Read: "The Geography Club" by Brent Hartinger

Read: The Geography Club by Brent Hartinger, 2003, 978006012229.

EDIT, March 8, 2016: Gay kids, if you are looking for a digital copy of this novel check to see if your public or school library has an Overdrive account for ebooks. I presume many of the people landing here are looking for a copy of the novel on the sly. Load the book up on your phone or tablet if your situation requires secrecy. Overdrive also has a "read online" option for desktop machines.

This is one of the books the twits in West Bend were complaining about. We own a copy and a copy of the sequel. I ordered the book after a Page recommended them a couple years ago.

Not bad but not great. I write "not great" because this read more like a juvenile fiction novel than a YA novel. (The writing seemed geared toward 12-year-olds.)

High school sophomore Russ is a closeted gay teen who often thinks of himself as a spy in enemy territory. His deception has made him an expert liar. Russ is not a popular kid but to reveal himself as gay would be disastrous. The P.E. locker room is a source of anxiety because he is afraid he may give himself away with a glance or expression. Russ goes online one evening, logs into a gay chat room, and starts talking to a guy from his home town, the guy turns out to be from his school, they meet at a swampy park, other guy turns out to be star baseball player that Russ was already lusting after. Russ and dude swap spit.

Russ then comes out to his best friend (a chick) who, in turn, comes out to him. Russ, his pal, and baseball dude meet with other gay students at local pizza joint. Russ and new friends are all from different social groups and their paranoia at drawing attention scares them from meeting together again publicly. Russ and others form a boring school club - Geography Club - as a way to meet up regularly but discourage others from joining.

Of course, things go bad. School rumors of a gay student get everyone guessing. The Geography Club almost breaks up when a member keeps pressing for inclusion of school outcast who all the other students think is the gay student. A chick hot for Russ gets mad when he turns her down and to get even she declares him the gay one. Russ initially denies but then admits to digging dudes. Hot baseball dude cruelly betrays Russ to stay hidden. Geography club turns into gay-straight support group.

All-in-all this was a good book. Russ was a good character: a smart kid, perceptive about himself, learning as he goes along, self-deprecating, loyal to his friends, scared, etc. The scenes with the would-be-girlfriend were well done.

Things I did not like so much:

1-Hartinger set some important sequences in an overly dramatic school lunchroom. 2-Russ could be repulsively lovey-dovey (but admitted to being so). Evidence includes these quotes: The terrain of my own heart, the landscape of love, was still entirely unexplored.
and
In the close confines of his arms, it felt like I had stepped right up into the stars themselves - like I had become one with the sky, and that together we were as clean and pure and wide as the universe itself.
EDIT 7 Nov 2013
2. Page hits have been coming in on this.  Presumably because a movie version comes out this month.
3. I re-read my comments and noticed I wrote "homo" when I was shorthanding. I was not going to edit that because of my views on archiving and editing for posterity. But, if I make the mention here it is the same thing.
4. I bought the fourth in this series, Elephant of Surprise, for work. I have not yet read it.
5. I spoke to Hartinger once, he is a good dude.  I mentioned the locker room anxiety scene and he had some insightful comments.
6.  Of all the books within this series I think the zombie movie novel was the best.