homophobia & Amazon.com

[rm]

http://vashtan.livejournal.com/490173.html
http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11369.html

Amazon removes rankings from books with homosexual characters, including from at least one YA book, because they don't wish to include "adult" content in their rankings out of respect to the range of their membership.

Queer content does not inherently equal sexual or "adult" content.

We've got a big problem on our hands with this one.

If you find a targetted media product, add to list here: http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11992.html

Comments

[woogledesigns.livejournal.com]

hmmm. I think the problem is perceived as being 'we can't explain what homosexuality is without explaining what sex is, and that's inherently adult.'

Possible solutions- use the same language that is used to sanitize heterosexuality to obfuscate homosexuality eg:
"Some people tend to fall in love with women, and some people tend to fall in love with men, and you never know which you are until you start to fall in love..."

Of course some people may think that being queer is a deviance and therefore has to be kept from children. Not sure what to do about that except ask amazon to take a stand, in essence deliberately disrespecting one portion of it's consumer base to ethically side with another portion.