We’re off to see the wizard.

No, not the one who lives at the end of the yellow brick road. This one might be said to live somewhere over the rainbow, as in the flag that symbolizes gay pride.

Or hadn’t you heard about Albus Dumbledore? If you are, or live in proximity to, a Harry Potter fan, you’ve already made the acquaintance. If not, suffice to say that he is our hero’s mentor, the headmaster of Hogwarts, the school for wizards in training. Last week, we learned that he was also something else.

The revelation came in response to a question from a reader during author J.K. Rowling’s appearance at Carnegie Hall. The reader asked if Dumbledore ever finds “true love.” Rowling replied that Dumbledore is gay and in love with a rival wizard, Gellert Grindelwald, whom he once defeated in battle. According to news accounts, the audience gasped – and then applauded.

The revelation has brought scattered condemnation from conservative religious types who already hate the books because of their supposed ability to make children worship the occult. But truth to tell, the criticism has seemed relatively muted, especially as compared with the praise.

I conducted my own focus group survey of two Potter fans in Miami and their responses echoed what I’ve seen in press reports. “Me and my sister are so happy,” gushed Katherine Robertson, 14, “because we’re big on gay pride.”

Her sister Anne Marie, 17, added, “I think the gay community was one of the few groups that was not represented in the books and it was important that they were. I don’t think it changes my perception of him at all. It’s just that as a Harry Potter fan, it’s an extra detail about him that I would like to know.”

His sexuality is an extra detail, she says. Not destiny, not definition. Just detail.

I am reminded that five years ago, Marvel Comics outed one of its signature characters, Ben Grimm, the rocky orange guy from the Fantastic Four: not as gay, but as Jewish. Apparently, in the minds of creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, he was always a Jew, but that was something they felt constrained to keep quiet back in 1961.

As a comic book geek of long standing, I felt much like Anne Marie Robertson does. It didn’t change my perception, but it was a detail I liked having.

The trouble is, not all details are created equal. Details of culture, color and sexuality are dangerous because they assume outsized importance in our mental calculus, because they have this ability to shape people’s understanding of who one is. So that to be gay is often to live confined to a prison of others’ perceptions, no longer a complex amalgam of likes and dislikes, weaknesses and strengths like anyone else, but reduced instead to a single neon characteristic. You are your sexuality and nothing more.

Or as actor T.R. Knight once put it, “I hope the fact that I’m gay isn’t the most interesting part of me.”

For some people, it is, and always will be.

Which is why there’s a subversive genius in what Rowling has done. By declining to lead with sexuality, she allows readers to first know a beloved character in the fullness of his likes and dislikes, weaknesses and strengths – like anyone else. And the revelation, when it comes, is only “an extra detail.”

We live in a nation where some people still accuse gays of “recruiting.” And equate homosexuality with pederasty. And give cheap applause to preachers and politicians who use gay men and lesbians as easy scapegoats.

Could the boy wizard help a generation learn to look at a gay person and see, neither definition nor destiny, but only detail?

That would be the greatest magic trick of all.