Over the weekend, a tide of indignation has been building against one of the Web's traditional poster children: Amazon.com. The reason? It appears that the online retailer has excluded a considerable number of gay- and lesbian-related titles from its ranking system.

The problem first cropped up in February, when Craig Seymour, author of All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C., noticed that his book had not only lost its sales ranking, but no longer showed up in product searches. (Please note, we're not talking about some grubby porn production here. Seymour is an Associate Professor of Journalism at Northern Illinois University, and his book was published by an imprint of the ultra-respectable Simon & Schuster.)

On February 25, after repeated inquires, Seymour finally got a response from Amazon. According to the email, his book had been stripped of its sales rank and excluded from searches because it "was classified as an Adult product." While the author pondered this rather mushy and ominous formulation, the sales rank for his book was quietly restored two days later. End of story.

Or not. Over the past few days, it has become clear that many, many more books, most of them gay- and lesbian-related, have gotten the same treatment from Amazon (whose founder, Jeff Bezos, is seen in the photo at left). When Mark Probst, whose own book The Filly had been stripped of its sales ranking, sent a query to customer service, he got the following response: "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."

The sales ranking--and just as important, accessibility via search--has been restored to Probst's book. But in the meantime, a cursory trawl of the Amazon site reveals a crazy quilt of exclusionary bloopers. John Fox's The Boys on the Rocks, a gay coming-of-age story that is not remotely pornographic, with a cover endorsement by the straight-as-an-arrow Richard Price, has no sales ranking. Meanwhile, something called Slave Boy, whose surfeit of graphic detail has caused even the publisher to issue a consumer alert, is still ranked (at a very decent 3,296, by the way).

As noted by the Jacket Copy blog at the Los Angeles Times, Paul Monette's Becoming a Man, which won the 1992 National Book Award, has been bumped to the back of the bus. So has Radclyffe Hall's 1928 classic The Well of Loneliness. Now, the sexual content in Hall's novel, which occasioned a public scandal and lengthy court battle before it could be passed through U.S. Customs, is limited to seven words: "and that night, they were not divided." Something tells me that Lights, Camera, Sex!, by porn star Christy Canyon, has a much higher smut ratio. Shouldn't this fall under the proud, saucy banner of "adult" content? Yet it retains its sales ranking, possibly because the star of I Like To Be Watched settled down into a healthy monogamous relationship at the end of the book.

So far, Amazon has done little in terms of damage control. The company's director of corporate communications, Patty Smith, issued a brief statement on Sunday: "There was a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed." Given the specific targeting of gay and lesbian titles, "glitch" seems like a disingenuous term at best. And the company's critics are not buying it, as you can see from this dedicated Twitter feed. (Says Solarstarfruit: " I'd like to see a nationally issued public apology from Amazon to its authors and readers." Hundreds of other tweets indicate the possibility of at least a micro-boycott from disgusted consumers.)

As a former Amazon employee--I worked there from 1996 to 2001--I can say that the company is not a hotbed of homophobic sentiment. I would also note that this is not the first time Amazon has wrestled with the issue of "non-family-friendly" content. In 1998, I believe, the company got some complaints from family advocacy groups for selling a pro-pedophilia book. (Whether the title was actually endorsed by the North American Man/Boy Love Association I don't recall, but the company got into hot water in 2003 for selling a NAMBLA bulletin in its magazine store.)

There was no great enthusiasm for NAMBLA among the staff, but the complaint did raise some interesting questions. To what extent was Amazon responsible for the materials it sold? Obviously a bookstore does not endorse every book on its shelves, but were there certain items that were ugly or inflammatory enough to end up in limbo? If so, how did that square with the demands of free speech?

In this case, the company took a middle course: the book would remain in the Amazon catalogue, but we would review the title and add a caveat at the end, distancing ourselves from the contents. A predictable game of hot potato broke out as staffers tried to duck this dreary chore. Nobody really wanted to pretend to Olympian detachment for the first paragraph or so, then stick in the parenthetical shiv at the very end. Finally, somebody did the job under an assumed name.

Let's be clear: I am not equating pro-NAMBLA tracts with the other titles cited above. And I think that the questions I raised--about the company's responsibility to its customer base versus the demands of free speech--are worth discussing. But it seems clear that Amazon stepped in a mighty big pail of milk here, and the company should do its best to clear the air. That would be true whether the mess was deliberate, semi-accidental, or even inflicted on the Amazon database by an outside party. (A self-confessed prankster is alleging exactly that in a new LiveJournal post, while a second post, denouncing this confession as a kind of meta-prank, popped up just a few minutes later.)

UPDATE: An Amazon spokesperson, Drew Herdener, has issued something of a mea culpa, which is quoted over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog. He chalks up the glitch to a "cataloging error," which impacted 57,310 books, many of them outside of the gay and lesbian ambit.

"This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error," he writes, "for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

"It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles--in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.

"Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future."

Meanwhile, ex-Amazon-employee Mike Daisey and Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger put in their two cents here, with Daisey citing inside sources to the effect that a programmer on the French Amazon site screwed up his BISAC categories and injected the bug into the entire system.