Geography Club made me gay

So, as I was making my notes for this post, I wasn’t entirely sure of what direction I wanted to take it in, other than I just wanted to talk about Geography Club by Brent Hartinger and why it is so important to me.

    I will also mention, if you want to avoid absolutely all spoilers, I’d avoid the second half of this post, as it does talk about parts of the plot. If you’re not bothered, feel free to read the whole thing (and give me that sweet, sweet engagement).

    I have a pretty roundabout way as to how I even found out about this book. I’m pretty sure I’ve made that exact statement in another post – that I’m pretty sure was my “Books I speed read” post. I know that in that post I said that I was going to expand on that story in another post, and this is the that post.

    So, we begin on Netflix n 2013/14. I realise that doesn’t seem like it connects, but it does, trust me. So, we begin on Netflix in 2013/14, and I’m a pretty new-ish user, so I don’t really have my recommendations down, and I’m not totally consumed by queer content yet. Because of that, I watch anything that looks remotely decent. And in that scope of “decent” was a show called Drop Dead Diva. Now you might wonder, how did Drop Dead Diva lead to Geography Club? And that’s valid point. And my answer is that within the show, the main character gets a guardian angel, originally played by Ben Feldman, then played by Carter MacIntyre, and then, finally, played by Justin Deeley.

    Then we take the fact that I finished watching the show, but wanted to see more of Justin Deeley specifically, because I am indeed a British cigarette, and so, like any normal person would, I went to his Wikipedia page to see what else he had been in. From there, I saw that there was a clickable link for a movie called, plot twist, Geography Club. I then ended up watching the movie (which I’m pretty sure that I have it on DVD as well…) and, because I saw in the credits that it was based on a book, I proceeded to buy and read the book, even though I had just watched the movie and the plot was essentially the same.

    I don’t know when exactly this was, but I want to guess and say it was 2013/14-ish, but it was actually the book that was my gateway into queer YA fiction. It was the first book that I bought that was purely gay. I couldn’t for sure say it was the book that made me want to write, because I know I realised I wanted to write around 2013 as well, too. But I also can’t say that it wasn’t. And yes, this book wreaked havoc onto my bookshelves, and now so many more of my books are gay, if not most of them…

    So, the book itself follows Russell Middlebrook, a closeted gay kid who is pretty low down on the social food chain. People don’t really notice him, and he’s fine with this. He has two friends, Gunnar and Min, neither of which he has told that he is gay, and it’s partly because down to the whole, “We’ve been friends for so long, so it’s difficult to tell them.”

    And then Russell logs onto this gay chat room (this book was published in 2003, for context) where he finds another gay kid in his town which he then goes to meet. Then the other gay kid turns out to be Kevin Land, one of the school’s baseball… I don’t know whether I would say star, but he was a member of the baseball team. He’s a jock, he’s popular, and he’s hot.

    Now, to just go off on a tangent, maybe it was in 2003, but as of me writing this in 2021, Geography Club is not the most revolutionary queer book, like, the plot isn’t the deepest thing – and it doesn’t necessarily need to be. And this could also be down to it being published in 2003, but that was just a point I wanted to quickly make.

    So, in terms of characters, Russell was fine, I wasn’t massively swayed either way by him. It seemed like he more or less wanted to keep his head down throughout high school, and fair enough. He does some kind of shit things throughout the book to try and keep up the guise of hiding his homosexuality. But he does end up making up for pretty much everything he did. So, he was fine, and I was happy with him by the end.

    I liked Min. At one point, fairly early in the book, Russell tells Min that he met Kevin in a gay chat room, and then she proceeds to come out as bi as Russell does gay. And she just seemed to be the nicest person in the book. I don’t know, I just liked her. She’s probably my favourite character in this book – but that might have something to do with the fact that I don’t like writing characters doing bad things. Like, I’ll do it when the time is right, but I think I want to live in this bubble where everyone is lovely, and the struggles my protagonists face are against the world, not other people.

    And, it might have been to do with queer solidarity, but I didn’t really like Gunnar. Pretty early on, he mentions to Russell that he wants a girlfriend and wants Russell’s help – since he mentions Russell is calm around girls. So, Russell agrees, to his own chagrin. And this whole plotline proceeds by Gunnar essentially having Russell doing things that make him progressively more uncomfortable – he makes Russell double date this girl, Trisha, so that he (Gunnar) can date this other girl, Kimberly. And the two boys get to the point they end up falling out.

    Now, they do make up at the end of the book, but while they’re making up, Gunnar mentions that he already knew that Russell was gay. And it was that, specifically, that I wasn’t a fan of in terms of liking Gunnar. If Gunnar knew that Russell was gay, why did he proceed to force Russell to date Trisha? And the answer is that Gunnar was selfish... He did say that he never called out Russell on (potentially) being gay, because he thought Russell would come out when he was ready, so I did appreciate that. Gunnar wasn’t total garbage, but I think it was because he spent so much of the book making Russell date Trisha, that was why I didn’t like him as much as Russell or Min.

    Now, as I’m writing this, I realise I’ve already exceeded 1,000 words (oops), so I’ll leave you with my final thoughts here.

    Is Geography Club, now, the most revolutionary or hard-hitting queer book out there? Not by any means, but it might well have been in 2003, when it was published. But that still doesn’t detract from the fact that it was the first purely queer book that I ever read. So, even though it’s not the greatest one to exist, it’ll always have that title, and a special place in my heart and on my bookshelf for that very reason. And, honestly, it’s still worth a read.

    Okay, bye!