This week, a coterie of major corporate sponsors including Anheuser-Busch and Comcast announced that they are pulling sponsorship dollars from SF Pride, the nonprofit that puts on the annual Pride parade and other events for the queer community around the city.
Naturally, it sparked outrage and consternation in the Bay Area, especially given the context that these sponsors are fleeing in the face of President Donald Trump’s attack on queer people across the country. With a reported loss of some $300,000 from a planned budget of $1.2 million, SF Pride is now left to scramble and hope it can pull off the parade at all.
But you know what? Fine. Let the brands scurry like frightened mice. We knew all along that conglomerates don’t give a single genuine shit about the LGBTQ community, anyway. San Francisco deserves a Pride month that speaks to the militant roots of queer advocacy and community defense here. This week’s news of corporate cowardice proves it.
Over the past two decades, these multinational ghouls have managed to flatten the experience of being queer into the most shallow expression possible: Bland consumerism, painted pink for the month of June. This trend of “rainbow capitalism” rose amid mainstream America’s growing support for gay marriage in the last 20 years, and I have to admit, it seemed like a beautiful development at first. The notion of a gay-themed Budweiser ad felt downright revolutionary after all the casual homophobia I lived through in the 2000s.
But the last several years have seen cresting waves of anti-queer turmoil, much of it stemming from far-right influencers who put companies like Target and Budweiser in the crosshairs, drawing ire from a vitriolic base of conservatives looking for a moral panic.
Instead of bending the knee to a bunch of extremists, these entities should have held firm, if only to fulfill their prior stated commitments to supporting the queer community. In typical fashion, however, they’re again turning tail and running again — just like they did in 2023.
The brands like to explain these sins away with a bunch of mealy-mouthed bullshit about navigating “an ever-changing operating and social environment,” but if you read between the lines, it’s obvious what is being said: We like it when we can make money off you gays without scaring away bigots. It’s a sales pitch disguised as some kind of good-vibes liberal multiculturalism, without an ounce of reflection.
Remember when Bud Light made an ad that turned “LGBTQ” into the words “Let’s Get Beers Tonight, Queens”? Or when Chipotle hit us with “¿HOMO ESTAS?” (I am literally doubled over in second-hand embarrassment thinking about it.)
The only explanation for such insane faux-pas is that these corporate-brand boardrooms are full of some of the most arrogant dumb people in the universe, all scheming how to harvest another buck from the masses by shilling a veneer of love and solidarity. All of those ad dollars to lure in queer people would’ve been better spent on philanthropy, if they cared so much. But they don’t. We’d benefit more from stealing Budweiser delivery trucks than expecting Anheuser-Busch to move the Overton window toward a progressive future.
So screw it. Let’s do Pride the OG way: With righteous anger, radical love, and a grassroots approach to solidarity and queer resistance. You don’t need massive floats and a million dollars to pull that off, and we know it because our predecessors did just that in the streets of the Bay. All you need are joyous bodies in the street, and maybe a brick or two.
