What Is It About Harry?

By Michael Bronski, Boston Phoenix. Posted July 7, 2003.

The publication of Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix (Scholastic) marks yet another media triumph for author J.K. Rowling and her boy wizard. More than 200 million copies of the first four Potter titles are already in circulation, and 8.5 million copies from Order of the Phoenix's first print run (five million of which sold the first day) are now being shipped in the US alone. At that rate, there could be 300 million Potter books in circulation quicker than a Nimbus 2003 broom at a championship Quidditch game.

With the Potter movies -- and myriad spin-off products such as Quidditch rule books, talking hats, flying brooms, board games, action figures, and magician robes -- the Potter madness that began shortly after the first book was published in 1997 shows no signs of abating. Apparently, people love Harry Potter. Even the Vatican -- an institution that generally stays above the fray of popular culture -- went out of its way in its February publication "Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life: A Christian Reflection on the 'New Age'" to praise the Potter books. A Vatican spokesperson claimed that "they help children to see the difference between good and evil."

Everybody, it seems, loves Harry -- except for a growing number of evangelical-Christian groups, including individual congregations and national publications. As the series' success has grown over the past five years, so has the fury of these evangelicals, who think Potter's popularity poses a decisive threat to children. The Harry Potter books, they argue, glorify sorcery, celebrate the occult, and encourage witchcraft -- all of which turns impressionable children away from true salvation through Jesus Christ.

Focus on the Family's publication Citizen: Family Issues in Policy and Culture has run several articles decrying the Potter books, most notably John Andrew Murray's reasonable sounding "The Trouble with Harry" in June 2000. Baptist.org, "the homepage for all Baptists," was a bit more strident in a two-part Aug. 27, 2001, article titled "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: Why It Is Truly Satanic." Even the more mainstream Christianity Today ran a piece in its Oct. 26, 2000, issue called "The Perils of Harry Potter," and Christian Parenting Today, in its September/October 2000 issue, claimed that Harry was "pure evil." Many of these groups also sell their own anti-Potter books. Ankerberg Theological Research Institute sells a videotape featuring founder and president John Ankerberg titled "What Christian Parents Should Know About Harry Potter," and will send you articles like "Bewitched by Harry Potter" for a small donation.

These evangelicals have continued the offensive by demanding that schools and public libraries remove the Potter books from their shelves. They have been implicated in several high-profile legal cases, the most recent resolved on April 23, when a state judge ruled that Arkansas's Cedarville School District had to put the books back into general circulation after sequestering them on a special "parental permission" shelf. Even more frightening, the Potter books have been burned publicly on at least a dozen occasions. On March 26, 2002, the Reverend George Bender of the Harvest Assembly of God Church in Butler County, Pennsylvania, received national attention when he gathered his congregation around a bonfire to burn copies of the Rowling books. The campaign against the Potter series is so intensely persistent that the American Library Association's anti-censorship task force reports that for the past fours years -- 1999 to 2002 -- there were more attempts to ban Potter books from libraries than to ban any other title or author. Forget Eminem, gansta rap, sexy Hollywood films, and violent video games: Harry Potter is the real danger to American kids.

Queer As Folk

That may sound ridiculous to most, but for the first time in its public-moralizing career, the Christian Right just might be -- at least partly -- right. The Harry Potter books are a threat to normally accepted ideas about the social welfare and good mental health of American children. Not because they romanticize witchcraft and wizardry, but because they are deeply subversive in their unremitting attacks on the received wisdom that being "normal" is good, reasonable, or even healthy.

The Harry Potter books are, in a word, queer. As used today, "queer" means "homosexual," but it has larger connotations too. The word also suggests a more generally deviant, nonconformist, renegade identity. In its oldest, original sense, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (which recently added the word "Muggle" to its august pages), queer means "deviating from the expected or normal; strange" or "odd or unconventional in behavior." The Harry Potter books can be read as queer in the "gay" sense, but also in the broader sense.

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