No, it’s not a typo. If you caught a recent episode of Celebrity Apprentice, you’ll notice that the clean-minded folks at All Laundry Detergent have a lot against anything dirty. They don’t like sex, they don’t like humor, and they definitely don’t like dirty words, even if they’re bleeped out. All wants you to go missionary, and they want to wash out your mouth with soap. I’ve used All for years, but I swear, the two wet lumps of coal who represented the brand on national TV have inspired me to switch to Tide.

It seems Amazon doesn’t like sex either, even though Amazon certainly makes a great deal of money selling sex. Oh, and they don’t like gay content. Everyone knows by now that the Amazon rankings for a number of books with gay, lesbian, and transgender content, along with books with steamy scenes, recently disappeared from the online mega-retailer’s site. Amazon sent out this message to concerned authors:

“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.”

According to Amazon’s algorithm, just about anything with gay content is adult, even the Young Adult books of Mark Probst, who posted about the vanishing rankings on his blog.

I decided to check on some friends’ books, and lo and behold, I discovered that Ellen Sussman’s anthology: Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex, had lost its ranking, as had Sheri Joseph’s novel Stray, which has a gay main character. Stephen Elliott’s novel, My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, was spared the axe, as was my first novel, Dream of the Blue Room, which is loaded up with sex, including a whole lot of girl-on-girl action.

So what makes some books suspect to Amazon’s strange brand of censorship, and why are others spared? And why the sudden anti-gay, anti-sex policy on the part of Amazon, which surely got its first big rush of business years ago from live-and-let-live West Coast? What gives? I’ve got Amazon widgets all over this blog, and, like All, it looks as though I may have to switch allegiances. We’ve all known for a long time that we ought to be doing ALL of our book shopping at local independents, anyway. Amazon is just lighting a fire under us to do it a little bit quicker. The company calls the vanished rankings a “glitch” and promises to fix it right away…but we’ll see.