Should she have said anything? Is it relevant at this point? Should we care? These and other questions are being debated amongst Harry Potter fans following recent comments by J.K. Rowling revealing she'd conceived her beloved Dumbledore character as gay.

According to a Reuters news report, Rowling told a New York audience she "always thought Dumbledore was gay." Many fans had long suspected this to be the case and her final Harry Potter book seemed to confirm it.

"Neither Dumbledore nor Grindelwald ever seems to have referred to this brief boyhood friendship in later life," Rowling writes in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. "However, there can be no doubt that Dumbledore delayed, for some five years of turmoil, fatalities, and disappearances, his attack upon Gellert Grindelwald. Was it lingering affection for the man or fear of exposure as his once best friend that caused Dumbledore to hesitate?"

Wayson Choy, one of Canada's best-known gay novelists, told the Globe & Mail newspaper, "She's taking a major leap in bringing human history up to date...She's honouring the complexity of the human being," he says, "and no child should be deprived of that truth."