But from the outside, here’s what we KNOW happened: many, many books, focusing mainly on gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, disabled, feminist, and sexual abuse issues (this included Heather Has Two Mommies, a bio of Ellen DeGeneres, and Paul Monnette’s 1992 National Book Award winner Becoming a Man) were pulled from the Amazon search rankings. What this means is that they won’t show up on bestseller lists, and searching for general topics (for example, “homosexuality” – imagine if you were a kid struggling with some issues and saw this search…) will not reveal the books.

It was a holiday weekend. Amazon is on the west coast. So I’m going to be watching keenly later today to see how they deal with this. I really can’t see the largest bookseller consciously doing a censoring action this huge and not addressing it, or fixing it ASAP.

But what concerns me is the response of some of people. Not even homophobes – just people who didnt really understand why this matters. Many authors were outraged at seeing their own books pulled. But one comment on a blog scared the crap out of me. Someone said that their books weren’t pulled, so they weren’t too upset.

By the electric hammer of Thor, are you insane?

I’m not gay, I don’t write books with queer themes, and I know this action – whatever the cause – is bad news for all authors and readers. As a reader, if you want to search for a book but can’t remember the title or the author, but it’s got this lesbian as the heroine and you remember the general theme, searching on amazon won’t help you.

And I can tell you, as a small press author who can probably safely say at LEAST 90% of my sales have come through Amazon, having your ranking pulled is a nightmare. If people are just looking for a general book about your theme, they’re not going to find it. And that kills your sales.

And also, it matters because, as Neil Gaiman says, once they censor the stuff that YOU don’t agree with, or even care about, they will have the precedent to censor more, and eventually they will censor the stuff that you think is OK, and then maybe they will censor the stuff that you actually like, and then you will think, “Oh no! We must stand up and FIGHT this!” And everyone will look at you, tired and beaten, and say, “Where the hell were you last year, jerk?”

As Gaiman says [the brackets are mine]-

Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like [or write], when they come for the stuff you do like [or write], you’ve already lost.