PORTLAND, Ore. — Brian Ross, frontman of the wizard rock band Draco and the Malfoys, leans into the mic and says, as he has almost verbatim for nearly 20 years: “This song’s about this kid at Hogwarts who gets way too much attention for his own good.”
For the standing room-only audience crammed on stools and into corners at Rose City Book Pub, the opening lyrics of ‘My Dad is Rich’ — “my dad’s always there / to open all my doors / you have to call a Patronus / just to catch a glimpse of yours” — are perhaps an unusual rallying cry for the community of fans and musicians who gather to celebrate music written about the Harry Potter series.
It makes more sense if you know that Ross, who with his half-brother Bradley Mehlenbacher co-founded one of the first Harry Potter- themed bands back in 2004, is one of the “wrock,” or wizard rock, community’s throughlines to its early days, when Pottermania only grew with every new entry of the explosively popular young adult fantasy series.
Organized by North Carolina-based pop punk wrock band Hawthorn & Holly, the concert at Rose City Book Pub highlights artists gathered from around the country to take part in the community’s largest — and last — annual gathering of Harry Potter fans: LeakyCon.
Convention culture
Friday through Sunday, LeakyCon attendees enjoy fan-led panels with topics such as the legal system of the wizarding world, the surprising diversity of the diminutive Professor Flitwick, and how to use fandom as inspiration for one’s fitness journey.
The convention’s name derives from The Leaky Cauldron, a pub and inn in the Harry Potter universe that served as a gathering place for the characters.
Activities include browsing the robust magic-themed marketplace, battling for the top prize at Potter -themed trivia, and singing cosplay karaoke led by Harry Potter actor Chris Rankin, who played Ron Weasley’s studious brother Percy.
For fans like Twila Cotter, who traveled from North Carolina to attend her first and final LeakyCon, being able to attach a living, breathing person to a profile she’s befriended online is the primary draw.
“Getting that sense of community is really awesome for these events,” she said. “I wish I could have gotten involved in it sooner. But you know, I’m still happy that I got to be here.”
Others come to meet and greet guest actors from the Harry Potter series. This year’s guest list included Bonnie Wright, who played Ginny Weasley, Stanislav Yanevski, who played Viktor Krum, and Rankin, whose own fervor for Harry Potter and its fan community has made him a LeakyCon staple.
But one of this year’s highest profile guests is Catherine Tate, known in geeky circles for her role on BBC’s Doctor Who — and who has never appeared in Harry Potter .
Growing its audience
Next year, the convention officially transforms into EnchantiCon, a general fantasy-themed event that de-centers Harry Potter to celebrate a variety of fandoms. EnchantiCon will take place in St. Louis on Aug. 15-17, 2025.
LeakyCon was started in 2009 by author and journalist Melissa Anelli, best-known to fans for helming another Potter gathering place, The Leaky Cauldron fan site. Since its inception, Anelli has used LeakyCon as the foundation for her convention management company, Mischief Management.
Now, LeakyCon struggles to not only weather lingering effects of the pandemic, but a reexamining of author J.K. Rowling’s legacy in the wake of her increasingly dogged promotion of the view that transgender women are not women.
Many of Rowling’s most diehard supporters, especially those who fall under the queer umbrella, have been alienated by her anti-trans ideology.
Repeat attendees are especially aware of the convention’s rapidly dwindling attendance numbers. 2019’s Dallas event attracted over 18,000 guests, while this year’s event saw closer to 500.
According to LeakyCon panelist and professor emeritus of Eastern Washington University Tom Crofoot, Mischief Management staffers said at the panel “EnchantiCon: What’s Next,” that the expansion allows them to keep their core Harry Potter fanbase while shedding any lingering association with Rowling.
The convention’s future, Mischief Management staffers said, depends on EnchantiCon’s success.
But changing the event’s focus rather than adjusting expectations for its scope brings frightening uncertainties.
