Corporate America is boycotting Pride month
Activists feel no shame as their fair-weather friends in Big Business take a break from the culture wars
‘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 are throwing a hissy fit as their fair-weather friends in corporate America pull 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 U.S. 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 sponsorshp — 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 golden 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, D.C., 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All of this is occurring at a time when a dozen companies have withdrawn participation from the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, a shakedown scheme used by the LGBT nonprofit behemoth to enforce woke capitalism.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 me).
What’s equally likely is everyone just has gay fatigue — 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 some 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?
While virtually everyone agrees that the government doesn’t belong in our bedrooms, LGBT activists have gleefully invited the corporations in. And no one’s buying it. In fact, a study from Pew this year revealed that only 16 percent of LGBT adults believe companies celebrating LGBT people is genuine. 45 percent of adults think companies do so because they feel pressured.
Pride, Inc. has 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 me.
Corporate America is a shallow and skittish place and only the most destructive HR managers want their businesses butting in to the culture wars. Rather than blaming Republicans for a long-deserved pushback against Rainbow Totalitarianism, LGBT activists ought to do a better job policing themselves, embark on a little soul searching as to how they became so toxic, and maybe even reexamine their unbridled love of money.
That last one might be a tough sell. Free Love? Not anymore. It’s just about free stuff.
*A version of this article appeared in the New York Post on June 8, 2025.
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Gays and trangendered want the same as heteros: Just to live life and not be invaded. Making a spectacle of things sets the movement back.