Stupid things are said in the Big Brother house all the time, and thanks to 24/7 live feeds, they’re all caught on camera. This season is getting off to a good start with controversy thanks to returning HG Jeff Schroeder, who went off on the fact that Albus Dumbledore from Harry Potter is gay.
The Big Brother 13 drama came when fellow HG Kalia told Jeff, who was voted Fan Favorite his first time on season 11, about how Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has said that the Hogwarts headmaster was a homosexual.
Now if you saw the video, there are about 20 different things to take issue with, not the least of which is Jeff’s insistence that a gay man being in charge of a “fantasy camp” for little kids is inherently wrong.
I’ll let others debate the finer points of Jeff’s homophobia and ignorance, but here are five things I find wrong with this two-minute debate.
– Jeff refers to the character as “Dumbledorf” and confuses him with Hagrid, so he clearly isn’t that familiar with the books to start with.
– The constant references to Hogwarts as a “fantasy camp” show a total lack of understanding for the world of Harry Potter.
– Based on this conversation, it seems like both Kalia and Jeff think that Dumbledore’s homosexuality is actually referenced in the books, when in reality it isn’t and if Rowling hadn’t said it in an interview, no one would’ve known.
– While I agree that Jeff is wrong, when Kalia tries to explain her point by saying her sister is gay, it’s an irrelevant defense as cheap and pointless as when I white person claims to understand how African-Americans think because some of their best friends are black.
– Jeff’s insistence that Kalia is only OK with Dumbledore being gay because there are cameras and she’s just being politically correct for television is the dumbest moment of the video because it suggests that he can’t even understand the point she’s trying to make.
So clearly there’s a lot of wrongness going on in this clip, and at the very least, Jeff quickly realized that there are cameras filming him, so he shuts the hell up because, even though it’s clear what he thinks, he’s smart enough to know that a lot of people will think he’s being an idiot.
Which he is, and which a lot of people now know. But I still loved Jeff from season 11 and I’m not about to vilify him for one stupid opinion. Yes, he’s incredibly ignorant, but that doesn’t necessarily make him evil. He isn’t the first person to say something ignorant on Big Brother‘s live feeds, and he won’t be the last.
(Image and video courtesy of CBS)
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
John watches nearly every show on TV, but he specializes in sci-fi/fantasy like The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural and True Blood. However, he can also be found writing about everything from Survivor and Glee to One Tree Hill and Smallville.
