Here's what I can tell you. The most powerful magic is cast by people who unite male and female, left and right, black and white. The rest of the wizarding community are not as powerful as AB because they do not do this.
I understand this angle; one of the most eminent people in my university's Department of History is a cultural historian whose research focus is precisely on this point of sexuality and magic, and the role of sexual transgression—the overriding of socially mandated borders—as a source of magical power. I was on our College's P&T review committee for his promotion to Full Professor last year, and I wound up reading quite a bit of his stuff in preparation for the discussion of his case.
BUT...
... it's important to recognize that that is not the only source of magical power. Consider Gandalf, a comparable figure from
LoTR, and one who in many respects constitutes a model for Albus Dumbledore: an immensely powerful figure who has a quasi-paternal protective role for a much younger person who he yet must send into the most terrible extreme danger in order to... well, save the world, basically. In the course of that involvement, he can intervene, but only up to a certain point, and henceuses his enormous power guardedly. The final actions, on which the success or failure of the young hero's quest depend, must be undertaken, in the end, alone, supported only by his strength of will, character and willingness to sacrifice himself. Both Gandalf and AD literally die, in a certain sense, and return, in somewhat different forms, in the course of this quest. So what is the source of Gandalf's power?
It strikes me as very unlikely that JRRT, a devout Catholic, constructed Gandalf as a gay character. We actually know a bit about him: he was a Mayar, one level of immortal being down from the Valar, and his power, as various bits and pieces of Tolkien's writing makes clear, came directly from the Valar themselves: he is a conduit, into the ordinary world of Middle Earth, of the radiant power that the Valar themselves possess, which Tolkier identified as being, ultimate,
goodness on a cosmic scale. Interestingly, just as Rowling has done with AD, Tolkien explicitly identified his archmage `offline', so to speak, as an angel. The power of sexual boundary violation, of the sort you and Tellner were alluding to, is, so far as I've read—and again, it's not my area!—with magic of a kind rather different from what AD and Gandalf embody. They are classic types of the `white wizard' (whom Gandalf actually becomes, in
LoTR); nothing that they do suggests the kind of uniting of opposites across socially defined bounds that what has always been considered black magic does. Voldemort, yes—that would make sense, in terms of hermaphrodism or other major violations of cultural norms (think about the Horcruxes, e.g.).
If you look at the Harry Potter story, JKR makes a point of showing that Dumbledore does all of this. She ties all sorts of symbols to AB that make a pretty clear allusion to John Dee and Hermes Trismagestis. My guess is that JKR studied this stuff to some extent before she wrote the HP series. I find this interesting, because she could have wrote a story with wizards and made a bunch of stuff up. Instead, she decided to draw from real occult practices to write her story.
But she can pick and choose the way in which the symbols and `decorations' of traditional magic are actually used. That's the great thing about being a writer who has the freedom of unlimited syncretism—you can make up your own story. So far as I can see, there was no actual linkage
in the logic of the narrative between AD and any particular sexuality.
IMHO, it adds another element to her story. It makes me want to read the book again and see what I can pull out with my meager knowledge of this stuff.
I'm thinking about passing this thread along to my student (who is also a member of MT) and seeing what he has to say. I'm sure he could give us a lot better perspective.
That would be a very good thing, UpN—I'd be interested in hearing what he said!
