#queer hp

I was wondering if anyone would like to read some of the fanfictions I've made of my OC and Snape?

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:

- remus is taller

- sirius loves sitting in his lap (especially when remus is studying)

- sirius is dramatic af and also makes sure to tell remus he loves him at least 5 times a day

- sirius is insecure about being too clingy/too much and remus is insecure about other people getting bored of him, so they kind of balance each other out (sirius can tell him how mush she loves him as much as she wants and not feel insecure about it)

- remus is mostly the one who cooks, but sirius does all the household stuff

- sirius is the first to wake up, and is always full of energy in the mornings

- sirius loves borrowing remus' big comfy sweaters

- remus reads aloud to sirius in the afternoons

- sirius is the only one who can read remus' mood changes, and when he's uncomfortable/panicked/annoyed/wants to be left alone, etc

- before they started dating, sirius would always get annoyed whenever he saw remus fake-flirting with james and couldn't figure out why

- james saw their relationship from a mile away

- lily also saw their relationship from a mile away, but she was a little more chill about it

- regulus sort of figured it out from how much sirius used to rant to him about how smart and funny and amazing remus lupin was when they were younger

- remus somehow always smells really, really good and has really soft skin

- sirius had a crush on remus since fourth year, at least

- sirius is the only one who calls him "moon", "moons", "moonshine" and every other version of his nickname

- remus reads to sirius in the middle of the night whenever she's had a panic attack/nightmare

- neither of them really ever wanted kids of their own, but they both adore harry in their own ways

- they support each other's passions

picture a genderfluid student at hogwarts going to care of magical creatures and the class is learning about unicorns that day (and on the same day that student is having extreme flucutation in gender identity) and when they get to interact with the unicorns, the unicorns keep fluctuating between being friendly and walking away bc they're minds are going girl no actually boy but girl but non-binary wHaT-

hufflepuff: will correct others on trans people's pronouns even (especially) when the trans person in question is not present, happy to test run different names and pronouns with their trans friends, sends links to trans fanfics, waits in line with trans friends at the DMV to get their license updated, turns it into a little party, and then buys celebratory hot chocolate afterward.

ravenclaw: genuinely excited to learn more about their trans friends' experiences, asks questions, reads up on gender theory in their spare time, watches trans youtube just to learn, realizes when a question they asked early on was inappropriate, follows up to apologize and then does better, has the etymology of the singular "they" ready to recite at any moment just in case.

slytherin: purposefully puts themselves in between transphobes and their trans friends, will go to the bathroom with their trans friends and keep up a chatty conversation making sure that nobody gives them any shit, invites trans friends to family dinner which turns out to be a table full of queers with lasagne, visibly recoils at the mention of terfs.

Okay but listen. Listen.

Ron goes out for drinks after work with Harry and George, and after a few glasses of red currant rum Ron blurts out that he’s planning to propose. Harry’s eyes go wide when he says it, but he reigns it in before buzzed Ron notices. George sees it though. When Ron goes to the bar for the next round, George rounds on Harry. “What’s up, mate?” Quickly Harry tells him that when he and Hermione were out with some Ministry coworkers she also said she was planning to propose. George breaks into a huge grin but shushes him as Ron returns. George waggles his eyebrows in a we’ll talk about this later type way as they take their refilled glasses.

When they do talk about it later of course Ginny overhears and wants in. She’s the one who hatches the scheme to have Ron and Hermione pick the perfect times to propose... that just happen to be the exact same time. In the end it takes several favors from Ginny’s Chudley Cannons friends, a line of experimental Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes products, entry to the Perenelle Flamel Magical Reserve, and getting Percy to keep Hermione tied up at the office and off their trail, but it’s absolutely worth it. The co-conspirators show the video of the proposal at Ron and Hermione’s wedding reception. (Ron leans over to kiss his wife’s jaw and to conveniently hide his reddened face in her hair.) They laugh and love along with everyone else in the room, embarrassed but so very happy.

ron & harry should have bonded over being Bi Disasters in love with both halves of a couple* and that’s the facts