Harry Potter fans, the rumors are true: Albus Dumbledore, master wizard and Headmaster of Hogwarts, is gay. J.K. Rowling, author of the mega-selling fantasy series that ended last summer, outed the beloved character Friday night while appearing before a full house at Carnegie Hall.

After reading briefly from the final book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” she took questions from audience members.

She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds “true love.”

“Dumbledore is gay,” the author responded to gasps and applause.

She then explained that Dumbledore was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, whom he defeated long ago in a battle between good and bad wizards. “Falling in love can blind us to an extent,” Rowling said of Dumbledore’s feelings, adding that Dumbledore was “horribly, terribly let down.”

Dumbledore’s love, she observed, was his “great tragedy.”

Oprah Winfrey picked “Love in the Time of Cholera” as her next book club selection on Friday, the second time she has chosen a novel by Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Her latest choice comes ahead of the November release of a film adaptation of the book starring Spanish actor Javier Bardem and American actor Benjamin Bratt.

“This is one of the greatest love stories I have ever read. It’s a captivating story about a passionate but troubled love affair that takes place over the course of 50 years,” Oprah wrote on her Web site after announcing the selection on her daytime talk show.

“It is so beautifully written that it really takes you to another place in time and will make you ask yourself — how long could you, or would you, wait for love?”

Hmmm….

the characters include a vulnerable TV star, a philandering husband and a callous mom. None of them is plucked directly from her own life, the actress says firmly.

“I know people are going to think it’s autobiographical,” Thorne-Smith said. But the cad is not her ex-husband and the dreadful mother is “so comically not my mom. My mom would crawl over hot coals to have lunch with me.”

Anyway, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, the author of “100 Places Every Woman Should Go” shares her top eight destination choices for women:

1. For inspiration and enlightenment: Hawaii Volcanoes National Park

2. For indulgence: Lingerie shopping in Paris

3. For purification and beautification: The banyas of Moscow and St. Petersburg

4. To celebrate powerful women and their places in history: Frida Kahlo’s Mexico

5. To celebrate struggle and renewal: Arts and voodoo festivals in Benin

6. For womanly affirmation: Belly dancing in San Francisco, New York, or Austin

7. For all-around wonder: Mongolia

8. Just for the fun of it: The Bahamian island of Eleuthera

More at Yahoo Travel.

Weston dreamt up the main character, Gabriel, a biracial teenage ghost who fights the evil of bigotry in post-Katrina New Orleans.

“He’s specifically dealing with racism,” said Cage.

“This is a highlight in my life,” Cage said, “that I got to create something with my son.”

The six-book “Voodoo Child” series is published by Virgin Comics. The first issue was released this month.

Well, it looks like the actress who played Winnie, Danica McKellar has just penned a book about math titled “Math Doesn’t Suck,” to encourage girls to get into math.

“When girls see the antics of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, they think that being fun and glamorous also means being dumb and irresponsible,” the 32-year-old McKellar (who majored in math in college) told Newsweek for editions to hit newsstands Monday.

“But I want to show them that being smart is cool,” she said. “Being good at math is cool. And not only that, it can help them get what they want out of life.”

The book uses cutesy graphics and teen-magazine staples like personality quizzes and horoscopes to spell out often confusing concepts like reciprocal fractions and prime factorization.

Amazon.com announced that the U.S. pre-orders for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final book in J.K. Rowling’s popular series, has topped 1 million.

That surpasses the previous record set at Amazon.com in 2005 by “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth book in the series, which sold 919,000 U.S. pre-orders.