How Corporate America Fails LGBTQ+ Pride

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When gauging whether someone respects you, my grandmother always said: "It's not what they say, it's what they do." And, judging from its behavior, Corporate America has not been as invested in LGBTQ+ Pride as it should be.

In truth, the state of Pride celebrations is merely symptomatic of the larger ways companies fundamentally misunderstand the LGBTQ+ community. And the resulting pejorative treatment is reflected by the mainstream way Pride is conceived, the way corporate Pride initiatives are designed, and ultimately the ways Pride has become disposable.

Pride—and therefore LGBTQ+ initiatives—are discounted, devalued, and degraded because companies (1) conflate the standing of LGBTQ+ people in society; (2) homogenize the community and ignore vulnerable populations; and (3) tie their allyship to commerce and capitalism.

After the Obergefell decision legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, it was easy to surmise that the LGBTQ+ rights movement had reached its pinnacle. In a tangible way, LGBTQ+ people had become equal in the eyes of the law; as a result of the trappings of marriage, parenthood, and suburbia, the community seemed to bear little difference from its heterosexual counterparts.

However, the experience of the LGBTQ+ community is still markedly different from that of the cis-hetero community.

Although LGBTQ+ allies intuitively recognize the humanity of queer people, a hasty reading of LGBTQ+ inclusion may fail to highlight how our journey to liberation is still fraught with peril. By seeing support for Pride as optional rather than necessary, our corporate partners have preferred the whipped cream illusion of inclusion to the crusty reality of still segregated lines—which our corporate allies don't dare cross in times of great need.

In essence, LGBTQ+ inclusion is only attractive when our allies get to ignore their responsibility to protect us from the same traditionalist machinations that other human rights movements have been sacked by.

Despite the community's color, energy, and fervor, a big part of the corporate disconnect comes from the homogenized perception of the community as largely white, cisgender, able-bodied, middle-class, and male. Therefore, when certain civil rights milestones, such as marriage equality, were achieved, it became easy for our mainstream allies to declare success. Much like it became easy for white liberals to assert that racism was over when middle-class Black men could reach the highest levels of political office or amass wealth.

Pride became the occasion to celebrate LGBTQ+ successes instead of also being a timely reminder that freedom for underrepresented communities must always be negotiated. As such, Pride would become an easy goal for corporate America because it required little else other than money, a boisterous celebration, and a short-lived attention span that coincided with the month of June.

However, as within all marginalized communities, there is an intersectional pecking order, wherein the needs of transgender people, in this case, continue to be obscured. If you listen to the stories of trans people, you know that this is an unfortunate but ever-present reality.

In fact, we are witnessing essentially the Queer version of Jim Crow as trans people continue to face an unprecedented assault on their civil rights. With carryover from 2023, 600+ anti-trans bills have been considered in state legislatures across the US in 2024. That alone belies the belief that LGBTQ+ inclusion is entrenched and settled for everyone in the community.

Yet, if your corporate sensibilities see the community simply as a cadre of colorful people who don't face active and ardent opposition, then your organizing efforts related to Pride will forego any training or preparation on how to deal with social resistance when it inevitably arrives. As a consequence, when zealots arrive at your doors with picket signs, boycotts, and vandalism, the response will be to fold like an easy chair.

Of course, some companies may ignore political threats—at least for the short term—in hopes of a long-term economic payoff. As a result, LGBTQ+ allyship becomes tethered to commerce and capitalism, because of the estimated $1.4 trillion purchasing power of the US LGBTQ+ community. However, when companies face the slightest bit of pushback, their cost-benefit analysis leads them to drop support of Pride or LGBTQ+ initiatives in the name of financial expediency.

Consequently, the corporate landscape is littered with the obituaries of corporate initiatives (led by Target and Nike, to name two) that have been sidelined in the face of public backlash.

Unfortunately, some companies are going even further by scrapping diversity-related programming altogether.

In July 2024, John Deere was the latest to abandon DEI efforts, saying that it will no longer support "social or cultural awareness" events and that it will audit its training messages to ensure they are free of "socially motivated" messages. Other companies, such as Crocs and Bud Light, terminated their Pride celebrations and LGBTQ+ inclusion initiatives to appease conservatives who have made it their fundraising mission to mischaracterize and denigrate anything LGBTQ+-related.

Strangely, the speed by which some raced to celebrate "Corporate Pride" has now only been exceeded by the speed to put the Pride flag back in the closet.

These trends indicate that most of corporate America was never truly invested in supporting the "rainbow community"—just rainbow capitalism. And if your knowledge of the community is cursory, then your support of LGBTQ+ Pride will be opportunistic, fleeting, and suspect from the very start.

Many LGBTQ+ people already know of "Pinkwashing," or the corporate practice of using LGBTQ+ iconography for monetary gain, and I can assure you: The jig is up.

Pride will always carry significance for the LGBTQ+ community. Yet, if corporate suitors want to build an enduring relationship with our community, they will need to treat Pride as more than a transaction and the community as more than a monolithic interest group.

The long-term success of any corporate relationship with the LGBTQ+ community will require relational qualities that are more essential than pride: choice, courage, conviction, and commitment. Only those companies that follow suit will be worthy of LGBTQ support, patronage, and respect.