Amazon celebrated the week leading up to Easter by purging its sales lists of gay content.

The purge includes gay romance books that are sold in bookstores such as Borders next to Mills and Boon novels (including some books written for “young adults”), and non fiction works including serious titles about combating homophobia, travel guides, biographies (including books about Harvey Milk) and even gay parenting guides.

Amazon has defended the move on the basis that it excludes adult material from its sales lists, sending out the following email to be people who have contacted them.

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 problem with the “adult” category is that far more explicit straight content remains in Amazons lists, and that’s only considering romantic novels or more graphic content. How a travel guide or parenting guide could be classified as “adult” content is another matter…unless of course Amazon has simply decided that in 2009, they no longer like gay people.

More coverage on LiveJournal and Valleywag. Also there’s a growing list of the books banned here. I get the feeling this story isn’t going away any time soon.