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Amazon "bans" gay books
Gore Vidal
Amazon has been criticised for removing gay books from its bestseller lists.
The online retail giant operates a popularity ranking system for each book they sell.
Over the Easter weekend rankings were removed from over 57,310 books, which were deemed to have an “adult content”. The books appeared in a number of categories such as health, reproductive and sexual medicine, and erotica.
This has been seen as an attempt to make Amazon more family-friendly.
However, gay and lesbian-themed books were disproportionately affected by the ban, which made it almost impossible to search for books with a gay or lesbian theme.
For instance, Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx was removed from the bestseller list as was The Well of Loneliness, Radcliffe Hall’s 1928 lesbian novel.
The City and the Pillar, Gore Vidal’s classic book about homosexuality, was also banned, which prompted the author to ask: "What kind of a childish game is this? Why don't they just burn the books? "
However, The Playboy Book of Centerfolds, featuring explicit images of naked women, remained on the list, as did Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which had been banned in the 1960s on account of its language and erotic content.
Amazon initially claimed that the removal of gay and lesbian books with minimal, if any, sexual content, was a “glitch”, before admitting that it was an “embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error”.
The “glitch” affected Amazon sites worldwide.
Amazon has said that the situation is now being rectified.
