THANK YOU For Justifying My Belief That HP Is Very Much Not Straight

THANK YOU for justifying my belief that HP is very much not straight

Hi, I've seen your reply to jalesidor's post on how fandom becomes ever more important the more one realises how disappointing jkr is. In it, you spoke about how both Harry and Draco are queer-coded in canon. Would you mind to expand on that? Or if you already have, would you mind linking that post or the tag under which I can find it? Absolutely no pressure to do so, just if you like! Thank you!

Hi anon! Sorry for the delay in answering; I wanted to do the question justice. I could have thrown some stuff at you off the top of my head, but that didn’t feel right—at my core, I am a Ravenclaw, and I could not bring myself to half-ass this. (For those who haven’t seen the referenced post, you can find it here)

Before I get into my personal analysis, I want to note that there has been a lot of discourse on this topic over the years, so many of my ideas didn’t actually originate with me, they just got incorporated into my mental cache of HP analysis. If you search the tags “canon drarry” or “drarry in canon” or any variation thereon, you’ll get a bunch of posts where people pull excerpts and explain how extremely not heterosexual the things happening in them are. @iamnmbr3 in particular has written a ton of these (which I didn’t realize were all by the same person until I started trying to track them down!), a few favorites being Arthur Weasley clearly thinking Harry’s got a crush, this hilarious list of canonical interactions, Narcissa’s very accurate understanding of how aware Harry and Draco are of each other, and that time Harry got beaned in the head by luggage because he was watching Draco change. Others classics include when @big-draco-energy got an ask about how Harry assumed that Draco must be a Death Eater if he was preoccupied enough to not care about their rivalry (and was right) and when @northward had a great observation about their obsessions with each other.

Seriously, this scene, y’all!

Possibly the most quoted line in Drarry fandom

And now, on to my own thoughts!

So first off, I want to say that some of the things that I’m going to flag as unintentional queer coding are rooted in stereotypes, and that that doesn’t mean that I believe in or condone said stereotypes. However, media often uses stereotyping as a lazy shorthand, and I think that that should be taken into account in this context, because it means there’s a reasonable assumption that people would interpret some character traits and scenes through that lens.

Secondly, so much credit to my amazing friend @mxmaneater, who actually HAS A FOLDER of photos of super gay moments from the books, which saved me a lot of time trying to dig up quotes that I knew existed but wouldn’t have been able to easily track down.

And finally, these are my personal interpretations. I’m not any sort of academic, and we’re all aware that JKR does not believe that she wrote Harry or Draco as queer. I’m hoping folks can be chill and take this in the spirit that it’s intended: as one possible reading. Your beliefs about the series and the characters are your own, and I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong just because they aren’t mine, so please extend me the same courtesy!

Now, without further ado, here we go:

Let’s start with Harry, because that’s the easier lift here. The Harry Potter books are written from a third person limited perspective, which means we only see things from Harry’s point of view and are privy to his thoughts. I can’t find a link, but I know that it’s widely quoted that JKR at some point used the fact that the books are from Harry’s perspective as justification for the ways in which some people or events were portrayed. The answers on this Quora post about pro-Gryffindor bias in the books do a good job of explaining the idea of Harry’s point of view skewing the point of view of the series.

So if we accept that the books reflect Harry’s thoughts and feelings about things, we’re left with the unmistakable fact that he frequently observes how handsome various boys and men are. We have physical descriptions of Cedric Diggory, Bill Weasley, Sirius Black, and even Tom Riddle that clearly illustrate admiration. Additionally, although it’s largely unflattering, it’s often noted amongst fans that we get full physical descriptions of Draco extremely regularly—we know his hair and eye color pretty much from the get go and hear about them often, as well as his outfits, his swagger, his smirking and ‘leering’ (yes, she really uses that word), etc.

Some very heterosexual observations on men from the perspective of one Harry James Potter

Sure, Harry never explicitly says he’s into men, but let’s keep in mind the time period the books were placed in and the type of family that Harry was raised by: there is a very real chance that Harry wouldn’t have been aware of the idea of bisexuality and therefore would never have questioned his own orientation. Because he knew he liked girls, so of course he wasn’t gay! To many folks who later realized they were some form of not-straight, particularly bisexual and/or pansexual folks, this is a pretty common experience: not really registering that checking out people of multiple genders is not actually something that everyone does. *Stares vaguely into the distance while pondering all of the girls I didn’t realize I was crushing on until many years later*

Plus, as I’ve mentioned before, there’s the symbolism of the whole ‘literally being raised in a closet, abused for being a ‘freak’, and forced to keep his truth a secret because the people he lived with were ashamed of him’ thing. To queer people raised by homophobes (or anyone who knew people in that situation), this isn’t even the slightest bit subtle, and the fact that JKR either didn’t notice or is in denial about it is truly bizarre to me.

