Corporate America Is Abandoning the LGBT Community

Today is Hampton Roads Pride's main Pride event in downtown Norfolk's Town Point Park, complete with a boat parade.   The event is a reminder of how much things have improved from when I first came out of the closet.  When I came out of the closet almost 25 years ago, the event was tiny and tucked away in the back of Lafayette Park out of sight, there was no same sex marriage, in Virginia the sodomy statute subjected same sex relations to potential felony charges, and there were no state or federal non-discriminations protections.  Yet with the Felon pushing the Project 2025 white "Christian" nationalist agenda to silence or even erase anyone who basically is not a right wing white Christofascist many, including myself, worry that all the gains made may be lost and ponder if those who can should consider moving overseas to safer, more welcoming countries (personally, the issue is where to go and how do we get our children and grandchildren out of an increasingly ugly America). Adding to such worries is the reality that much of corporate America that courted the LGBT dollar are proving to have been fair weather friends/allies only out to tap into the pink dollar (a piece at JP Morgan Wealth Management estimates the global LGBT purchasing power is $4.7 trillion while the U.S. LGBT purchasing power is likely over $1 trillion).  Faced with potential threats from the Felon's anti-diversity, anti-equity and anti-inclusion agenda and MAGA world's "anti-woke" fixation, many large corporate donors to Pride events and other LGBT organizations have either cut or reduced funding - better to alienate LGBT community members than face threats from the knuckle dragging MAGA provocateurs.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the unsettling situation: 

I remember the heady days when Out magazine, which I edited from 2006 to 2018, would swell each June for L.G.B.T.Q. Pride month, its pages thick with ads. Our offices became cluttered with vodka bottles emblazoned in Pride flags, sneakers in rainbow hues, underwear so festively gay that they might as well have come with a parade permit. That deployment of marketing budgets to support the gay community became known as rainbow capitalism, and for a time it became a good business.

Maybe we were naïve. The forces that once propelled corporate America into the arms of L.G.B.T.Q. America have pivoted, retreating under the weight of political backlash and the calculus of risk aversion. The pink pandering hasn’t gone away entirely, but the Trump administration’s assault on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives has turned Pride from a brightly colored bandwagon for brands to jump on into a possible liability — or worse, a political statement.

Consider BarkBox, a purveyor of pet toys and treats, whose leaked internal message in early June laid bare the new corporate zeitgeist: “We’ve made the decision to pause all paid ads and life cycle marketing pushes for the Pride kit effective immediately,” it read, adding, “We need to acknowledge that the current climate makes this promotion feel more like a political statement than a universally joyful moment for all dog people.”

What was once “universally joyful” is now, apparently, divisive. As if Pride were ever meant to be apolitical. The corporate retreat comes at a moment when pressure to reverse marriage equality is growing. This month the Southern Baptist Convention, emboldened by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, set its sights on Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationally 10 years ago next week. What a way to mark an anniversary.

BarkBox is no titan of industry, but such skittishness is echoed by giants. Garnier, Skyy Vodka, Mastercard, Anheuser-Busch, Diageo, PepsiCo, Comcast, Citi and PricewaterhouseCoopers have all slashed their Pride commitments this year, fleeing the parades they once clamored to sponsor.

Target, long a mainstay of rainbow capitalism, seems to be trying to revive a version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” by trying to have it both ways: still a sponsor of New York City Pride but asking organizers to keep their involvement on the down low.

The retreat didn’t come out of nowhere. The warning shots were fired in 2023, after Bud Light, owned by Anheuser-Busch, teamed up with the trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a sponsored Instagram post timed to the end of March Madness. The backlash was swift and theatrical. Kid Rock filmed himself shooting up packs of the beer with a rifle. The conservative troll Ben Shapiro posted a 12-minute rant. Donald Trump chimed in. “It’s time to beat the Radical Left at their own game,” he posted. “Money does talk — Anheuser-Busch now understands that.”

It did. This March, Anheuser-Busch pulled out of Pride sponsorships, including marquee events like San Francisco Pride and St. Louis PrideFest. . . . In New York about a quarter of corporate donors have canceled or scaled back, leaving organizers to plug a $750,000 gap. Pride events in Washington, St. Louis and Salt Lake City have also faced sponsorship drops.

The rise and fall of rainbow capitalism is instructive. When I was hired as editor in chief of Out in 2006, the normalization of gay people was already well underway in popular culture. (The eighth season of “Will & Grace” was on the air.) Nine years later, the Supreme Court established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, a decision that seemingly also enshrined the right of L.G.B.T.Q. people to be a consumer category to be catered to.

But here’s the thing about marketing campaigns: They seek to move product, not the culture. And when the culture goes in another direction, as it has especially since Mr. Trump was elected again, corporate allyship becomes corporate snubbing.

This backing off underscores what some critics have long argued: that multinational brands have flattened queer identity into bland consumerism. Queer activists have long pushed back against the corporatization of Pride.

But if Pride editions of Listerine and Oreos seemed frivolous, they also reflected how far society had come since Karl Rove used same-sex marriage ballot initiatives as a boogeyman to turn out the conservative base in swing states in the aughts. What does it say about society if Bud no longer feels safe being publicly pro-L.G.B.T.Q.?

For the best part of two decades queer activists exploited social media to shame corporate America for its historic neglect of L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Mostly that was a good thing. But Twitter also drove outrage to excess.

Did we help ourselves by piling on a carrot juice company or when we freaked out in 2013 about Barilla pasta when its chairman said he wouldn’t feature gay families in ads? GLAAD’s response to the Barilla chairman’s statement: a solemn suggestion that consumers would switch to “more inclusive brands like Bertolli,” because, you know, pasta must be progressive, too.

It’s hard not to see those campaigns now as a template for how the MAGA movement responded to Anheuser-Busch and Dylan Mulvaney. The conservative backlash to queer visibility is uglier by far, but it’s following the same script, compounded by our growing inability to reason and rationalize. Truth is very often the first casualty.

That’s what makes this year’s retreat so revealing: It’s not just a loss of funding but also a reminder that acceptance was always provisional. . . . Strides made yesterday can be reversed tomorrow.

With Mr. Trump back in office, the era of rainbow capitalism seems well and truly over. Corporations are, by their nature, opportunistic. They go where the money is. How else to explain why Coinbase, Coca-Cola, Walmart, ScottsMiracle-Gro and Goldman Sachs helped sponsor the Army anniversary parade last Saturday — in effect a MAGA pride parade?

For this to be the moment when corporate America steps back from Pride initiatives is to add salt in the wound. But is downsizing Pride so terrible? . . . . A leaner, meaner Pride won’t have the branded sheen of rainbow capitalism, but it could rediscover its teeth. Even better, it would sort out true allies from fair-weather friends. A little adversity goes a long way. We can manage just fine without the baubles of pinkwashing.