Source: EW.com
First things first: At last night's talk at New York City's Carnegie Hall -- an event for thousands of young Harry Potter fans and their parents -- J.K. Rowling outed the kindly headmaster.

Responding to a question from a child about Dumbledore's love life, Rowling hesitated and then revealed, "I always saw Dumbledore as gay." Filling in a few more details, she said, "Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald.... Don't forget, falling in  love can blind us. [He] was very drawn to this brilliant person. This was Dumbledore's tragedy." She added that in a recent meeting about the sixth movie, she spied a line in the script where Dumbledore waxed poetic about a girl, so she was forced to scribble director David Yates a note to correct the situation.

So how did all those lucky kids get to sit in the baronial gilt and red velvet splendor of Carnegie Hall? First they won a sweepstakes event created by Rowling's publisher, Scholastic, and then they flew to New York from all over the country.

When the line, snaking around the block, began moving at 6:30, it moved fast. By 7:00 everyone was seated, the red-jacketed ushers were shushing and closing the box doors, and the event host, MSNBC news anchor Keith Olbermann, took the stage.

The crowd was polite to Olbermann, but when a smiling Rowling finally strode on stage, perfectly blonded and coiffed, fingernails shellacked to a brilliant red, stilettos clicking, they went absolutely mad, screaming, jumping to their feet, even crying. Gently, in true mom fashion, she shushed them, and began to read from the seventh book. She's a brilliant reader, funny and quick, doing all the voices with comic perfection

When she finished the crowd rose to its feet again, even as she tried, in vain, to get them sit. "Don't make me cry!" she kept saying. Finally everyone did sit, and the question-and-answer session could begin. The lucky questioners had mostly been chosen in advance (though a few were plucked at random); at least one little girl -- 8 years old -- could barely reach the microphone.

Were there intentional similarities between Voldemort and Hitler? Yes, there were. The books, she said, were "a plea for an end to hatred, to bigotry" as well as a lesson for kids "to question authority.... You should not assume the establishment tells you the truth." Did Hagrid ever find love? Alas, no (though that had something more to do with the rarity of giantesses than any personality defect on Hagrid's part).