Pride Is Good for Business. But Corporate America Is Not Upholding Its End of the Bargain.

Yahoo

2 days ago

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In a quiet, rural enclave, Clark County Pride is a big deal. The annual parade and festival, which is in its fifth year, is held in La Center, a southwest Washington town of 4,300 that doesn't have a stoplight. There are no hotels and only three restaurants . Still, about 100 people attended the event when it was held for the first time in 2021, braving record-breaking heat to march through the city's modest downtown. To accommodate the 100-degree temperature, organizers installed five different cooling tents—complete with water stations and copious misters—along the 0.9-mile walk. Rather than marching, some locals participated in the parade from the shelter of their air-conditioned vehicles.
Attendance has since ballooned to nearly 700 people, not including the dozens of vendors who cater the event. For the businesses who provide food and beverages or sell rainbow flags and jewelry, many have reported that the festival is their single most profitable day of the year. 'Our vendors are so excited to come back because they do so well,' said Malerie Plaugher, Clark County Pride's board secretary. 'Folks who come and want to celebrate Pride rurally are so relieved to have a space that feels friendly, open, and safe that they're excited to spend their money among family.'
While Clark County Pride is still much too small to survey the event's economic impact on the local community, all available data indicates that its vendors aren't alone in finding Pride to be a lucrative endeavor. Some of the larger Pride events have estimated that their financial footprint spans the tens of millions: A 2019 study tabulated that Los Angeles Pride generated $74 million in revenue for Southern California, and St. Pete Pride, Florida's most-attended Pride festival, brought in an estimated $60 million in 2023. Similar reports have found that Twin Cities Pride, in Minnesota, and Charlotte Pride, in North Carolina, contribute about $13.4 million and $15.8 million, respectively, to their local economies. San Diego Pride, which is typically the city's largest single-day event each year, is estimated to have a $30 million impact.
Despite the fact that Pride remains big money, corporate America is increasingly unwilling to return the investment. Prides across the country have reported a sharp decrease in sponsorships for their 2025 events amid threats from the Trump administration against companies that outwardly embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion. On the high end, San Francisco Pride and WorldPride—the latter of which is set for the District of Columbia this month—have lost nearly $300,000 and $260,000, respectively, in sponsorships from corporate partners of previous years, and NYC Pride is down a reported $750,000. Some Pride festivals have been forced to scale back their events while they grapple with a new reality, and others worry that, someday in the near future, they may no longer have the money to exist at all.
These funding deficits were nearly universal among Pride organizers I contacted for this story, reporting shortages that account for significant chunks of their overall budget. Representatives for Omaha Pride, in Nebraska, and Wynwood Pride, in Florida, each estimate that sponsorships are down by 50 percent in 2025, while a spokesperson for California's Long Beach Pride says that contributions from businesses have plummeted by 40 percent. Hampton Roads Pride, in Virginia, was forced to cut $80,000 from this year's budget—amounting to a little less than 20 percent of its 2024 expenditures—to keep pace with reduced commitments from corporate sponsors.
These funding woes simply do not square with the considerable money that Pride groups bring in for their communities. The estimates cited by LGBTQ+ groups themselves are actually on the conservative side: When I contacted a representative for Columbus Pride—which brings in an estimated $16 million to $18 million for Ohio's economy each year—they said that their data is based almost solely on local hotel stays during the month of June. It's hard for them to survey the more intangible externalities of Pride, such as a surge in local restaurant bookings, bottled-water sales, or even temporary job creation. Airbnb, for one, has estimated that Pride festivals bring in $77 million nationally for its hosts each year, while Lyft has reported that Pride has an even bigger impact on the demand for rideshares than a Taylor Swift concert does.
'It's not something that Pride organizations always talk about because, for so long, there's been this diametrically opposed sensibility that Pride can't be something that also impacts revenue generation because it's protest—but it is both,' said Densil Porteous, executive director of Stonewall Columbus. 'Our opportunity as a community to demonstrate our power through the economic impact that we can make in a region is also part of that protest. It says: Look at what we can do. Look at what smart business is. Smart business is being welcoming, open, and inclusive.'
Although Durham Pride generates about $2.7 million in annual revenue off 100,000 attendees, co-founder Trey Roberts says that many of the major tech companies based in North Carolina won't even return his calls. This year's weeklong roster of events—which includes a fashion showcase and a poetry open-mic night—is being funded almost entirely through the proceeds from a local charity 5K race.
