In The Order of the Poison Oak, Brent Hartinger’s sequel to the acclaimed and award-winning gay-themed young adult novel Geography Club, the characters venture off campus, taking the reader along with them. Set during the summer after protagonist Russel Middlebrook’s high school coming out, the novel follows Russel and best friends Min and Gunnar to a summer camp, where they will be working as counselors. While there they will encounter new conflicts which eventually strengthen them and their bond. I spoke with Hartinger about his new novel and his popular characters.

Gay & Lesbian Times: In the acknowledgments at the back of The Order of the Poison Oak, you thank Bret Tiderman “whose memories of his own experiences as a summer camp counselor were so detailed that it almost felt as if I’d been a counselor too.” Since you didn’t have the experience of being a camp counselor yourself, what made you want to write about it?

Brent Hartinger: That’s a good question. When compiling the events of a novel, I always outline ahead of time and I knew there were certain elements I wanted to have; I wanted it to be an adult free environment, like Geography Club, and I knew I didn’t want it to be a high school campus. I felt like I had covered that terrain. I wanted something different and when I put those two things together, summer camp came sort of natural. I knew what Russel wanted to deal with, which was “OK, what happens next,” and I knew at that point in his story he would be really sick of being the gay kid, he would want to get away. It was a way to wipe the slate clean and start all over and introduce new characters and have it be a controlled environment.

GLT: It’s also interesting that Geography Club is a school-year type of book and now you are telling us what these people do when they’re off for the summer. Being a counselor at a day camp is more than a summer job at a burger place.

BH: Absolutely. My attitude toward sequels is people think they want to know what’s going to happen next in the same story, but I think when people read a sequel that’s basically a continuation of the same story, they are inevitably sort of disappointed, because that story, if it was told well, is over. There was more or less closure at the end. I wanted to tell a whole new story, and I felt like to do that, I needed a whole new setting and some new characters. Talking about Brett (Tiderman), I met him at I think my third or fourth reading for Geography Club. He was 21, still in college. He e-mailed after the reading, and I didn’t remember him, because I meet so many people, but we were talking back and forth, and I think I had written most of Poison Oak at this point, but I mentioned summer camp and he said, “I was a counselor for six years, and I loved it, and it changed my life, I worked with the kids.” At that point I thought I had a handle on summer camp, because I was already writing the book, and, yet, he was able to give me just great details. At one point they talk about “camp

stew,” which is when the cook takes all the leftovers from the whole week and mixes it together, and if you can eat it, you get a prize. When he told me that, it’s a sort of verisimilitude, it’s the sort of truthfulness that no matter how hard you try to invent that type of thing, reality is always going to be more real. It’s the sort of detail that he was able to provide all through the book, and I was very grateful.

GLT: Russel, Min and Gunnar don’t just get jobs as counselors at any old summer camp. At Camp Serenity, the first campers of the season are burn survivors.

BH: I knew that I wanted the central conceit of the book to be about another club that you wouldn’t think you would want to join. I knew I wanted to play on the existing geography club that was sort of the gimmick of Geography Club. I wanted to give a twist on that. Then I heard a radio program where they were interviewing a burn survivor, and I was struck by how I totally got what he was talking about. I totally got it, and it was because of the gay thing. I related to everything he was saying. We’ve all had that experience when we’re talking to a black friend, or we just immediately get it even though our experience was different in some way; the feelings are exactly the same. It’s one way to avoid the usual and the trite, just repeating the same thing that’s been written a million times before, and maybe give straight people another way to look at the issue of being gay, and maybe look at it from a slightly different point of view, and maybe also help gay people look at the issue from a different point of view, too.

GLT: One of the campers figures out how it is that Russel qualifies to be a member of the Order of the Poison Oak without being a burn survivor; that he is gay. Do you think children are more perceptive than maybe some people give them credit for being?

BH: I think some are and I think as gay kids, a lot of us probably were. I think a burn survivor would have that sort of sensitivity, too. I think the thing about being gay and the reason I think the character of Russel resonated with so many gay kids was that he is constantly playing the angles, constantly looking around and gauging the safety of the situation and comparing his popularity to other people. I think that is a characteristic of a lot of gay people, but I think that is a characteristic that a lot of burn survivors have, and it seems consistent with his character.

Now that he’s had this experience, not just the experience of being burned, but also the experience of how people relate to him, that he’s going to develop a finer sense of what’s going on under the surface.

GLT: There was a slightly more erotic edge to this book, from the descriptions of Web to some of the physical activities that take place between Russel and Web. Why did you choose to add that element?

BH: [For Geography Club] I heard from a lot of straight people’s parents that, “Oh my god, it’s going to make people uncomfortable, it’s so explicit, so raw in its sexuality.” I heard from gay people, “It’s so squeaky clean,” so it’s all your point of view. I did want to explore that a little bit for a couple of reasons. Russel is getting older. I felt like the first book really wasn’t about sexuality, it was about different themes. The second book is a little bit about developing sexuality and what it means to be tempted. It gave me a chance to explore Russel’s maturity. I also thought when I set it at a summer camp, I had to have them skinny-dipping. Summer camp is, for a lot of gay kids, for a lot of kids period, a more sexual place. Finally, it also gave me an opportunity to deal with the issue of safer sex, which I think every gay teenager who is sexually active and every gay person who is sexually active has to deal with, and it’s a really complicated issue these days. When I was a teenager, I’m 40, things were sort of pre-HIV; it was just happening. You could be really stupid when I was a teenager and the consequences weren’t that dire. You can’t be stupid today without some really bad potential consequences, and so I think it’s a really important issue that needs to be dealt with in literature aimed at gay teens, that’s about gay teens. I’m sure [laughs] a lot of people are going to be horrified, but what can you do. I don’t think I did anything too out of line.

GLT: Do you envision following this character into adulthood?

BH: Probably not. I think if I did continue after these four books, I think what I would do would be a little bit like the “Simpsons” or “Peanuts” in that he would grow old, but very slowly. He would be 17 in the next book and maybe 17 in the book after that. Maybe he would turn 18. I suppose it’s possible that he could go to college, but I really doubt it. It seems that if I were going to write that story, I would write a new character, but who knows? Never say never [laughs].

Brent Hartinger and his partner Michael Jensen author of Fireland will be doing a reading, May 8, at 5:00 p.m. at Obelisk bookstore in

Hillcrest.