Corporations are ditching rainbow flags and cutting funding for Pride. LGBT+ people say they won’t forget it
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down — we’re witnessing withdrawal, with a few exceptions… the exuberant displays of support we saw five years ago have been replaced by passivity, silence, or strategic invisibility.”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.