Draco is a little harder to pin down without delving into stereotyping, so I’m just gonna go for it: Draco is a textbook Drama Gay™. He’s performative in his speech, using a lot of flamboyant gestures; he constantly performs over the top reenactments for his friends; he makes buttons and sews costumes and does drawings and generally just goes through a lot of effort to pick on his ‘rival’. The only scenes where we see him in something that could be read as a heterosexual romantic relationship are with Pansy Parkinson, whom he doesn’t seem remotely interested in; she reads more like a prop that he puts up with to project a particular image. Also, at one point we see him flopped across her lap to have his hair pet, which is definitely a thing that I remember happening during rehearsals back when I was involved in high school theater (and almost never by people with compatible orientations).

And then there’s this scene:

Someone once made a post about just how gay this whole thing is: pointedly grabbing the biggest bowtruckle, whispering in Harry’s ear, smirking over his shoulder while walking away, etc. (If anyone can find it, please send me the link and I’ll add it to the list of other people’s thoughts that contributed to all of this.)

So, that’s what I’ve got for you! Someone could probably write a whole research paper on this (and hell, maybe they have), but hopefully this at least somewhat explains my assertions of queer coding. As a reward for reading all of this, please enjoy a bonus scene of Harry NOT being attracted to a man:

Poor Ron. Maybe next time, buddy.

JK Rowling: Don't be fooled, Draco may not be pure evil, but he dosen't have a heart of gold deep down. Me: Yeah, ok. But how about if ignore that.

JK Rowling is hilarious bc on the one hand she says stuff like that, but on the other hand she’s the one who wrote Draco the ways she did. 

She’s the author. She made him be torn apart by the reality of being a Death Eater. She made him ultimately turn his back on everything he’d been taught to believe in. She made him choose to disarm, rather than kill on the Astronomy Tower - a direct parallel to Harry. She made him risk everything - his life, his family’s lives, the last hope they had to regain their lost prestige - by lying to protect Harry at the Manor. 

She also wrote Harry as someone who constantly, obsessively notices every little detail of Draco Malfoy’s appearance and mood from when he’s subdued to the specific way he walks to how his hair gleams in the sunlight to the clothes he wears and when he’s added a new item to his wardrobe and the tinge his skin turns when he’s feeling ill. She did that. She had Harry drop everything to save Draco in the Room of Requirement (literally - he event forgot about the Horcrux for a little while). And she had Draco overcome his cowardice and instinct for self-preservation when faced with the possibility that Harry might die. 

I’m sorry JK. Did you read your own books? Draco not only deserved a redemption arc, he actually got one. Also he and Harry have been dysfunctionally pining for seven years and by the end of the books they have evolved to the point where they can finally be together. 

And you know what? Right after the battle Harry gave Draco his wand back and then they sat and talked properly for the first time. And that conversation led to another and another and to soft whispered confidences in the early hours of the morning and to careless laughter and kisses and love and all the happiness that neither of them had in their childhoods. Epilogue whom? Don’t know the bitch. 

The perfect crossover

based off that one bob's burgers scene

Oh look it's me

Look. It’s not that I mind all those characterizations of Draco as super cool and collected and suave and unflappable and always in control. I just kinda suspect that maybe Draco wrote them. Bc that’s how he wants to be seen, but in truth this is the person who got scratched by a hippogriff and started rolling around on the ground yelling “it’s killed me. look at me. i’m dying.” and who smashed a glass during a charms exam because his crush Harry walked into the room and he got distracted looking at him. 

Hot take: postwar (and post Seamus Finnegan), Hogwarts no longer trusts first- or second-year students with open flame. No more cauldrons in Potions; instead, they use modified slow cookers.

Burn accidents decrease. Snape fumes silently from his portrait in the corner of the Potions classroom. All is well.

Did I get a tumblr just so I could follow all the fests? Noooooooo, definitely not (but yes)

DTH 2021: Lithe and Lean, Bonny and Gay (FIC)

Title: Lithe and Lean, Bonny and Gay Author: honeydewinter Prompt: Everybody knows that pretty, posh Draco goes for the big, burly, masculine types. Harry makes the same assumption as everybody else, until one day he walks in on something that shows him just how wrong he was. Draco remaining his posh, lithe, well-dressed self. Summary: Everybody knows that pretty, posh Draco goes for the big, burly, masculine types. Harry makes the same assumption as everybody else, until one day he walks in on something that shows him just how wrong he was. Rating: Explicit Warning(s): N/A Word Count: 6716 Author's Notes: Thank you for reading!

(Lithe and Lean, Bonny and Gay)