Mark Reads ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’: Chapter 36

In the thirty-sixth chapter of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry comes to terms with the trauma he has experienced when he has to relive it in order to help Sirius and Dumbledore arm themselves against the coming fight. Then Cornelius Fudge screws everything up, and a tear is shed over the absolute saddest moment in the entire series. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read Harry Potter.

CHAPTER 36: THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

Harry Potter made me cry.

I’m at a point in my life where I’m completely disinterested in worrying about my behavior and how it might clash or misrepresent my gender presentation. (I realize how privileged it is to say that, but I’ll get to that.) I grew up with a slew of masculinity issues: my father, along with pretty much every dude I knew in school, told me that since I was born with a penis, I had to act a certain way. There were certain things I was supposed to enjoy, certain things I should say, certain ways I should present myself, and definitely a specific gender I was supposed to be attracted to.

The years I spent believing these things were the worst of my life. Easily. I tortured myself, told myself I was a worthless man and a waste of a human being, and lived day-to-day as a shell of a human being. I shuffled through classes, using my intelligence as the only thing I could believe in and feel satisfied with. I couldn’t keep a true friend and I couldn’t tell anyone how much I was hurting, but I could sure smile when I aced a test or a final.

Of course, I was bullied for that as well.

Early in my life, I found that it was very, very easy for my eyes to well up with tears at the slightest provocation. I’m not going to wax on why that is. Maybe I’m just a ~sensitive soul~ or something. But just around the time I discovered that I cried more than my peers was right around the time my parents made sure I stopped.

Sometimes I’d get hit. It wasn’t often. But I was always yelled at. Called a faggot, called a queer. Real men don’t cry. Stop being a baby. Don’t be a pussy.

So I stopped.

It was hard, because the only thing I really clinged to those days was my schoolwork and my music. Of course, my terrible excuse of a sister constantly tattled on anything I might be listening to that might be “offensive” or inappropriate. I can’t count how many CDs were thrown away because my sister told my mom they were Satanic or evil or offensive. She always did this with a smile.

I’d cry at night whenever I lost a record. It was like losing a part of my skin, or a part of my heart, or a part of my lung, and everything seemed harder without it.

I’d cry when I didn’t do as well as I wanted at school. If I didn’t get a good grade on a test or if I was embarrassed in class by some goon picking on me, I always choked back tears. I’d get that feeling like there’s something in my throat, pulling it tighter, making it harder to breathe, as tears stung my eyes like bees and I just wanted to make the whole class erupt in flames and go away so I could just get through the day.

By the time I finally started feeling free of these constraints, I was out of high school, on my way to college. I’d come out. And I was discovering the tainted, complex web of homosexual life.

And I had to stop crying.

Gay men, especially those in larger cities, generally grow up with a similar situation: our gender presentation is frequently called into question because, to a great deal of people, men simply aren’t men if they like other dudes. The end. No question about it. And I certainly dealt with a large handful of those kind of bigots since I was a kid.

So, like most gay men who finally come out and start socializing in any sort of gay scene, I overcompensated.

I’m sure I said some misogynist or transmisogynist shit those first couple years. I don’t remember it, but I’m sure it had to have happened. Because the easiest way for a gay man to make himself feel more like a man is to lash out at women and femininity.

I stopped crying. And despite how hard that first year of being out was, despite how disillusioned I became with the whole idea that I didn’t even fit in with the gay community, I wouldn’t let myself cry. Crying was for girls. Crying was for fags, I thought. And I was a real man.

It took me until I got fired from Hot Topic, years later, before I cried in public. And maybe it was the trauma of being fired for something I didn’t do and was thrust into the reality of being broke, poor, and facing eviction, but I suddenly didn’t care. I was scared. I was in pain. And I need to fucking cry, goddamnit.

It was surprisingly easy. And when I was done, I didn’t feel like any less of a dude.

Over the past five years, I’ve come to realize how childish, immature, and downright bigoted my thinking was about gender, gender presentation, and behavior. My own masculinity issues were magnified and I took that out on other people. And I now realize that, despite that I am happily a dude who isn’t really concerned whether I’m MASC enough for gay men who I’d gladly kick in the face, it’s pretty privileged to say that. I ultimately don’t even have to worry about that on any grand scale because I’m a cisgender dude. We can’t even begin to imagine the masculinity or femininity issues trans men and women have to deal with, or anyone who is intersex, genderqueer, androgynous…you get the point.

I cry much more often now. I cried at the end of Six Feet Under, sobbed ruthlessly during the LOST finale (and was reduced to an emotional rubble during a second watching), cry during weirdly emotional moments in day-to-day life, cry during movies, and I cried all three years as I crossed the finish line at the AIDS/LifeCycle. Those were happy cries, though. Crying when you’re happy is pretty awesome. You should do it.

I cried during Harry Potter. I got a bit choked up during the scene where Dumbledore asks Harry to painfully recount what happened to him when he was with Voldemort. It was especially bad when Harry got to the point of the story about his parents and suddenly lost the will to speak. I’ve been there.

But I lost it at the end of the chapter, after Fudge denies Voldemort’s return and Dumbledore sends both Sirius and Snape off on important tasks. Harry, after reliving the trauma of his infancy and the trauma of death, dismemberment, and pure evil, has a moment where tears are finally triggered, when Harry reacts to Mrs. Weasley trying to cheer him up by suggesting he think of what he’ll do with the gold he won.

  • “I don’t want that gold,” said Harry in an expressionless voice. “You have it. Anyone can have it. I shouldn’t have won it. It should’ve been Cedric’s.”

And the moment comes. He can feel the same burning in his eyes, the same stinging, and he wishes Ron would just look away from him, worried it might make Ron feel less of him, realizing he told Cedric to grab the Triwizard Cup too, and that’s when Mrs. Weasley leans in and hugs him. Like a mother, like one he never had long enough to hug him just like that.

And Harry cries.

There’s a lot of amazing, infuriating, and shocking info in this chapter, but I want to eschew any sort of traditional review to use this entry to hopefully empower you as well. A lot of what I just typed up there is stuff I haven’t really felt comfortable sharing with anyone besides a very, very close batch of personal friends. Yet now I’m spilling it forth to thousands of people I’ve never met and may never meet.

The thing I am growing to love about Harry Potter is that it empowers me. It empowers me to talk about bigotry, racism, transphobia, political fuckery, and why I love writing. It empowers me to talk about deeply personal things like this.

I want you to feel empowered, too. Let’s use the comments to talk about these things we fear, the things we were told to keep to ourselves, and the things this series has helped us come to terms with.

Obvs NO SPOILERS ALLOWED and obvs WE ARE NOT MEDICALLY TRAINED PEOPLE and obvs NO BULLYING OR JUDGING IS ALLOWED or I will punt you into Azkaban where you belong.

Also, you are also welcome to talk about this beautifully written chapter and ASK ME QUESTIONS ABOUT STUFF and I will answer them because GUYS SO MUCH SHIT HAPPENS IN THIS CHAPTER omg Snape showed off his Dark Mark and WHAT ABOUT DUMBLEDORE’S SPEECH ABOUT POLITICAL DESIRE CLASHING WITH WHAT IS RIGHT oh god this shit is insane.

OK GO.