Corporations are ditching rainbow flags and cutting funding for Pride. LGBT+ people say they won't forget it

Yahoo

2 days ago

Every June, like clockwork, multinational corporations — from banks to fashion houses to petrochemical giants — would suddenly don their Pride-themed logos on social media.
Many LGBT+ people found it shallow, and mocked the phenomenon as a cynical exercise in "rainbow-washing". But just a few years since the wash of rainbow feeds, even this skin-deep show of support is conspicuous by its absence.
Of the ten major U.S. corporations documented by journalist Hunter Schwarz to have adopted a Pride avatar or banner on Twitter in 2023 — including ExxonMobil, Bank of America, and Freddie Mac — just one, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, is still flying its rainbow flag on the social network today.
Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League have also abandoned it since 2023.
"A lot of people have hesitations around 'rainbow capitalism', and I'm definitely one of those people," Maybe Burke, a 32-year-old gender inclusion consultant in Philadelphia, tells The Independent. "But to not see anything makes you miss when you did, you know?"
Multicolor logos aren't the only things disappearing. Pride marches across the nation have lost corporate sponsorships, from big city extravaganzas to small town celebrations. New York City's Pride organizers reportedly lost roughly one quarter of their corporate donors this year; Kansas City Pride lost half its annual budget; even San Francisco Pride was down $200,000.
Some ties, such as that of Budweiser brewer Anheuser-Busch to St Louis PrideFest, were decades old. LGBT+ non-profits have also reported severe drops in their funding.
The newsletter Popular Information found 19 examples of companies that appeared to have scaled back their support for Pride, including Dyson, Nivea, UPS, Mastercard, and Citi. The hardware chain Lowe's reportedly also backed out of a regular Human Rights Campaign survey and shut down an LGBT+ employee resource group. Another report by NBC News named Nissan, Comcast, and drinks maker Diegeo.
"The scale of the retreat in the U.S. is dramatic and telling," Fabrice Houdart, executive director of the Association of LGBTQ+ Corporate Directors, tells The Independent.
"We're not witnessing a mere dialing down — we're witnessing withdrawal, with a few exceptions... the exuberant displays of support we saw five years ago have been replaced by passivity, silence, or strategic invisibility."
Burke, who earns much of her living training organizations to be more welcoming to trans and non-binary people, noticed conditions beginning to change after the Trump administration's flurry of executive orders targeting DEI programs — one of which threatened to investigate companies, non-profits, universities, and other institutions that maintain them.
"No new inquiries were coming in, and people I had been planning and talking with for months were ghosting me," Burke says.
"June has always been my busiest month of the year. June has funded the rest of my summer. In recent years I've had at least two gigs a week in June with different clients; as of right now, I have two gigs for the entire month.'
One client, she adds, told her straight up that the company's legal department had intervened and warned that hiring her for a gig might violate Trump's decrees.
That's just one symptom of the sudden chill that has descended over corporate America about openly standing up for LGBT+ rights. Some companies pulled back earlier, as a new anti-LGBT+ hate movement gathered steam between 2021 and 2024. But the presence of an openly authoritarian president in the White House, backed by a movement seemingly hellbent on driving queer people back underground, has drastically raised the stakes.
"Companies are afraid of backlash, boycotts, and being 'called out' by the administration. But the real issue is that many never developed the courage of their convictions," says Houdart from the Association of LGBTQ+ Corporate Directors.
"We're seeing the unraveling of conditional support: the second Pride stopped being universally popular or profitable, many brands quietly exited."
Ron deHarte, co-president of the Pride organizers' association USA Prides, says there has indeed been a "noticeable decline" in national-level brand sponsorships, especially in the biggest advertising markets (mostly large cities such as New York and Los Angeles).
Yet he stresses that there are other factors at play too. "The broader economic climate", he argues, especially "uncertainty around tariffs", is making companies reticent about spending on events and marketing across the board.
Whatever the cause, the lost money will have an impact. Sponsorship money, deHarte explains, is "crucial not only for the flashy decorations and entertainment but also for essential aspects like security, insurance, porta-jons, and maintaining free entry for many events."
At least smaller Pride events, which is most of them, will be less impacted on average, because they "traditionally rely more on community fundraising and local business support".
Of the nine companies that ditched their Twitter drag since 2023, ExxonMobil, McKesson, Cencora, Cardinal health, Centene, Bank of America, Freddie Mac, and UPS, all either did not respond or declined to comment to The Independent.
Citi did respond, though it declined to answer our specific questions. A spokesperson said the company's LGBT+ employee group is 'excited about sponsoring a range of Pride celebrations' worldwide, and will be marching with the LGBT+ elders' charity SAGE in New York City.
To be fair, few companies seem to have completely cut all support, instead either scaling down their commitments or simply undertaking them more quietly. Yet that still sends a bitter message to a community that has spent decades fighting not to have to live in hiding. There is, after all, a reason that nobody dubs it LGBT+ Sensible Modesty Month.
"In the short term, it's unpleasant. It reinforces the sense that LGBTQ+ dignity is still negotiable and that we never really accumulated any political or economic power," says Houdart.
There will, he argues, be lasting damage to companies' reputation: "Many queer people will not forget who stood up and who disappeared."
Yet in the long term, deHarte and Houdart are both hopeful that good things will come of this. To deHarte, it's an opportunity for the movement to diversify its funding and prioritize sponsors who demonstrate a real, year-round commitment to LGBT+ equality all year round
"It could be a pivotal moment — a forced reckoning,' says Houdart. 'We have been too dependent on institutional validation from parties, governments, and corporations that never honestly shared our long-term vision.
"This is a wake-up call to reclaim our power and stop renting our liberation from others... it's a painful moment, but it's also clarifying. Our future depends on solidarity and organizing, not sponsorship."