Amazon.com decides gay books are "adult". Gay customers say, "WTF?"

What does a classic gay novel like James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room have to do with gay porn?

You'd think the answer would be pretty much "nothing." But if that's true, why would Amazon.com strip the sales ranks of it as well as almost all gay and lesbian books on their site — including Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story and 20s lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness — at the same time it's removing the sales rankings for adult novels?

And it's not just fiction. The blog Meta Writer said that affected titles also include The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students, Taking a Chance on God: Liberating Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Lovers, Families, and Friends and The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience. And indeed, not one of those books has its sales ranking listed.

Asked "What's up with that?" by a number of authors, Amazon sent out a form 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. 

It's hard to know what's more disturbing: That they're removing gay and lesbian books from their search results and sales rankings in the first place, or that they're categorizing anything about our community and our lives in the stigmatized "adult" category even when there's nothing "adult" about it.

I mean, in what universe are books like Vito Russo's Celluloid Closet, Randy Shilts' The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk or Dan Savage's The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant adult books? 

I checked the gay young adult titles by AfterElton.com's Brent Hartinger, and they all still have their sales rankings. A few other YA titles I looked at didn't, however, including John Fox's The Boys on the Rock, Jim Grimsley's Dream Boy and, ironically, The Heart Has Its Reasons: Young Adult Literature with Gay/Lesbian/Queer Content, 1969-2004.

Neither did Heather Has Two Mommies, which has got to be one of the most banned books in American history. Nice company you're in, Amazon.

However, homophobes and wingnuts will be glad to know that Speechless: Silencing the Christians: How Liberals and Homosexual Activists are Outlawing Christianity (and Judaism) to Force Their Sexual Agenda on America was still being ranked.

Amazon.com has not responded to a request for a comment by AfterElton.com.

EDITOR's UPDATE: Here is the response Christie Keith just received from Amazon.com

Thanks for your message. There was a glitch with our sales rank feature that is currently being fixed.

Drew

A "glitch", huh? Um, how does this jive with Amazon's form letter above? It seems pretty damn clear that Amazon classified gay material as "adult" and are now trying to backtrack without admitting what they did. I do think the classification might have been inadvertent, but to call it a "glitch with our sales rank" without admitting responsibility is only compounding their mistake. Great to handle this P.R. disaster, Amazon!