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.

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.