“It’s bittersweet. I’ve spent a lot of time helping build this community into what it is, and I know, or I hope, gratefully, that the community will continue under the new banners,” said Dag Currier, a regular LeakyCon attendee and panelist since 2011.
Now more than ever, fans explore complicated relationships with the series at LeakyCon. Freed from Rowling's authorial control, they discuss the Harry Potter series as they’d like it to be.
Panels like “Separating the Art and the Artist,” “When Fanon is Canon – Reclaiming the Narrative,” and “Queerness, Disability, and Monstrosity: An Exploration of Remus Lupin” reflect a fandom shift toward widespread LGBT interpretations.
Currier worries that the con’s decision to distance itself from Harry Potter will cause a hostile environment for fans, especially queer ones, to explore these connections without judgement.
Maybe fans will be won over by EnchantiCon’s promised attractions for next year, which include a Shrek -themed ball alongside a gaming section and the return of author spotlights.
Most plan to give the new con a chance, hopeful the space they’ve spent so long nurturing will continue to thrive.
‘The banality of evil’
When others who opposed Rowling’s politics found it too painful to engage with the Harry Potter series, it would have been easy for fandom musicians to lay down their guitars.
But when San Diego-based Adam Davis experienced a 2014 concert from the genre-founding Harry and the Potters, he saw people fighting “the banality of evil” through the series — and that didn’t change just because the fight shifted to Rowling herself.
Davis recruited Juan Carlos Acosta and Libby Weber to form the band Potterwatch, named after the underground radio program resisting dark forces in the Harry Potter books. They released their debut album, Follow the Light, on Oct. 31, 2023.
They’re not alone. Lan Flynn, a founding member of Milwaukee-based wizard rock collective Bisexual Harry, joined the community to heal and find their own voice after the hurt of Rowling’s actions.
“ Harry Potter has reached cultural saturation,” Flynn said. “If we leave the conversation, we’re just leaving certain voices behind.”
Plenty have left. Ross, of Draco and the Malfoys, is among the last of the first wave standing. The rest have hung up their robes, including, it seems, Joe and Paul DeGeorge, creators of that first and most enduring wrock group, Harry and the Potters. Performances with thousands of attendees seem to be no more.
But because Ross and other early wrockers set an example, “kids all around the country started picking up guitars and writing songs about Harry Potter, ” Ross said. “That’ll keep you going.”
And as the head of LeakyCon’s music programming, Ross is optimistic that the con’s musical workshops and open mics are only gaining in popularity and will “continue to slightly evolve like everything else.”
For example, Gio Navas cites first wave wrock as inspiration for endeavors like the Bookish Songs Collective, a group of independent artists who’ve banded together to create music about popular fantasy novel franchises such as A Court of Thrones and Roses , Fourth Wing , and The Folk of the Air .
This year, Navas and the rest of the Bookish Songs Collective shares LeakyCon’s main stage with traditional wrockers like Ross and Geoff Hutton, an experimental artist who performs under the moniker Dream Quaffle.
Hutton’s music centers queer characters in direct opposition to Rowling’s transphobia. Just last month they released a parody of “Pepper” by The Butthole Surfers called “Wolfstarbucks,” which explores a polyamorous relationship between three popular male characters in the Harry Potter series.
“Music has that incredible power to help us work out how we’re feeling about things and why,” Hutton said. “You can learn things about yourself by doing this, just by trying it, and that’s, to me, the greatest magic that there is.”
Like the Harry Potter Alliance of old, the non-profit charity organization founded in 2005 that continues under the banner Fandom Forward, the wrock community still rallies together for causes it believes in, like producing a tribute album to fellow wrocker Totally Knuts and donating the proceeds toward funding their gender-affirming surgery.
Before his last song at his final LeakyCon main stage performance, Ross tells an audience both smaller and more devoted than ever that LeakyCon’s legacy is the reminder to stay “passionate about the things we love.”
And then he says: “I’m gonna leave you with this song about this kid at Hogwarts who gets way too much attention for his own good.”
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