say it with pie

A couple weeks ago, I posted about the launch of my friend Adam Bourret’s graphic novel, I’m Crazy. Adam is serializing the book on his website for free, but also planned to self-publish it through a professional printer. However, this week Adam received news that the print provider he hired, Harmony, refuses to print his work.

Backstory: Adam is gay. He loves and makes love to other men. In fact, the whole reason I know Adam is because he loves my good friend Johnnie. They are an awesome couple.

I’m Crazy is an autobiographical comic, and therefore deals with Adam’s gayness. There are scenes featuring gay sex which could be considered explicit (though I haven’t seen any peen or penetration yet; it’s after 10 p.m. viewing by television standards). Apparently, all this gay sex was potentially too much for Harmony’s sensitive clientele. From the rejection letter Adam received:

Unfortunately due to the content I am going to have to respectfully decline. The reason is we have a lot of long standing clients who are religious organizations. They are in our facilities all of the time and cannot risk having this content out in the open during production. Please understand that this is not a slight against your artwork or the message that you are trying to convey to your audience. I wish you all the best and I hope you can understand our position.

Okay Harmony, let me get this straight. You can’t print the book because you have important religious organizations for clients (Watchtower Magazine?) who like to show up and walk around your industrial printing facility in a warehouse district of Etobicoke, and you’re worried that one of them is going to walk by at the precise moment that a page depicting gay sex spits out of a six-colour printer.

Right.

Let’s take a minute to talk about how “we can’t print this because we don’t want to lose our religious clients” was not an appropriate response. As Adam says on his blog, “This is your company’s decision, not theirs.” I could understand if Harmony didn’t want to print Adam’s book because they have a policy about printing sexually explicit material in order to keep their business “family friendly”. However, I do not see this policy anywhere on their website, nor did the Harmony employee cite such a policy in his e-mail. Rather, he said it was because they did not want to damage their relationships with religious organizations. He was not judging the content of Adam’s book against a general policy, but as an individual case. Which is discriminatory.

Ahhh, discrimination. What a touchy word. Harmony only said they were rejecting Adam’s book based on its “content”, not its “gay content”. Maybe they just meant the sexual content? Perhaps.

But probably not. The implication of their comment is that the content of Adam’s book is not offensive to the company—and why would it be? It’s not hardcore pornography—but offensive to their religious clients. And what is the most notable thing that religious organizations find offensive nowadays? I’m going to have to go with gay sex. Let’s not be naive: it was discriminatory.

Obviously businesses are under no obligation to take jobs they don’t want to. But Harmony showed a real lack of PR skills by saying, “We don’t want to print your work because it depicts gay sex.” The appropriate response would have been, “Our company has a policy about printing sexually explicit content.” Instead, they exposed themselves as a business who practices mild discrimination, something that potential clients might have a giant problem with. Consider this tale a warning to self-publishers considering Harmony.

Kind of an ironic name for a printing company that discriminates against gay content, no?