Roxane Gay, who several weeks ago pulled out from a book deal with Simon & Schuster because the publishing giant gave a large book deal to Milo Yiannopoulos, isn’t returning to that deal even though Yiannopoulos’s book deal was canceled.
On her Tumblr, Gay argued that Simon & Schuster just showed that they were willing to tolerate racism, sexism, and transphobia:
They did not finally “do the right thing” and now we know where their threshold, pun intended, lies. They were fine with his racist and xenophobic and sexist ideologies. They were fine with his transphobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. They were fine with how he encourages his followers to harass women and people of color and transgender people online. Let me assure you, as someone who endured a bit of that harassment, it is breathtaking in its scope, intensity, and cruelty but hey, we must protect the freedom of speech.
Gay also accuses the publisher of retaliating against her because of her protest: “After I pulled my book, they changed the release date of Dangerous from March to June 13, the day my next book, Hunger, comes out. I said nothing because I was neither threatened nor concerned but it did reinforce for me that this was not a company I wanted to do business with.”
Video of Yiannopoulos voicing support for pederasty appeared over the weekend and resulted in the troll getting un-invited from CPAC, a large yearly conservative conference. Simon & Schuster ended his book deal and he was forced to step down from his position at Brietbart in the face of protests from his coworkers.
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