous phrase of avoidance and elision) but by directing it to Sirius. He doesn’t know better. He is reacting with the only emotions that he has been taught.

The power of Harry's anger matters. Only with so much emotion at stake can the scene of Sirius's salvation occur. Harry discovers he is wrong. He begins to see for the first time the deep rivalries and passions of not just Sirius, Peter, and Remus but also the abiding hatred Snape directs towards him. Indeed, Harry looks so much like his father that, at a glance, you'd almost think Harry was his father James (except for those eyes, of course). Then, in the moment of this sudden recognition, which carries with it the full weight of realizing not only that is he not alone in this world but that he, Harry Potter, boy in the closet under the stairs, is also loved—even by a man who has not seen him since he was a baby, with a love that is, simply, unconditional—at that moment, he loses him. Or thinks he does. Beside a pond in the Forbidden Forest, the Dementors crowd Sirius and Harry. They come in close—there are too many of them—they overwhelm the sputtering sparks of Harry's meager patronus. They lean in to deliver to Sirius their shattering kiss.

When Harry wakes up in the infirmary, he swears he was saved by his father. A stag of a patronus comes sweeping in; off in the distance, a figure emerges that looks just like the pictures of James with which Harry has become familiar. However, as he and Hermione use her "I can be in two places at once" charm to repeat the events of the night, readers begin to realize who is really responsible for Harry's salvation. Harry, meanwhile, steadfastly refuses to reach that conclusion until there, off a distance from Sirius and his former self, he stands by a pond as he watches those Dementors circling their victims. He is waiting for his father to show up—some strange magic, no doubt—but he is also watching not only himself but also this new man who loves him dying. And that's when he realizes what has really happened. It was never James; it was always Harry. All the deep pain and heartache and loneliness of his entire life reverses its polarity in an instant. He steps out from his hiding place and, with a love so entire it is pure light that can overcome any darkness, he casts a patronus powerful enough to save the thing that brings him the most joy: the recognition that he is loved by someone, that he is not so alone.

Metaphors for accepting one's queer identity are strong in this sequence of events. Harry gains power by being loved and by recognizing that he is the author of his own salvation. Thus, he beats the demons away.

The appeal of this scene to queer readers resides in the lesson it encompasses, a lesson we all must learn, often on our own—minus when we queer kids are reading books about wizards. Perhaps non-queer readers don't quite get what I'm driving at here. Queer kids are rarely taught in schools or from parents (even loving parents) the basic ways to survive in this world. The world is made for muggles. Harry's aunt and uncle clearly represent a version of muggle guardianship that hates what makes a child special, that actively denies knowledge of self to a child, much to his detriment. However, the other side of the coin is also limited. Hermione's parents are delighted that she is a witch! They are just dentists, but they are thrilled by all the wonders of their daughter's magical world. Yet, there is only so much they can teach her about it. It is not their world. They know nothing of its history. They never read their daughter Beedle the Bard. They don't know the first thing about the flick of the wrist that makes a feather float, nor the magic words to summon such wonder.

All queer kids encounter one pervasive truth in our road to self-realization: when we want to know more about ourselves and what our identities can do to define us, we are on our own to discover it. In the most obvious way, it begins with the utter dearth of useful sex ed for queer sexual expression. It extends to the books we are told to read, the histories we are told to learn, the heroes of the values and morals on which we are told our society is founded—that we shall not tell lies (tut, tut, Harry Potter); that dreams belong to memorized speeches spoken only once a year; that everyone throughout all of history prior to "me" was obviously heterosexual. Period. Full stop. The lesson is clear: if I am gay, I am the first (and, they seem to hope, last) of my kind. I have no history. I represent nothing of value. What I do and with whom are things too perverse to discuss in school.  

But there are other lessons queer kids learn in the formative years of our self-discovery, hard fought and learned with more than a little pain, more than a little loneliness: that those words they call you are true, but they can mean more than a pejorative; that it is okay to dress differently than expected; that love is love is love is love—certainly a significant lesson that rarely finds affirmation in our mainstream institutions. And there are bigger realizations: that we should save our own money for a cabinet full of fine dinnerware and a kitchen full of appliances—our wedding registries might not work out so well as for couples more in line with social expectations, assuming we have weddings at all. That we must learn to recognize subtle clues of allyship and safe spaces—just as we can metaphorically tap an umbrella on a wall in a certain pattern to find the entrance to a secret world, we learn to figure out the meaning of gestures, contexts, smiles. Even the geography of our environment takes on new dimensions; new spaces create themselves. Then we realize that they were there all along, just passed by with limited acknowledgement by our muggle kin, so we, too, never learned to see it until we realize it is a space for us.  

