A walking tour group in Edinburgh is temporarily cutting their Harry Potter tours and replacing them with LGBTQ+ history tours for Pride month — and they aren’t shying away from the reasons why.
"For the six years now that I have been a walking tour guide in the city of Edinburgh I have given Harry Potter walking tours alongside historical ones," Fraser Horn wrote in an April blog post on his business website. "But there’s an increasing amount of negativity around the series which is making it much harder to conjure up affection."
Horn explained that he fully expected J.K. Rowling’s transphobic rhetoric to have an immediate impact on the demand for Harry Potter-related tours some time ago — but nothing changed. The demand continued, and "hardly anyone" ever brought the topic up. Anecdotally, he says that other tour guides across Edinburgh have said the same thing.
His post doesn’t sugarcoat the situation. Instead, he frames it as a conflict between profit and values, pointing out both how dangerous anti-trans views are for the entire LGBTQ+ community across the world and how much Edinburgh, where Rowling wrote the popular kids’ series, depends on that connection for tourism.
"I’ve seen some guides try and cut round JK Rowling while giving the tour," Horn admitted. "The link Edinburgh has to the world of Harry Potter is the fact it was written here. The person it was written here by is Rowling. So it cannot really be gotten around."
However, he does point out that any money earned from these tours doesn’t go towards lining Rowling’s already heavy pockets. This stands in worthwhile contrast to something like the upcoming Harry Potter TV series, particularly after HBO’s chief content officer seemed to breeze past that issue while recently defending the decision to keep working with Rowling.
Clearly, that isn’t enough to prevent Horn from carefully considering what other impact continuing to prop up Harry Potter — and, by extension, Rowling herself — may have. For now, he plans to continue the tours, but his company, Street Historians, is at least pointedly hitting pause for Pride month.
"I will be replacing my Potter tours with additional LGBTQ tours," he writes, "just because it’s really funny."
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