Photo by Avi Richards on Unsplash
After three months of protests, Amazon pulled the conversion therapy books from its website.
For months now, complaints have been growing against Amazon for selling gay conversion books. The books were written by the late Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, who died in 2017. The site continued to sell these books despite the practice’s promise of converting gay people into being straight getting debunked years ago. In addition, several states and counties in the US, and areas within other countries, have banned the practice.
News sources became aware of these books on Amazon after UK activist Rojo Alan started advocating against them. As for Alan, he became aware of the books after a local church planned to host a film screening to promote the books. On top of protesting that event, Alan contacted both Amazon and Wordery to ask that the literature be removed. Wordery did so within 24 hours, but Amazon did not.
Man reading on public transport / Image via Instagram @hotdudesreading
“Every time I had called them or spoke to them over their webchat, I felt like I was getting nowhere. I was always told the same thing ‘I will take down your information and pass it along to the relevant team.’ When I asked them whom they were passing it along to, or if I could speak to this team, I would always be refused,” said Alan to the Business Insider.
“I was told that it would take about a week for the books to be removed if this team thought they should be. So it was frustrating. Having to look up these books all the time and not know why they were allowed to be there.”
Alan then brought in the help of Reddit and Twitter users to give negative reviews to the books, which then dropped to two stars each. Plus, a Change.org petition gained more than 82,000 signatures in hopes that Amazon would remove the titles. And eventually, it did.
This past Tuesday, all of the books that were so hotly contested for three months were removed from the site. That said, Amazon has not made an official statement about the issue and has refused to comment on it. Despite that, Alan and his allies are happy.
He said, “I wasn’t expecting them to actually remove the books — but as soon as I saw they did, I’ve been over the moon really.”
Sources: Business Insider, NBC
