Some bloggers and social media communities are taking exception today to Amazon's removal from its sales rankings of gay or lesbian books it considered "adult" in nature.

Mark R. Probst, a gay romance author whose book was included in the action, writes in his LiveJournal blog:

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?

Probst received the following reply after contacting Amazon through his Amazon Advantage account:

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.

Probst also notes, however, that Amazon has de-ranked heterosexual romance novels in its erotica section. So the allegation is not so much that Amazon is removing all gay romance (some still remains), but rather questioning whether Amazon's standards for what constitutes "adult" material are biased against homosexual romance. It should also be noted that Amazon still sells these books: they simply no longer appear in public sales rankings.

In the comments of that post, and elsewhere on LiveJournal, readers have been searching Amazon to find bias in the books removed from the rankings. The examples found do appear to hold water: for instance, the aforementioned post claims that the raciest section in The Well of Loneliness, one of the novels no longer ranked, is the phrase "And that night they were not divided." Another, False Colours is a historical novel about a gay relationship with a single, non-explicit sex scene, explains the same source. The classic novel Lady Chatterley's Lover has also been removed from rankings.

Growing Backlash

The book blog Booksquare has posted an open letter to Amazon regarding the change, and the topic "#amazonfail" has been trending on Twitter for most of Sunday. Whatever Amazon's response to the issue, they'll need to respond quickly and publicly to the allegations.