Numerous major corporations retreated from Pride Month sponsorships this year, sending organizers, particularly for large-scale parades and festivals, scrambling to make up for budgetary shortfalls. This followed a more modest scale-back in corporate Pride Month support last year, according to CBS News. [...]

All of which leads to the question of how important is corporate support to the LGBTQ Pride movement. According to many in the community, corporate support is largely performative, meant to serve corporate goals – “rainbow washing” – not support the real issues confronting LGBTQ individuals and the community.

“We had Pride before corporate sponsors paid us any attention. We’re getting back to our community roots with people wanting to connect and collaborate with each other,” said Eve Keller, co-president of USA Prides, an organization that support Pride Festival organizers.

Corporate Sponsorship Waning, Community Skepticism Growing

In its annual survey of major corporations’ Pride engagement, Gravity Research tracks the recent pullback in corporate support. In last year’s survey, some 30% of what it classified as “consumer staples” companies, like retailers, planned to change their Pride engagement strategies. Across the entire survey sample, only 9% expected any changes.

In 2025, the share that planned to pull back jumped to 39% of all major corporations surveyed across all industries, not just consumer staples, and no company surveyed expected engagement levels to increase. A 61% majority said pressure from the new administration was causing the change, followed by 39% that were concerned about a conservative backlash.

Their withdrawal of support this year largely resulted from changes to internal corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion policies following the Trump administration’s restrictions on DEI programs across the federal government, including among federal contractors. Additionally, corporations don’t want to become targets for potential discrimination lawsuits or negative publicity from influential anti-DEI activists like Robby Starbuck, according to the Wall Street Journal. [...]

That cynicism is in full view in a provocatively titled article in The Intercept, “Corporate Pride Is Dying. Good.” by Austin Ahlman, a reporter and researcher with the Open Markets Institute’s Center for Journalism and Liberty.

“Corporate support was a cynical marketing ploy to tap into the perceived disposable income of LGBTQ+ Americans,” he wrote. “This was never allyship: it was a highly lucrative protection racket. Corporations’ money bought social legitimacy on all sides at a fraction of the cost of most feel-good advertising campaigns.”

Ahlman concluded, “This is a necessary wake-up call. It creates an opening to rebuild Pride from the ground up. Pride can once again be funded by and accountable to the community it serves.”

[...]

He suggests that big corporate dollars “actively damaged the character of Pride,” turning events into an “endless stream of corporate logos and turning what were once human rights marches into mobile billboards.” [...]