A pair of gay-owned Internet businesses that don’t believe themselves to be sexually-oriented say PayPal is extending its no-porn policy to them.
Hyperion Interactive Media (HIM) in Los Angeles, a Web business whose sites offer services to gay surfers; and Belhue Press in New York, a publisher of books by gay writers, say PayPal let them go as clients earlier this year. Both companies said PayPal told them via email that their Web sites violated PayPal’s acceptable use policies.
This occurred around the same time PayPal dropped an actual sexually-oriented gay Web business, BadPuppy.com.
Visa and MasterCard have said they don’t restrict payments to sexually-oriented businesses just as long as those businesses break no laws and comply with the credit card companies’ regulations regarding chargeback levels, which both companies have tightened in the past two years.
Neither PayPal nor Badpuppy.com returned queries for comment from AVNOnline.com before this story was posted.
Belhue Press owner Perry Brass says his company sent a small flurry of email messages to PayPal’s customer service department to learn why his publishing company was let go as a PayPal client, and learned the reason was a photograph on one of his company’s titles – a photograph showing a pair of bare-chested men embracing. Brass said it was no different that photographs you might see on “dozens of straight romance novels” sold in airports, bookstores, or supermarkets.
Brass also said PayPal told him later they would agree to reinstate Belhue if they agreed to produce a statement removing such book covers, an offer Brass found easy enough to refuse.
“Obviously my Web site, www.perrybrass.com, would be forbidden hereon from selling penis-shaped macaroni, anything published by Playboy after 1980, and any postcards less than ten years [sic] showing two-year-old puppies fucking while being petted by humans,” Brass said in a statement on his site. “I read [PayPal’s policy] in a dazed state: where it's not blatantly stupid, it becomes really Naziish. Although some people would argue that no one has to use PayPal, it does not take a big leap of imagination to see the grunts at PayPal organizing a bonfire of books, sculpture, art work, and ‘toys’ that they object to.”
HIM president Matt Skallerud is a little less incendiary in discussing his issues with PayPal, even if an HIM worker told AVNOnline.com he “is not interested in making any comment on PayPal.” But last month he told a gay online newsletter, PressPassQ, that PayPal dropped him in early July without previous notice.
Skallerud told PressPassQ the cause appeared to have been two Web sites his company runs, LesbiaNation and GayWired, which provide personals for paid members in which some who take out such ads include graphic material including photographs. But Skallerud insisted the photos could be seen by paid members only.
