Title: Geography Club
Author: Brent Hartinger
Challenged at: West Bend, Wisconsin Community Library
For: “being obscene or child pornography” in a section designated for young adults
West Bend was also the community going after Baby Be-Bop, so it is possible that their definition of “pornography” is “mentioning gay people”. The West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries campaigned for about four months to have sexually explicit materials from the young adult section moved to the adult section and labelled “as containing sexual material”. On the one hand, labeling all the books that mention sex WOULD make their circulation suddenly go through the roof, but on the other hand, anyone picking up Geography Club because of its supposed sexiness is going to be extremely disappointed. The first person narrator only gets a few kisses over the course of the book, and anyone else who goes farther only mentions it rather obliquely. It sounds more to me like West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries is actually trying to “protect” teens from positive images of gay people in the misguided belief that not reading Geography Club will keep them safely heterosexual, or at least safely in the closet and depressed. Great job, West Bend, that’s pretty much the opposite of what we need.
Russel thinks he’s the only gay person at his school, and spends his days feeling horribly alone and terrified that at any time his secret might be somehow revealed, bringing with it social ostracism and possible violence. Then he meets another gay teen in a chat room from his home town, and they agree to meet. Russel is shocked when it turns out to be Kevin, super jock star of the baseball team! Soon after he discovers other gay or lesbian teens keeping their own secrets–including one of his best friends–and they decide to form an after-school club to discuss their commonalities and just hang out with people who know their secret. Because they don’t want any unwanted public attention, they decide to name the club “Geography Club” because it’s the most boring thing they can think of to keep other people away.
I found this book difficult to get into, maybe because the language used seemed kind of unrealistic for teens and the situations were a little too “now you are being treated the way you treated others; learn a lesson!” Also, I’m kind of surprised that West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries only objects to the fact that gay people exist in this book, because there are all kinds of unsafe behaviors going on that I find way more troubling. Like meeting someone from the Internet in a dark, scary park in the middle of the night. Or meeting your secret girlfriend in an abandon warehouse downtown.
Clearly this is just another book being attacked for portraying gay people in a positive way (or a normal way), which is incredibly depressing. I can get a little angry about it, but mostly I just feel sorry for people who think this way. It must be so hard to live in a world with so many troubling absolutes. In one of my classes we learned that the brain finds anything that doesn’t fit into an already-held world-view extremely difficult to process, and even emotionally upsetting, which is why sometimes it’s so hard to teach kids things. Once they assimilate the new information and adjust their preconceived notions accordingly, they’re okay and ready for the next assault of information. I think that’s what it must feel like, an assault, to these people who view the world as so black and white. Reality is constantly challenging their preconceived notions, and it must be emotional turmoil to constantly have to shut that out and not assimilate and adapt.
To prove my point, here are my play-by-play notes on the book. Obv spoiler alert, so don’t read if you are ever planning on reading Geography Club yourself and want to still be surprised by all the… two surprising events:
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