Children's Book Too Gay for Amazon.com

The internet’s in an uproar over the news that amazon.com has punished hundreds of non-erotic books because they dealt with the issue of homosexuality. Dubbed #amazonfail on Twitter, the action seems to be an attempt to control the site’s search results. Books that have no sales ranking don’t appear at all, leaving massive holes where lauded and important books once were. From the LA Times:

“American Psycho” is Bret Easton Ellis’ story of a sadistic murderer. “Unfriendly Fire” is a well-reviewed empirical analysis of military policy. But it’s “Unfriendly Fire” that does not have a sales rank — which means it would not show up in Amazon’s bestseller lists, even if it sold more copies than the “Twilight” series. In some cases, being de-ranked also means being removed from Amazon’s search results.

Amazon’s policy of removing “adult” content from its rankings seems to be both new and unevenly implemented. On Saturday, self-published author Mark R. Probst noticed that his book had lost its ranking, and made inquiries. The response he got from Amazon’s customer service explained:

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.

Probst wrote a novel for young adults with gay characters set in the old West; he was concerned that gay-friendly books were being unfairly targeted. Amazon has not responded to the L.A. Times request for clarification.

What’s striking is how widespread the de-ranking is. Heather Has Two Mommies, one of the most widely recognized LGBT-affirming children’s books today, has no rank on its 10th Anniversary edition.

Other affected books include Dead Boys Can’t Dance, which addresses the correlation between homophobia and suicide in teens. Alex Sanchez’s Rainbow Boys is a young adult novel used in high school English classes. Even Brokeback Mountain, the award-winning short story behind the film, is now de-ranked for being too “adult” to show up on best-seller lists and some search result pages.

For context, the number one book found on amazon.com last night with the keyword “homosexuality” was A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality by Joseph Nicolosi, the long-discredited past-president of NARTH, a major player in the ex-gay industry. Also still ranking: Can Homosexuality Be Healed?, by the aptly named Francis MacNutt and Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds, with over 600 pages of nude women.

Jane at Dear Author has a theory that she’s all-but proven.

At the suggestion of someone I looked up the category meta data provided by the publisher to Amazon. I looked up over 40 books that had been deranked and filtered out of search engines. It appears that all the content that was filtered out had either “gay”, “lesbian”, “transgender”, “erotic” or “sex” metadata categories. Playboy Centerfold books were categorized as “nude” and “erotic photography”, both categories that apparently weren’t included in the filter. According to one source, the category metadata is filled in part by the publisher and in part by Amazon.

[go to Dear Author for several examples]

Thus, as a “glitch” it was a remarkably targeted one that seems to support the emails that Mark Probst and Craig Seymour received from Amazon which was gay and lesbian works were deemed “adult” content regardless of actual content. This evidence appears to indicate that it isn’t so much a glitch but a specific policy. The question is then who implemented the policy of marking GLBT books as adult and who knew of the implementation? What kind of supervisory person signed off on it?

I’m inclined to agree with Jane. I doubt this was a top-down management decision. It’s much more likely that it was a lower decision with unintended consequences.

But even assuming that’s true, the question remains: Who decided that all books that have any metadata connection to the words “gay” or “lesbian” must be erotica by nature?