She spoke to their Amazon rep today, and he told her it was definitely not a glitch. From Brooke’s email to me:

Basically he said that amazon has been experimenting with the way they dole out content specifically so that people who are searching Harry Potter or whatever won’t run into links to products that might be offensive. …It’s super fucked up, but apparently he’s saying that Amazon is a bully when it comes to stuff like this and it’s all about sales for them and it’s not about censorship.

…He also said no human is responsible for the decisions per se, and that it’s all about tagging and feeds which are constantly being tweaked. He does think that amazon will retweak the tags based on the uproar that happened over the weekend.

Others say that the rep doesn’t know what he/she is talking about. In any case, the “no human is responsible” line is kind of fishy. At some point, humans were involved. someone made the decision to tag, or not to tag, or to not reveal the truth to the public. Amazon is a giant company – why are there still rumors about this? Why hasn’t a statement from Jeff Bezos been released?

***

Gay websites, including this one, were aghast that Amazon.com seemed to have moved many mainstream gay and lesbian books into the “adult” category – and so automatically removing them from the sales rankings, while other books, like one of Playboy centerfolds, remained.

But it seems now that the tagging – which Twitter users quickly dubbed “#AmazonFail” was actually a hacker prank.

Gawker says that:

The hacker, known as Weev, with whom we’ve had dealings before the “amazonfail” episode, is saying that the whole escapade was the result of his exploitation of a vulnerability in Amazon’s product-rating tools.

On livejournal, Weev said:

Hay dude. Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday. I guess my game is up! Here’s a nice piece I like to call “how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code”.

There are some doubters, though, saying Weev is taking responsibility for something that Amazon itself did.

Which is the truth? It sounds possible that it’s a prank – but even so, Amazon.com didn’t help itself by calling it a “glitch” instead of expressing extreme regret that dozens gay and lesbian books – such as Ellen DeGeneres’ autobiography – would be accidentally classified as inappropriate.

It’s something of a coincidence that I spent much of my holiday weekend reading The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. I picked up Dan Shilts’ definitive biography of Harvey Milk at my local bookstore last week (shout out to Lambda Rising, one of the last LGBT bookstores in existence) on something of a whim, and I haven’t been able to put it down since.

So when I first heard yesterday about #Amazonfail, the change (purposeful or otherwise) in the Amazon.com ranking system that meant most LGBT focused books lost their sales ranking, the first thing I did was search for Mayor of Castro Street. After a weekend of reading that complex and important biography, I was pretty shocked to find that it too had lost its sales ranking. Was it a serious, difficult book? Certainly. Was it adult material? Certainly not.

Of course my experience was mirrored by many. Jezebel pulled together a list of books that saw their rankings purged,including Ellen Degeneres: A Biography, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Queer Theory, Gender Theory: A Primer, and Heather Has Two Mommies, potentially the most frequently banned children’s book in America.

Books that Jezebel pointed out weren’t removed from the rankings? Ron Jeremy: The Hardest Working Man in Showbusiness, Hot Cougar Sex, Super Beauties: Nude and Natural, and The Complete Asshole’s Guide to Handling Chicks.

Given the contents of the two lists, it has been difficult to believe Amazon’s initial response– that in deference to their entire audience, they removed books with adult content from the rankings. The explanation is not close to credible.

Yesterday evening (after the story blew up all over the blogosphere and particularly on Twitter), Amazon finally realized that their explanation wasn’t flying and started circulating a new explanation. The books had their ratings stripped, the company explanined in emails, because of a “glitch.”

Perhaps it was a “glitch,” I have no way of knowing. But that “glitch” has not, I’d like to point out, been fixed a day later. And since the “glitch” hasn’t been fixed, the most disturbing part of the situation also hasn’t been fixed.

If you search “homosexuality” on Amazon right now, the first items that come up include A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality, You Don’t Have to Be Gay, and Can Homosexuality Be Healed? I can’t help but think of some poor kid searching for a book to help him deal with a complicated part of his life and being faced with those choices.

Those search results are a real problem, and they represent to me, a clear validation of that viewpoint by Amazon.

Perhaps inspired by the book I’d been reading all weekend, and it’s hero’s repeated dependence on economic boycott as a change strategy, I fired off a strongly worded email to Amazon last night, explaining how they’d lost my business until they issued a public apology for this misstep, accidental or not.

I received a form letter explaining the “glitch” immediately, but that’s not enough for me, not this time. I want a public apology and I want the “glitch” to be fixed, the sooner the better. Every minute it stands is one minute that important information isn’t available for those that are seeking it.

But I also know that my email alone isn’t going to change minds or policy at Amazon. It’s only through collective decisions, collective action, the flexing of collective economic muscle that things like this can be changed.

So what have you done today? Sent an email to Amazon yet?

“There was a glitch in our systems and it’s being fixed,” Amazon’s director of corporate communications, Patty Smith, said in an e-mail Sunday.

As of Sunday night, books without rankings included Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room,” Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar” and Jeanette Winterson’s “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.” The removals prompted furious remarks on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere online.

Craig Seymour, author of the gay memoir “All I Could Bare,” wrote on his blog Sunday that his sales rank was dropped in February, then restored nearly four weeks later, after he was told by Amazon that his book had been “classified as an Adult product.”

1. If you climb a gate, jump into a zoo habitat for polar bears, and get beat down by a polar bear, expect little sympathy from me. Instead I’m going to laugh and start a petition demanding that animal gets some type of prize.

2. The New York Mets play their first game in a new stadium today. Sure you come here for “gay news” but if they make the playoffs, I’m writing about it for a whole week. So deal.

3. Dr. Laura said good things about gay relationships?!?! Dr. Laura?! Get out!

4. My apartment is a pigsty and I don’t care.

5. Rev. Rick Warren is not making sense.

6. Newt Gingrich said something smart yesterday: the Obama dog story is stupid. However, Bo is a cute little thing; the new Obama pet doesn’t hold a candle to Bailey.

7.  No cherry pie yet. That  will change by Friday.

8. The Amazon.com story reminds why my cash only goes to independents. Good morning 192 and Book Court.

9. If my doctor ever tells me to give up coffee, I’m getting a different opinion.

10. Bacon salt. God bless this land!

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 almost all gay and lesbian books on their site — including E. 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 Speechless: Silencing the Christians: How Liberals and Homosexual Activists are Outlawing Christianity (and Judaism) to Force Their Sexual Agenda on America or Heather Has Two Mommies, which has got to be one of the most banned books in American history. Nice company you’re in, Amazon.

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