Best. Gay. Week. Ever. (April 17, 2009)

BEST.GAY.WEEK.EVER? I don't think so. First, there was that Amazon.com kerfuffle where the online merchant began treating almost all books dealing with gay subject matter (even purely academic ones) as adult content — excluding many very worthy titles from their sales rankings system and standard searches.

One sad result? When you type in "homosexuality" as a search on Amazon, the results are skewed dramatically toward crap like this:

(Here's my bit of unsolicited advice to Amazon shoppers who might be interested in A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality: "Do everyone a favor and don't have kids!")

So what's going on here? On the surface, it sure looked like Amazon had adopted some sort of conservative policy to effectively bury positive gay representation on their site.   

But then company spokespersons variously blamed it on a computer "glitch," and a "ham-fisted cataloging error" and made assurances they were working on a fix.

And then some supposed hacker genius named "Weev" announced he was the culprit behind the disappearing rankings for gay books. He claims to have hijacked Amazon's feature for user reporting of inappropriate content. And tellingly, Amazon.com shut off that feature this week. 

But I'm wondering if a mouth-breathing, Cheetos-fingered computer geek playing an appallingly bad joke really was behind it, or was it actually any number of conservative cranks who independently started going around on Amazon and flagging gay stuff as inappropriate?

You know, the sort of nutjobs who regularly contribute to Conservapedia.  That seems more likely to me.

I mean, the same thing happens all the time on YouTube and other online video-sharing sites, where gay or even simply gayish videos of the G and PG variety inexplicably wind up with the "warning mature content" message, while hate speech and soft porn — as long as it's of the hetero persuasion — seems to sail through uncensored. 

That's the trouble with websites that allow user flagging of inappropriate content — inevitably, the only users that bother to do it are the crackpots.

But if Amazon.com ever turns the feature back on I might just force myself to go through and started flagging stuff that I think is inappropriate. Stuff like The Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality.  And I think I could also have a lot of fun uploading ironic photos to anti-gay titles with Amazon's "share your own customer image" feature! (Looks like at least one enterprising soul has already had the same idea.) 

Also contributing to a downer of a week: The plight of that poor gay elephant, Ninio. Through no fault of his own he finds himself stuck in a Polish zoo that apparently doesn't even want him. Said one Polish politico: “We didn’t pay 37 million zlotys (£7.6 million) for the largest elephant house in Europe to have a gay elephant live there.” 

Poor Ninio, its not like he had any say in the matter. It was purely luck of the draw. He might have been sunning himself at Busch Gardens Tampa Safari Park, or hobnobbing with the gay penguins at Manhattan's Central Park Zoo. Instead, he's stuck in Poland.

Photo credit: Greg Wood/AFP/Getty Images

You know, his story would make an absolutely perfect animated film from Disney or Dreamworks. Here's the pitch: Ninio, the young gay elephant is on his way to the Serengeti White Party when he gets waylaid by animal poachers and then sold to an Eastern Bloc zoo.

Things look bleak for the queer pachyderm when the close-minded zookeepers discover his orientation, but with the help of some colorful animal sidekicks (a wisecracking toucan, an effete lemur, and a mature though sexually predatory female cougar) Ninio manages to teach his Polish captors a thing or two about acceptance — by stampeding them to death.  

Okay, maybe that last bit is a little dark for an animated film. 

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