Crossposted from the soapbox: Amazon is censoring books with GLBTQ content.

My apologies to those of you who have both my journals friended and are reading this twice.

Amazon.com is censoring books featuring GLBTQ characters or homosexual relationships by stripping them of their sales rankings, which makes it less likely that they will appear in searches. When contacted regarding one of the books, an author was told, "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists." However, several of the books stripped of rank include autobiographies, young adult novels, self-help books, and other books with no explicit sexual content. It also includes major works such as Brokeback Mountain, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Stone Butch Blues, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Am I Blue?, Gender Outlaw ... books that, for those of us who are queer, or questioning, or transgendered (and notably: for those of us who are also people of color) are likely to be the first time we read about our own experiences, or read something that makes us feel loveable, or represented, or make us make sense in our own heads.

I encourage those of you with the time, particularly those of you who routinely purchase things from Amazon, to contact them and demand rankings be restored to books with GLBTQ content. There's a web page here that offers various ways to contact Amazon. ETA: There's also a petition you can sign.

I shop at Amazon for its cheapness and convenience. That's not enough of a draw for me to subsidize my own cultural erasure.

Amazon update: the internet punishment should fit the internet crime.

Again, crossposted, because it's still worth it to me.

Channelling our collective hatred of both bigotry and faulty logic, Sarah of Smart Bitches is showing Amazon the price of being wrong on the internet: a good old-fashioned Amazon Google-Bombing. Details here, but the short version is this:

To play along, post a link to http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/amazonrank/ on a searchable blog or website with the link text set to:

Amazon Rank

If enough of us do this, the top hit for the search "Amazon Rank" eventually becomes:

amazon rank
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): amazon ranked
1. To censor and exclude on the basis of adult content in literature (except for Playboy, Penthouse, dogfighting and graphic novels depicting incest orgies).
2. To make changes based on inconsistent applications of standards, logic and common sense.