Amazon Fails Gay Readers And Writers, Reclassifies GLBTQ Books As “Adult”

“Amazon: Building Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company”?

 

Shocking. As the news spread throughout the Internet yesterday, especially on social networking sites like Twitter, the anger and hostility rose quickly. It appears Amazon.com, “The world’s largest bookstore”, without notice has been removing LGBTQ publications from search results. At first it seemed reasonable to assume when the news broke that it was a computer glitch, or some over-zealous new employee who got a bit too rambunctious. But now, reports are coming in that the delisting has been going on since February. Via craigspoplife:

“Here’s my story: I’m the author of a memoir, All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C. (Atria/Simon & Schuster), which is about my journey from grad student to stripper to entertainment journalist to college professor. (I’m currently Associate Professor of Journalism at Northern Illinois University.) Like many authors, I frequently check my sales status on Amazon, so imagine my shock, back in early February when the “Amazon.com Sales Rank” completely disappeared from the Product Details of my book. The book also disappeared from the search listings, so that if a customer looked up “All I Could Bare by Craig Seymour” on the Amazon home page, nothing came up. Of course, I immediately sent emails to Amazon asking about this situation. I also placed several phone calls. But I could never get a straight answer, until February 25, when I received an email stating that “the sales rank was not displayed for the following reasons: The ISBN #1416542051 was classified as an Adult product.” “

Well-respected journalists and authors, among them Andrew Sullivan, have been affected:

 

“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.”

Mark R. Probst writes:

“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”

Amazon’s insufficient response reportedly has been this, by Patty Smith, Director of Amazon’s Corporate Communications:

“There was a glitch in our systems and it’s being fixed.”

But at 3:20 PM today, a search for “homosexuality” netted these results (see image here):

A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality by Joseph Nicolosi and Linda Ames Nicolosi Homosexuality (general topic fiction, non-fiction) You Don’t Have to Be Gay: Hope and Freedom for Males Struggling With Homosexuality or for Those Who Know of Someone Who Is by Jeff Konrad For The Bible Tells Me So ~ Gene Robinson, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Imogene Robinson

To be fair, Amnazon is a business. A very successful business. One wonders why they would, especially in these challenging times, attempt to limit access to products that, especially after events of the past few weeks, must be sufficiently lucrative to them. There don’t seem to be previous episodes of anti-LGBTQ attempts from Amazon. The question seems open, despite their claims of being a “glitch”? Why? If it was a glitch, why did it take them so long to realize it, especially since they were notified months ago? Personally, I’m in favor of giving them the benefit of the doubt, because any other explanation seems amazingly ridiculous from a business sense, and from an historical perspective.  But they do get an “F” for how they’ve responded to this situation. A friend on Twitter forwarded me an email he received from Amazon, after requesting they close his account. Their response: