Roxane Gay Dismisses Publisher's Break With Milo Yiannopoulos As Cold-Hearted Business Decision

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Feminist (or Bad Feminist) author and essayist Roxane Gay hasn’t warmed to Simon & Schuster after the publishing giant canceled its book deal with Milo Yiannopoulos on Monday following his comments on pedophilia.

In fact, Gay dismissed the news as a simple “business decision,” she wrote on Tumblr, “the same way they made a business decision when they decided to publish that man in the first place.”

A tape in which the Breitbart editor appears to defend pedophilia surfaced online recently; the controversy also revoked his invitation to a conservative conference planned for next week with Vice President Mike Pence.

“Simon & Schuster realized it would cost them more money to do business with Milo than he could earn for them,” Gay wrote. “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.”

The author yanked her upcoming nonfiction bookHow to Be Heard, from Simon & Schuster late last month in protest of the company’s decision to publish Dangerous by the white nationalist alt-right figure. 

Gay also claims that Simon & Schuster reacted to her decision with pettiness, stating the company moved the publication date of Dangerous to June 13 ― the same day her next book, Hunger, is set to be released by a different publisher. She confirmed that she will no longer work with Simon & Schuster.

Yiannopoulos’ list of offenses against women, people of color, Muslims, transgender people and other groups is long. In June, he was permanently banned from Twitter after inciting racist harassment of comedian Leslie Jones. His appearance is enough to spark outrage; students recently stopped him from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley after violent protests broke out, and a journalist canceled his appearance on “Real Time with Bill Maher” after discovering Yiannopoulos had been booked on the same episode. 

“There are some who will spin the cancellation of this book contract as a failure of the freedom of speech but such is not the case,” Gay ended her statement, “This is yet another example of how we are afforded the freedom of speech but there is no freedom from the consequences of what we say.”

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

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