Amazon gets hit over gay-themed books

A strange thing happened yesterday on web megastore Amazon.com: all the gay-themed literature was suddenly recategorized as “adults only” and was removed from the all-important Amazon rankings. When the blogosphere and the twitterers noticed, the debated over Amazon’s actions erupted online. Twitter went crazy. The hashtag #amazonfail quickly rose through the Twitter ranks as a top topic.

The company claims it was only trying to limit access to adult material, and that gay literature was inadvertently swept up in the category changes. So is Amazon anti-gay? Or just clumsy? It’s not completely clear what happened, rumors of hacks and customer hate-based tagging abound, but the company is not helping clear the air over exactly what happened although they did apologize for being “ham-fisted”.