The Paris Review

Harry Potter and the Secret Gay Love Story

In our new monthly column, YA of Yore, Frankie Thomas takes a second look at the books that defined a generation.

Joseph Christian Leyendecker, Man Reading Book, 1914

My micro-generation—that is, the subset of millennials who were born in the second term of the Reagan administration and graduated face first into the Great Recession, and of which the most famous member is probably Mark Zuckerberg—has very little to brag about, so you can hardly blame us for our possessive attachment to Harry Potter. Harry Potter is to us what the Beatles were to our baby boomer parents. To say that we “grew up along with Harry” is far too corny to convey the actual experience of being the world’s first children ever to read those books. I remember attending a classmate’s twelfth birthday party in 1998, thrusting into her hands a gift-wrapped copy of (at the time the only Harry Potter book available in the United States), and informing her with something like personal pride, “This book has been on the best-seller list for !” It would probably still be there today if the hadn’t, shortly thereafter, created a separate best-seller list for children’s books on the grounds

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Paris Review

The Paris Review35 min read
An Eye In The Throat
My father answers the phone. He is twenty-three years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People call all day long, and my parents pick up and say, “Hello?” and then people say, “It’s C
The Paris Review32 min read
The Art of Poetry No. 116
Alice Notley lives in a studio apartment up a single flight of stairs, on the Right Bank in Paris. Her front door is labeled with her name, in looped handwriting on Scotch tape. The small kitchen, which I saw used only for the making of espresso, lea
The Paris Review1 min read
Farah Al Qasimi
Farah Al Qasimi’s first photographs were of the dreary New Haven winter: reflections in water, a dead cat, an angry dog. She was an undergraduate at the Yale School of Art, where in 2017 she also received her M.F.A. Since then, Al Qasimi has turned h

Related