Or more fundamentally, we learn that we will have to fight to defend the things in this world that matter most to us. Others won't see that which we hold sacred as sacred, that which we love as loved. The world expects its children to hit benchmarks that make each child like other children, following trajectories to selfhood on old, well-trodden paths. To be ourselves is to learn to love deeply the things we chose to love, the things and persons who matter to us. We also learn that we are the only one's who are truly committed to preserving that which we love in a world that either actively hates us or, at best, turns away in the banality of complete disregard.

These lessons undergird the ability to conjure a patronus. These are lessons one learns outside the daily lives and values of muggles, which may feel the chill of a dementor but which rarely understand the full magical power of the manifest lives of those who see the world through different lenses.

Or at least this is what I got out of reading Harry Potter. But then why would I not be able to read Harry Potter right now?

After a few minor incidents hinting at her convictions, in the summer of 2020, during a raging pandemic, the author of books that can be read with so much profound and moving queer energy finally pulled back her own mask. J. K. Rowling has recently retweeted rhetoric associated with the pernicious reactionary syndrome known as "Trans Exclusive Radical Feminism." Convert that last word to "feminists" and you get the abbreviation for members of this movement: TERF. Or, less laconically, "all your liberal friends when they realize that trans rights means sharing a bathroom, changing room, locker room, or experiences of gender discrimination." Then there is a pause, an inhalation, a shrugging of shoulders, perhaps even a spoken response: "Can't I just stick with Black Lives Matters? I'm not sure about all this other stuff." TERF rhetoric represents a significant ethical violation of the very nature of the queerness the Harry Potter books seem so wonderfully to endorse. Rowling has recently begun to amplify TERF rhetoric.

More pointedly, when called out for broadcasting this hateful rhetoric via her twitter account, Rowling wrapped herself in the cloak of victimhood and sided with scholars and thinkers (largely white, largely cisgender) lamenting the rise of "cancel culture." In fact, Rowling joined the academics and authors who signed the Harper's Magazine open letter against so-called "cancel culture" (for what it's worth, if people did, at this exact moment, stop purchasing, reading, and/or viewing every book she's written or film made from her work, she could live another fifty years as one of the wealthiest authors in recorded history—also, I'm pretty sure the next installment of Fantastic Beasts is in production and all the films and books are still available on Amazon).

At some point in the ancient past, Rowling threw a bone to gay fans and let slip that Dumbledore is a homosexual. However, in the films made for the Fantastic Beasts series, wherein Dumbledore is played by Jude Law, who on more than one occasion has played gay in his career, this part of the narrative is entirely implicit, existing only in veiled glances and ambiguous dialogue, as if a magical world prior to Voldemort was already well-versed in scary demons "that dare not speak its name." Worse, in The Cursed Child, the clearest, most explicitly gay relationship in all the published Potter universe—between Harry's and Draco's sons—is wiped away in a clumsy conclusion that traipses in a girl who has had, at best, an ancillary role in the narrative, thus using the triangles of pre-modern literary homoeroticism to craft the Deus ex Machina of safe heterosexuality. For surely, all stories end with a boy and girl falling in love which each other, right?  

One can feel at times as if the series is a giant practicum in gay-baiting, or at least that the metaphors and implications of the novels, having gotten too close to the surface and too potential, needed to be swept back into a cupboard, possibly under some cobwebby stairs.

And now Rowling, performative Petunia, has taken to sneering at trans identities without even a modicum of acceptance, not even a pretense of civility. But woe be the lamentations of a rich white woman when we humorless queers ask that she tone it down a bit. 

When I run these days, I don't really look down at my tattoo much, as originally intended. When I'm complimented on it, I offer thanks and try to conjure the magical feeling I had for the series. I think on that scene where Harry saves Sirius. I think on lessons I've learned in my queer life—that I must save what I love on my own, that nobody else will save it for me—and how deeply interwoven into one's self that source of joy must be to cast an effective patronus. And then I think about what the author of these exceptional books has taken to promoting. I flick my wrist, I speak the words, but no sparks fizzle. That little bit of darkness falls like a shadow, overwhelming my best intentions. I cast nothing. I can't even make a feather fly.