
Happy National Coming Out Day! Velma Dinkley was a few days early.
Velma, the bespectacled, orange-turtleneck-wearing smarty of the Scooby-Doo gang, is apparently queer, at least in the new, direct-to-digital and DVD film "Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo!" But creators of Scooby-Doo stories have long wanted the character to be openly queer, and wrote her as implicitly so for years. Why does it matter that Velma is gay, and how is this different from late gay characters such as Dumbledore of "Harry Potter"?