The Amazon Case – A Reflection Of What We Are…Able To Achieve

By Sandra Showtime on Monday, April 13, 2009 - 19:17

I haven’t recovered from the happenings of yesterday yet. At 4:30 am I went to bed, but I couldn’t find sleep that would feel now as if it was any kind of resting.

I am not a big Amazon user. I do have an account but I tend to buy the books I want in local bookstores or download them (as e-books), and the same goes for music and movies.  But I did appreciate this online store when I was looking for products that were hard to get anywhere else.

When I opened my Inbox yesterday, I found myself in a storm of emails by outraged eurOut readers. They told me how they felt about the censorship by Amazon regarding books with LGBT content. I needed half an hour to understand what they actually meant by this.

Apparently someone in the world-company Amazon decided to tag almost every product concerning lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender topics as “adult content” and with this decision removed all these publishings from their sales rankings and public search machines. I was first confused and then just stunned. Luckily, eurOut writer Joan pulled me out of my trance with her request to write about this issue. I confirmed thankfully, since I would have needed many hours more to find words for at least an almost factual article. You can find Joan’s summary here.

Scrolling through the tons of tweets and emails by sad, angry, disappointed or just shocked people, I started to wonder how this was even possible. I am still new in this “job” and not as familiar as the staff of AfterEllen.com with lesbian/bisexual portrayal in the media, and also not with the impact of media itself. But looking at the posts our writers, eurOut editors and myself had to write in the last months, I got my feet back on the ground because the ‘trend’ actually lead directly to a happening like this.

Sarah Warn rounded this up perfectly in her post called ‘What Amazon's "Glitch" Says About American Pop Culture’, which she has co-written with Michael Jensen (Editor in Chief of AfterElton.com). I don’t need to add anything to this topic, since the issues they are fighting over there are absolutely comparable with ours in Europe. Different shows, different channels/newspapers, but same problem. Bisexuality isn’t to be taken seriously, lesbians are not really lesbians, it’s all about f...., I think you understand.