Ahem…

I read online today that Amazon has stopped ranking gay themed titles.  This is having the effect, intended or not, of pushing a whole genre of publishing off your lists, and into the closet.  Even the children’s book "Heather Has Two Mommies" has been de-ranked and thereby de-listed.  Or, put another way, closeted.  Only Kindle editions are listed now when you search Gay and Lesbian bestsellers, because the print editions have had their rankings stripped.

What were you thinking when you did this?  As a gay man, and a frequent customer here, I am more unhappy to read about this then I can express.  It’s one thing to keep sexually graphic content out of sight of minors, but another thing entirely to push anything having to do with the lives of gay people into the closet.  That, simply put, is bigotry.  A kind of bigotry I thought Amazon wasn’t really interested in trading in.

And here I was, just about to purchase another lawn and garden tool…something I need and can’t seem to find locally.  Like the lawn mower blade I bought some time ago.  Oh…and all the mp3s I’ve been buying lately…I have some more titles I was going to search for.  Hardly a week goes by that I don’t buy a song, or a book, or some other product, from Amazon.  But not now.  You need to seriously re-think this policy, and quickly, or I will not be buying a single thing more from Amazon.  And considering the stink I’m seeing about this online already…I doubt I’ll be the only customer you loose over this.  Get a little more common sense into your ranking policy, and the prejudice out of it.  My thanks in advance.

Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland.

[Update…]  Via Toweler Road…a wee list of some of the titles Amazon.Com is now essentially considering pornography…

Meta Writers has posted a list of the books that have been stripped which includes almost all novels in a user’s Top 100 Gay Novels List including James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance.

Our theatre critic Kevin Sessums reports that the hardback edition of his memoir Mississippi Sissy retains a sales ranking while the ranking for the paperback edition has been stripped. Michelangelo Signorile reports that his books have all lost their rankings.

The L.A. Times reports on the de-ranking:

Our research shows that these books have lost their ranking: "Running with Scissors" by Augusten Burroughs; "Rubyfruit Jungle" by Rita Mae Brown, "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" by Alison Bechdel, "The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1" by Michel Foucault, "Bastard Out of Carolina" by Dorothy Allison (2005 Plume edition), "Little Birds: Erotica" by Anais Nin, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" by Jean-Dominque Bauby (1997 Knopf edition), "Maurice" by E.M. Forster (2005 W.W. Norton edition) and "Becoming a Man" by Paul Monette, which won the 1992 National Book Award.

[Update…]  Andrew Sullivan discovers that as far as Amazon is concerned, he’s a writer of pornography…

This has to be one of the weirdest and least defensible policy changes imaginable. Mein Kampf is fine. Jackie Collins is fine. But books about gay subjects are now "adult" on Amazon and so not included on best seller lists or rankings. Sure enough, "Virtually Normal" and "Love Undetectable" have been de-listed and stripped of customer sales rankings. Jackie Collins’ "Married Lovers" hasn’t. My books contain discussions of Aquinas and Freud and Foucault and Burke. I’m puzzled as to why those authors are more "adult" than Collins’ adulterous couplings.

Seems someone at Amazon has had a homosexual panic moment.  Well…the electric pole saw I was going to order from them tonight (I have a tree I need to prune a tad…) is available on the ACE Hardware website too, which claims to ship for free to my local ACE store.  

[Update…]  Ah…it was a GLITCH…

"A groundswell of outrage, concern and confusion sprang up over the weekend, largely via Twitter, in response to what authors and others believed was a decision by Amazon to remove adult titles from its sales ranking. On Sunday evening, however, an Amazon spokesperson said that a glitch had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new adult policy."

Well that certainly explains this…

"Many of us decided to write to Amazon questioning why our rankings had disappeared. Most received evasive replies from customer service reps not versed in what was happening. As I am a publisher and have an Amazon Advantage account through which I supply Amazon with my books, I had a special way to contact them. 24 hours later I had a response:

"In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude ‘adult’ material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

"Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

"Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage"

And how suddenly every book with a gay theme or content in it was wiped off hundreds of Amazon book lists as if they’d never existed…but not other books with similar heterosexual themes.  As I said previously, I think someone in Amazon HQ had a homosexual panic moment and made a really bad decision they thought, whilst in the grip of their homosexual panic, that it wouldn’t be noticed or much disapproved of.  "Glitch" goes a long way toward explaining what happened…not.  How the hell does Virtually Normal, Brokeback Mountain, and Maurice suddenly get treated like they’re pornography if this wasn’t some jackass attempt to push gay books into the closet because somebody got all upset that Amazon was treating gay folk like just another customer demographic?

[Update…]  Over at The Examiner, they have a new and interesting theory about that little "Glitch"…

Now a new theory is starting to circulate, that in fact, there was a glitch in the system, and that glitch was abused by people wanting to hurt Amazon.  Here is the theory:

On each book is a feature allowing customers to tag a book with words to help people search.  Someone might tag a book about Britney Spears with the words "popstar" or "meltdown", words potentially related to the book.  If a book was tagged "adult" enough times, it is possible that Amazon had a system in place to remove the sales rank and remove it from the search engine, perhaps until a live person could double check it.  This would fit with the statement from a customer service representative over the weekend that this was a new policy about "adult" content. 

Now, a group of people makes a concerted effort to tag books they don’t like with the "adult" tag, knowing the automated system will remove them from the search.  Reports have surfaced that authors have been discovering their books removed from search as early as February of this year.  At that time, they complained and Amazon put the books back in the search.

This weekend is when many people became aware of the fact that so many books were disappearing, hence the firestorm.  Some on the internet find it odd that the cat would be let out of the bag on Easter weekend, a religious holiday when few staff would be on hand at Amazon to deal with the fallout.

I’m generally not a conspiracy theory fan, but this has a certain ring of truth to me.  Trusting the crowd to rate content is pretty common across the internet, so for Amazon to have instituted an automated feature like this would not be surprising.  In fact, as I noted in my previous report, one of the books that did not disappear from search is "For The Bible Tells Me So", a positive look at homosexuality with a biblical perspective.  This actually supports this theory- someone trying to eradicate books that support homosexuality might easily think this one was opposed based on the title.

Given that I’ve seen wingers doing crap like this elsewhere, it’s not at all beyond the realm of possibility.