Corporate Support of LGBT Rights is Teetering, Is it good or Bad?

A Pride T-shirt on display in a Walmart in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, June 2, 2023

 

The corporate embrace of Pride Month began in about the mid-2010s, with rainbow-patterned flag displays in stores and corporate-sponsored Pride parade floats. It left a bad taste in the mouth of many LGBT folks. There was a tradition founded by downtrodden activists who struggled for decades for dignity and respect when it was quite dangerous to be openly gay or trans. Now it was being colonized by money-grubbing corporations trying to make an easy buck through a gesture at allyship.

We’re seeing now that the cynical reading of corporate Pride has a lot of truth to it. Over the past couple of years, the fascist right has been whipping itself into a progressively more genocidal frenzy of transphobia, which has now evolved into a full-blown homophobic terror campaign. And one of the more prominent targets has been corporate marketing campaigns. When Bud Light did a tiny sponsorship deal with a trans influencer, enraged conservatives launched a boycott and took to shooting cases of the beer. Companies like Target, Cracker Barrel, and Walmart, which have set up Pride displays or advertising, have been deluged with boycotts, bomb threats, or attacks on their property. Random employees have been subjected to purple-faced tirades from deranged conservatives.

In response, many companies are pulling back. Anheuser-Busch apologized for the sponsorship deal, and is now planning a new advertising campaign portraying the brand in as uncontroversial a fashion as possible. Target has pulled some of its Pride displays. LGBT influencers report that many fewer brands are coming to them with sponsorship deals. The Starbucks union accused management in some stores of forbidding them from putting up Pride displays, though the company has denied this.

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That said, several other brands have doubled down on Pride support, likely because aside from Bud Light (which has seen close to a 30 percent drop in sales, possibly due as much to its quick reversal as its initial action), the effects of the terror campaign have reportedly been modest. But if the homophobic terror campaign continues, Target probably won’t be the last to give up.

Now, I should note that while it was rather unseemly for corporations to embrace Pride, it was still a net positive for LGBT rights as a whole. It reflected the fact that gay marriage at least had entered the zone of consensus, where that right is taken for granted across most of the population, and gay couples could (in most of the country, at least) live openly without fear of attack. Pride symbols being used for aggressive advertising campaigns is, alas, just what tends to happen as a by-product of this process.

Admittedly, conservatives were last to the Pride party. Gay marriage bans were central to George W. Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004, and it wasn’t until 2017 that 50 percent of Republicans in Gallup’s poll said same-sex relationships were morally acceptable. The politicians still lagged behind: Codification of the Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing gay marriage passed last year, and the vast majority of Republicans voted against it in the House and Senate. 

But now, the conservative movement is attempting to destroy the gay marriage consensus, returning to its familiar effort to create a political wedge issue. Aside from the terror attack on corporate Pride, LGBT people of any kind are now smeared as pedophile “groomers,” and the Pride flag is taken as a symbol of sexual perversion. Government support for LGBT rights, like the Biden administration hanging a Pride flag on the White House, is characterized—in the usual habit of casting support for minority rights as victimizing conservatives—as “state-enforced homosexuality.” States like Florida, Indiana, and Kentucky have proposed or passed “Don’t say gay” laws forbidding LGBT teachers from mentioning their sexual or gender identity in the classroom—both directly oppressing them and implying in the process that LGBT sexuality is inherently depraved.

Sure enough, rank-and-file conservatives are getting the message. In 2023, the Gallup poll registered the largest drop in moral approval of gay marriage since it started collecting the poll in 2001, from 71 percent in 2022 to 64 percent this year. This was driven largely by a deep decline among Republicans, with support falling from 56 percent to 41 percent—about where it was in 2014, before the Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage.

The point of all this is to shove LGBT people back into the closet. Through a combination of legal repression and an omnipresent threat of violence, LGBT people will feel afraid of expressing their identity in public, and instead present as heterosexual and cisgender.

Thus far, the fascists have only dented the gay marriage consensus. Hence the remaining brand support for Pride: Two-thirds support for gay marriage is still solid enough for more confident brands to calculate that they might earn more sales by sticking to their guns, and burnish their reputation among the majority of the population in the process. Indeed, they might lose money if they give up. But should people like Matt Walsh—who is currently ferociously attacking Fox News for being too woke—keep chipping away at public opinion, that will change. Even just driving Republican support for gay marriage to zero would probably be more than enough.

Corporations exist to make money. Corporate support for any social issue is an incidental indicator of its success, not a driver of it. The moment it costs a dime to continue supporting LGBT rights even rhetorically, most if not all companies will stop doing it.

 BY RYAN COOPER

Prospect.org