They ordered three queer books online. They got a Bible instead.

We all know how it is: a book site we love has a massive sale, and we’re tempted enough to snag a few of the hardcovers we’ve been daydreaming about while the price is right. Then we wait patiently by the mailbox to get our hot little hands on our next life-changing read. The package arrives, we rip it open, shivering with anticip….ation, only to discover…a Bible?

I mean, ideally this should never happen to anyone. But it’s exactly what happened to Liv, a queer TikToker, Drag King, and avid reader who placed an order for some good books, and ended up with the Good Book instead.

Now there’s one question on everyone’s mind—what gives? Could this have been an innocent mistake at the warehouse, or has the anti-gay rhetoric surrounding book bans aimed at school-age children started to unofficially creep into the private realm?

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“I ordered the prequel to Legends and Lattes,” Liv told followers in a recent TikTok, referring to writer Travis Baldree’s hugely successful fantasy series, “and [R.F. Kuang’s] The Poppy War,” another fantasy book that has queer characters. Instead, they were shipped the Oxford World Classics edition of, that’s right, the King James Bible.

As a former Target employee, Liv doesn’t believe a mistake of this kind could be an accident, and other warehouse workers keep entering the comments to agree. So what, exactly, is going on here?

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In the comments, other viewers started talking about similar issues they’ve had when trying to buy queer literature.

And it gets even weirder: this version of the Bible isn’t even sold through Target, which means that someone might have brought their own Bible to work with the intention of swapping it out for queer book orders. It might seem far-fetched at first, but as one commenter pointed out, Christian extremists “keep lists of queer media so followers know “what to avoid,” & they would absolutely do this kind of swap as well.”

So can Target crack down on rogue employees if they catch them doing weird stuff like this? Does it boil down to doing more inclusive training for workers? Or are the insane Christians truly on a mission to ruin reading at every level, regardless of where the books come from?

We’ve reached out to Target for comment—more as this story develops.