'It's like a guarded fence,' Roberts said of trying to attract corporate sponsors. 'We have no clue how to break the barricade to get in there. It's crazy, because Pride feels like it every year gets bigger, but we're also trying to get more resources so we could do more. We're building ourselves up where everyone's expecting us to get bigger and bigger, and we're just struggling: Can you help us out? Can we find sponsors and donors? Can we get grants?'
The cold shoulder that Pride groups have received is coming from not just Wall Street but also local businesses, establishments that would appear, on paper, to be natural partners for their programming. Although Come Out With Pride is one of the few major draws to Orlando's downtown district—as the city's tourism is largely centered on Disney World, out in the suburbs—organizers have struggled in recent years to get prominent restaurants and bars to sponsor the event. In this case, much of the hostility stems from fear of retribution, not from the White House but from the DeSantis administration: In 2023 Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a draconian bill restricting public drag performances (legislation that was declared unconstitutional by a federal appeals court this month). Even before the drag ban was enacted, at least one Florida city, Port St. Lucie, pulled the plug on its Pride event to avoid prosecution.
As with Clark County Pride, many of the Orlando business leaders who have been hesitant to show up to the table have confessed that Pride is their best day of the year. Tatiana Quiroga, the executive director of Come Out With Pride, told me that after organizers were forced to change the parade route in 2024 due to the challenges of accommodating 230,000 attendees, the organization received 'major backlash' from businesses that were along the old path. Those numerous complaints, Quiroga says, were yet another indication of how valuable Pride is to the very people who don't want to fund it.
'We were like, 'Oh, wow, so you do need us. At the same time, where's your sponsorship? I'm really glad that you were standing room only at this wine bar or this brunch place, but there's no conversation with you. You have absolutely no representation in our festival whatsoever,' ' she said. 'Where is that mutual amount of support? We're the actual nonprofit having to support their business, when it's not a mutual relationship.'
These roadblocks affect not merely Pride festivals but entire communities. Mallory Pollock, now the executive director of Wyoming's Casper Pride, joked that when the organization held its first festival back in 2017, she could turn her camera horizontally and capture the whole event in the same photo. But this year, Casper Pride will take over the city's entire downtown area with a week's worth of events—a lineup that will include a drag show, karaoke night, and bowling night. Although organizers have yet to see a reduction in funding this year, any losses in sponsorship or vendor participation would ripple across not just the town but the wider state. The festival is part of the And Let Live coalition, a network by which Pride groups in Wyoming share funding and resources with one another. One organization's being defunded would be extremely detrimental for each of ALL's members.
Casper Pride not only brings revenue from LGBTQ+ people and allies to Wyoming, but it also keeps those dollars in the community. The city of 58,000 recently opened its first queer resource center, which offers monthly support groups, a food pantry, and microgrants. 'We've had people say that they moved here because of that, and I would like to think that we also keep people here because of it,' Pollock said. 'The surroundings are really hard, and so a lot of people tend to leave for bigger places with more to offer.' Without that support in place, Pollock worries, members of Casper's LGBTQ+ community might move away—and take their business with them.
It goes without saying that Pride is about much more than money. It's about creating spaces where LGBTQ+ people can be visible but also feel safe to be in community, a moment to live without fear and luxuriate in collective joy. But the paradox is that those opportunities will be curtailed unless Pride itself is able to be economically sustainable. Some groups, like Utah's SLC Pride and Ohio's Cincinnati Pride, have pushed to end relationships with businesses that have backtracked on their support for the LGBTQ+ community, shifting to alternative fundraising models to help make up the gap. Jonathan Swindle, board president of the Mosaic Project of South Texas, said that he has never had the backing of Fortune 500 companies to put on Pride Corpus Christi, as there aren't very many in the area. 'That's South Texas,' he said.
But Pride organizers say they remain committed to finding long-term solutions that uplift and celebrate the community, while also creating space for the most vulnerable. The first Clark County Pride was thrown together on extremely short notice, after its founders learned that LGBTQ+ students at the local middle and high schools were being bullied. Being in such a small town, Plaugher says, Pride is the only opportunity many queer youth in the area have to find their people and feel as if they aren't alone. At last year's festival, an eighth grader came up to Plaugher and told her, 'I made my very first friend today.'
'It's become so big and loud—in the joyful, happy way,' Plaugher said of Clark County Pride. 'To folks who are ignorant of what it looks like to celebrate Pride and what the meaning of it is, I would like to see them be unable to deny the fact that we are safe, happy, and courageous. I would like the naysayers to be unable to deny the positive impacts that our community has on the area.'