lazyllama – stock.adobe.com
“Private companies can do whatever they want,” leftists once snorted in defense of companies like Facebook banning conservative speech.
But now the tables have turned, and LGBTQ activists have found themselves in a state between panicked and sulky as their fair-weather friends in corporate America are pulling sponsorships of Pride celebrations this month.
As a result, Pride events across the nation are facing budget shortfalls, and activists are blaming everyone but themselves.
At least 14 companies — including Pepsi, Citi, MasterCard, Nissan, Garnier, and US defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. — have dropped or greatly scaled back their financial contributions to annual Pride events nationwide.
Anheuser-Busch, makers of Bud Light, has also backtracked on Pride sponsorship — and for good reason. The company lost an estimated $395 million after its botched partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney led to a nationwide boycott in 2023.
Ever since, Bud Light has struggled to reposition itself as the good ol’ boys, God ’n’ guns beverage, to lukewarm reception.
The numbers are grim: Heritage of Pride, organizers of New York City’s festivities, by far the largest in the nation, faces a $750,000 shortfall this year after nearly a quarter of corporate donations dried up. This follows years of operating at a loss: In 2022, the group was $2.7 million in the hole, and another $1.2 million the following year.
In California, longtime corporate donors ran for the hills when San Francisco Pride executive director Suzanne Ford reached out begging for money. Twin Cities Pride has seen longtime corporate sponsors in Minnesota shift into retreat mode, and now the group is scrambling to meet a $200,000 goal. Organizers in Washington, DC, Milwaukee, and St. Louis all have reported being ghosted by big companies they once relied upon.
All of this is occurring at a time when a dozen companies have withdrawn participation from the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, a shakedown scheme used by the LGBT nonprofit behemoth to enforce woke capitalism.
For LGBTQAI2S+ activists, the reason for all this is simple: It’s Trump’s fault.
“There’s a lot of fear of repercussions for aligning with our festival,” Wes Shaver, president of Milwaukee Pride, told The New York Times, joining others who believe companies fear they may be penalized by the White House if they donate to Pride events, citing the administration’s effort to curtail DEI initiatives.
(When asked about this, the White House didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment from The Post.)
What’s equally likely is that everyone just has gay fatigue — a collective eye roll at the oversaturation of LGBT themes in culture, combined with all the negative connotations now associated with Pride. Once a niche event of subculture fun and revelry, it’s devolved into a mainstream, month-long orgy of far-leftism that looks more like a tent revival beckoning an impending open-borders transgender race war.
Rage-hungry conservative influencers have latched on to videos of public nudity and shameless parents forcing Pride spectacles onto their children. Transgender insanity has swallowed the entire movement and, in doing so, repelled middle-of-the-road Americans.
Simply put, it’s exhausting.
And what company, in its right mind, wants to be tied to all that? While activists say companies are afraid of Trump, the same could have been true about Biden. Businesses certainly felt the Democrat gun in their back to start coughing up their woke bona fides during his term.
Overall, the corporate retreat from Pride is a good thing for everyone, and it ought to continue. The grotesque parade of political and corporate pandering that’s defined Pride over the last two decades is embarrassing, as any honest gay person will admit.
After all, who wants their sex life validated by junk food companies and bomb-makers?
It’s also alienated plenty of old-timers.
“The cold corporations are more important to the rotating Heritage of Pride than the actual surviving Stonewall veterans. Plenty are still alive and kicking,” former New York City Pride Grand Marshall Williamson Henderson, of the Stonewall Veterans Association, and who participated in the original Stonewall rebellion in June 1969 (the reason Pride Month exists), told The Post.