Is Amazon.com rank?

Lesbians and gay men are frequently in the frontline of the blame game over society’s ills. Jerry Falwell said after September 11, that “the feminists and gays and lesbians … made this happen”. Speaking satirically: so feminists, lesbians and gays have access to planes? My question above about Woolf’s Orlando is answered by a blogger where you can find a list of affected titles. Among them are books by Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Christopher Isherwood and a host of others. Their ranking at Amazon.com has dropped as it has on another 57,000 plus titles.

In my poetry collection, The Butterfly Effect, I use the metaphor of the butterfly effect, in which the beat of a butterfly’s wing can cause storms on the other side of the world, to ask what is the power of words? Can a single word, like the small beating of a butterfly’s wing, have large consequences? It seems it can, and among those words are lesbian and gay.

Let’s hope that Mary Hodder is right when she says the new ranking has created a publicity nightmare for Amazon.com. Let’s hope that they’ll reverse this “glitch” because otherwise we’ll all have to ask, who will be next? Which dissenting group will be de-ranked? Which voice silenced by technology-wielding Amazon.com? Writers, publishers, booksellers and anyone with a social conscience should protest this new ranking system and expose it for what it is: an unfair homophobic insult not acceptable in 2009.

---

Post script: On Friday, Christopher Rice of the Lambda Literary Foundation which represents the interests of LGBT writers wrote an Open Letter to Amazon.com in which they acknowledged that Amazon.com has restored the rankings of the writers whose books had lost ranking.  He writes: “We were very pleased to hear that you are taking steps to prevent a repeat of this problem, and we look forward to being a knowledgeable participant in this process.”