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. So tickled were we by the excess of it all that we once devoted a feature to the annual deluge of swag. “Look at this,” we seemed to say. “We’ve arrived.”
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. (It was also booted as a sponsor of Twin Cities Pride after pulling back on its D.E.I. efforts.)
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.
Indeed, San Francisco Pride organizers have been grappling with a $200,000 shortfall after the departure of not just Anheuser-Busch but also other longtime sponsors like Comcast and Diageo. 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. Nissan Canada explained its withdrawal from Pride Toronto as part of “a re-evaluation of all our marketing and media activations.”
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.
Glossy magazines like Out played an outsize role in wooing corporate America. We live in a culture, after all, in which money signals legitimacy. But the arrival of those Pride-stamped Oreo cookies in 2020 marked a telling evolution: We’d transitioned from societal deviants and sexual outlaws to supermarket-aisle respectability.
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. We’ve had countermarches to New York City’s official parade, with participants carrying banners reading, “No pride in corporate greed.” In San Francisco, activists from the Gay Shame movement disrupted corporate floats with glitter bombs and guerrilla theater, part of a lineage that has long questioned what gets lost when Pride became middlebrow.
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.? Those Oreo cookies were a marketing gimmick, but a gimmick accompanied by Oreo’s financial support of the advocacy organization PFLAG National. Under its Care With Pride initiative, Johnson & Johnson (until a few years ago Listerine’s parent) has donated over $1.5 million to L.G.B.T.Q. nonprofit organizations since 2011.
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. In 2008 I was invited to attend a GLAAD event as a guest of Bolthouse Farms, the carrot juice people, there to pay penance for a donation by its founder to an anti-gay-marriage initiative in California. The fact that the founder was no longer affiliated with Bolthouse had slipped the notice of gay Twitter in its canceling of the company. Although Californians Against Hate called off a boycott, the reputational damage took longer to fix.
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. For those of us who came of age in the AIDS era and saw how social acceptance could curdle and sour, none of this is new. 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? Attendees were given cans of the energy drink Phorm, a collaboration between the Trump ally Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and Anheuser-Busch.
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? I’m old enough to remember Pride marches in the 1990s that didn’t feel like Super Bowl commercials. They felt messy and urgent and ours. Nice though it is to be courted, it felt pretty good back when Pride was more explicitly political and even radical and when having one another’s backs was the point of it all — not flaunting our corporate bedfellows. Now there’s an opportunity to reclaim that spirit.
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.
After all, did anyone notice last year when Nike didn’t release its Pride Be True collection for the first time since it was introduced in 2012? Did you?
Aaron Hicklin runs One Grand Books in Narrowsburg, N.Y.; hosts the radio show and podcast “Shelf Life”; and is the director of Deep Water Literary Festival. He was the editor in chief of Out magazine from 2006 to 2018.
Source images by NESSDesign and FanPro/Getty Images.
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