Amazon Cuts " Gay" Books from Inventory
Library Grape: Amazon Hides, De-Lists Hundreds of Gay-Related Books
And people wonder why gay people feel like we're treated by society like dirty, unmentionable rubbish:
On Amazon.com two days ago, mysteriously, the sales rankings disappeared from two newly-released high profile gay romance books: “Transgressions” by Erastes and “False Colors” by Alex Beecroft. Everybody was perplexed. Was it a glitch of some sort? The very next day HUNDREDS of gay and lesbian books simultaneously lost their sales rankings, including my book “The Filly.” There was buzz, What’s going on? Does Amazon have some sort of campaign to suppress the visibility of gay books?
Lest you think it's just gay romance novels that lost their rank, the pogrom also purged a lot of award-winning gay-related nonfiction as well, including "Becoming a Man" by Paul Monette, which won the 1992 National Book Award, "Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America" by Nathanial Frank and a biography of Ellen Degeneres. Check out Jezebel for a more fulsome list of the books that suffered the Ultimate Amazon Punishment.
It just goes to show you that society is perfectly happy to let the degenerate gays live their lives as long as they relegate themselves to bathhouses, beauty parlors and florist shops. People only become forced to denounce the gays when they actually step out from the shadows, ridiculously try to assert that they're a Normal part of every facet of our daily existence and demand equal treatment under the law. Why aren't those horrible, prancing gays more discrete? Why are they always "flaunting" their sexuality? Why can't they have the decency to just LIE about who they really are? Why don't they all just crawl into a glory hole in San Francisco and leave the respectable, moral people in society to live their lives in peace?
Update: Ok, my last paragraph is a bit breathless but it bubbled up from a really serious resentment that I hold in my heart. Too much inane shit -- like this boneheaded move by Amazon -- happens on a daily basis in people's lives that gets no publicity whatsoever. And it all goes unnoticed or unappreciated because Normal straight society pats itself on the back that they've oh-so-magnanimously granted the Gays a restricted license to generally walk free in polite society without too much of a threat of violence or too much of a threat of on-the-job retaliation. It all just makes me so sick and tired that something so fucking innocuous as people choosing to love someone of the same gender has evoked so much blood and pain throughout our history as a "civilization". To think that this oh-so-enlightened country stood by our ever-modern Muslim allies during the Bush years in refusing to sign a U.N. declaration calling for the universal decriminalization of homosexuality... It really speaks volumes about us as a "civilized country" when our President stood alongside fucking Saudi Arabia in opposition to the simple proposition that people shouldn't be criminally prosecuted for being gay. Oops, I'm rambling...
Update 2: Ok, ok, so this is my High Gay Dudgeon post for the day. At least frothing gay hater James Dobson threw in the towel and dejectedly admitted that he lost the culture war that he helped unleash upon millions of innocent gay people:
James Dobson, 72, who resigned recently as head of Focus on the Family -- one of the largest Christian groups in the country -- and once denounced the Harry Potter books as witchcraft, acknowledged the dramatic reverse for the religious Right in a farewell speech to staff.
"We tried to defend the unborn child, the dignity of the family, but it was a holding action," he said.
"We are awash in evil and the battle is still to be waged. We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles."
Let's all take a moment and hope that, for him, the Hell he believes in actually does exist -- because at least then we'd have some comfort that he'd actually be punished for all the evil he was responsible for in this world. He'd have good company down there -- Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms are waiting.
The occasion of Dobson's resignation somehow reminds me of a quote I once read:"In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men." - Mary Renault Update 3: In the interest of fairness, I should point out that an Amazon spokesman has now claimed that the purges were there result of a mysterious "glitch". Not like anyone in corporate PR would say anything other than that, but it's something.
Update 4: In the interest of more fairness, LiveJournal blogger tehdely has a very interesting theory on how this all may have come about. In essence, his hypothesis is that this whole thing may have been a stealth campaign by religious zealot trolls to flag any gay-related books on Amazon as "Adult". If true, this would not be a "glitch" (i.e., "A fault or defect in a computer program, system, or machine") but rather an abuse of Amazon's technology.
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