JK Rowling responded to a fan on Twitter who said she "couldn't see" the character Albus Dumbledore as gay with a very powerful response.
"Thank you so much for writing Harry Potter. I wonder why you said that Dumbledore is a gay because I can't see him in that way," Ana Kocovic, a Harry Potter fan, asked Rowling on Twitter in a tweet that's since been deleted.
Of course, nothing is ever deleted from the Internet forever and Kocovic's controversial question was screenshot by another Twitter user.
Since Rowling responded to the girl, she was called an "inspiration" by several Twitter users.
She said: "Maybe because gay people just look like... people?"
Rowling says she has received a lot of backlash from fans after revealing that Dumbledore was gay in a 2007 U.S. book tour at New York's Carnegie Hall.
"Falling in love can blind us to an extent," Rowling said during the tour, according to BBC. She added that Dumbledore's "great tragedy" was his love for Gellert Grindelwald.
Some gay activists told the author they wished she would have made Dumbledore's sexual orientation more obvious so she could have sent a message of understanding and acceptance, BBC reported at the time.
Rowling said during the tour that being more open about Dumbledore's sexual orientation would have caused more hate towards her books at the time because she was already receiving backlash from the Catholic church for "promoting witchcraft," reported BBC.
However, she did clarify Dumbledore's sexuality later on in the Harry Potter wiki:
"Dumbledore was gay, but after reflecting that falling in love with Gellert Grindelwald in his youth had led him to lose his moral compass, he no longer trusted his own judgement in such matters. As a result, he became 'quite asexual,' and lead a 'celibate and bookish life.'"
