Author Sarah Luddington Harassed for Writing A Bisexual Lancelot

Sarah Luddington

After releasing her Arthurian fantasy series, The Knights of Camelot, author Sarah Luddington has become the victim of a homophobic campaign for interpreting the main protagonist as bisexual.

The first book in the series, June 2011's Lancelot And The Wolf, was rereleased for the Amazon Kindle, where it raced up the charts. However, a torrent of one-star reviews on Amazon.com first tipped off Mirador publishers that the issue may be more than a coincidence. The investigation that ensued revealed that all the reviews were posted in the same short time period and had similar anti-gay connotations, describing the series as “Twisted” “Perverted” and “Disgusting.” Not long afterwards similar hate emails began pouring into the publisher’s offices and to Luddington directly.

Amazon was notified of the dilemma and assured to remove any reviews that violate their protocol.

As a medieval historian and bestselling author, Luddington — who is also bisexual — began her series after years of studying the original source material of Mallory and Chretien de Troyes.

"People seemed outraged that I could suggest that King Arthur and Lancelot were in a gay relationship," Luddington said in a press release on Monday. "Yet when one looks more deeply into the original legends the undercurrent is clearly there. There had to be more to that love triangle than the simple infidelity of Guinevere."

As a response, Luddington released a special edition of the novel and will donate the royalties to Stonewall, a gay charity in the U.K. Her most recent novel, Lancelot and The Grail came out earlier this year.