Book Banning Rears Ugly Head in Washington State

As most of us stuffed Thanksgiving birds and prepared cranberry relish, Brent Hartinger found himself embroiled in a controversy swirling around his almost three-year-old novel Geography Club (HarperTempest 2003). 

The saga of a gay high school sophomore (Russell Middlebrook) with a crush on a baseball jock, Kevin Land, whom he discovers to be gay, Geography Club is an awarded, critically-praised Young Adult tome about the impossible years. Among many honors, Geography Club was a 2003 Lambda Literary Award Finalist and a Booklist “Top Ten Best First Young Adult Novel!” 

On Sunday, November 20, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that Tacoma, Washington’s University Place School District had removed Geography Club from its library shelves following parents’ complaints. 

Superintendent Patti Banks said she was alarmed by the “romanticized” portrayal of a teen meeting a stranger at night in a park after first meeting the person - revealed to be a gay classmate – in an Internet chat-room. 

“We want to send a strong consistent message to all our students that meeting individuals via the Internet is extremely high-risk behavior,” Banks wrote earlier to concerned parents. 

“To the extent that this book might contradict that message, I have determined that it should not be in our libraries, in spite of other positive aspects (e.g. strong anti-harassment theme).” 

Explaining further her decision to ban Geography Club, Superintendent Banks told the Seattle Times, “I was influenced by a recent special on MSNBC on the dangers of Internet predators.” 

Banks claims she wasn’t swayed by gay themes, telling the Times that she is disturbed by “the immediate assumption that if a book features gay characters, (criticism) must be homophobia run amok. In my case, nothing could be further from the truth.”