Lotripper

Amazon has just re-defined pretty much every book in their Gay and Lesbian section as "adult" and removed their "sales rank" and listings in the bestseller lists. As though their existence is too scary for children. I'm a mom, gay is just a word for some of our relatives: how dare Amazon try to make them disappear?

This is just wrong and stupid. One author of a non-explicit gay YA book, markprobst , got this explanation

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller listas. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

For more WTF? see the list of suppressed books, including Brokeback Mountain, Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story, Tipping the Velvet, Heather Has Two Mommies, and Challenging Homophoba: Teaching About Sexual Diversity.

Not affected: heterosexual novels including violent rape and/or explicit rape (Laurel Hamilton, etc.) And their featured blog of the day includes a trailer for the video game Terminator:Salvation (rated teen). So it's clearly not violence they're worried about.

What to do: use the word #amazonfail on Twitter and blogs, at the very least. Link to the smartbitches redefinition of Amazon Rank. Gosh, Amazon has some blogs with comments enabled. We could... comment.

(cross-posted, sorry)