It May Not Be Praxis, But We Need Corporate Pride

Corporate Pride is the pointy tip of the spear in the fight for acceptance. We need to ease up a little and let our capitalist overlords help us before they decide not to bother.

Yes, I am aware that it’s August and also that August is not Pride month. I am also aware we can talk about queer issues when it is not even a little bit June!

And it’s important to do that, because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a whole festering pile of sweat-stained tighty-whities are getting well and truly bunched over the long-cherished Thanksgiving-uncle dream of clawing back the very concept of allowing LGBTQ+ folk to exist anywhere in the land of the increasingly-asterisked free.

These colors don’t run.

I’ve just been thinking so much lately. As June approached and went. As Bud Light had the unmitigated gall to *checks notes* send a novelty can to a lady and got boycotted, and yes, boycotted by people who seem to have only the most casual friend-of-a-friend-of-their-father’s-cousin’s-college-roommate relationship with the actual meaning of the word boycott, but they sure were loud. As we were all forced to side with fucking Disney because they were punished by a politician for the most tepid Saying of the Gay and that’s apparently just a thing that can be done now. As Target caved and removed Pride merchandise.

And I watched as all this happened and companies started back-burnering Pride support and events and sports teams cancelled their Pride night and all the rest, all these internet folk ostensibly on the side of the rainbow angels bellowing from every corner: rainbow capitalism, pinkwashing, fake allies, we don’t need corporate Pride!

Now, I’m not saying we all need to rush out and drink a barrel of Bud Light each for the cause because, I mean, I want rights and all but there’s lines even I won’t cross for the revolution, but saints and ministers of Milk defend us are you actually kidding me we desperately need corporate Pride and we cannot afford to lose it now.

And look, before I get into this Sunday-night-behind-the-Cinemagic-multiplex helldumpster of human psychology, let me just say…how to put this…erm, well, I’m sorry capitalism exists? It wasn’t my fault (OR WAS IT), it’s certainly not going well, and it’s not like I’m over here cackling over my collection of fine boats stuffed with smaller boats that are themselves stuffed with cash bellowing YESSSS MY PRECIOUS MORE, MORE, MORE! over the grand ziggurat of my boat-turducken, but at some point, to be effective activists on any level, we do have to play the board as it lies, not just claim none of this would be a problem if we set everything on fire and played an as-yet-uninvented game with no board at all, (or pieces, and hey, fingers crossed, maybe no players if this whole AI thing sets properly in the fridge!) And where it lies right now is that scarcity, currency, unenforced and sometimes non-existent regulation, and the plain old rotted-orange-soda-and-butterfat-popcorn-slurry that is human nature all exist and must be navigated somehow.

You’ll love Ciiiiiiinemagic!

There’s just…no way out but through, guys, even if we all agreed on what should be on the other side, which we pretty fucking obviously don’t.

So it’s all well and good to want no corporations or CEOs or mass media or marketing machines or the entire apparatus of postmodern consumption, but that is not an achievable goal right this second at this moment in history.

You know what is an achievable goal? Hurtling backward at twice the speed of progress and crushing the LGBTQ+ community back into the closet or the goddamned grave.

They’re working real hard on it, right now, as I write this, as you read it. And as comforting as it is to imagine that it couldn’t really happen, they can’t really do it, someone, somewhere, would step in, you can’t take all that away, you can’t put our beautiful queer gender nonconforming genie living their authentic self back in the go-go bottle, Roe v Wade was predicated on the same Constitutional interpretation that Obergefell was, and they’ve flat out said that’s the next judicial middle finger they plan to throw up.

It is happening, and no one is stepping in to save us.

Funny thing about corporate Pride. I think there’s an argument to be made that very few things have been more impactful in terms of getting this looping episode of Jackass we call a country on board with the validity, acceptance, and normalization of the LGBTQ+ community in the 21st century. Its only real competition is on Clarence Thomas’s Oppression Dream-Board with a big target on it. Like it or not, Americans don’t do shit until a marketing firm tells us how. And I’m not sure there’s any competition at all in terms of getting people to associate our folk with fun and joy and All-American shit like baseball and beer and rainbows and buying diapers, car batteries, shrimp, and lip gloss all on the same aisle.

But they did it, the bastards.

And my god, do we seem to hate them for it.

Problem is, if we hate them for doing it, and the polyester fast-fascism crowd hate them for doing it, corporations will stop supporting Pride. And I don’t know how to make you believe this, but if that happens, we are in real trouble.

Target taking down those racks especially hurt.

See, several years ago, in the fucking Cretaceous period from whence apparently no record or memory hath escaped, Target pretty much only sold rainbows on things approximately four minutes before and one minute after St. Patrick’s Day, and it only meant some pretty weird shit about Irish people that to be honest probably needs a rebuilding year or ten. God damn, everyone likes getting blasted, eating potatoes, and wearing green, why do we have a holiday where children are allowed to assault each other and adults unless they wear a color? Have you ever been pinched by a kindergartner? It fucking hurts! They’re like tiny sharks!

ANYWAY.

I remember. I remember the first time I walked into fucking TARGÉT and saw a display full of Pride shirts right out in front with the purses and the sunglasses and the bathing suits like it was no big thing. Reader, I cried. I couldn’t believe it. I could barely understand it.

TARGET. Do you know what Target is? It’s the white suburban nonsense mothership. It’s where Live, Laugh, AND Love woke from their ancient slumber to walk the earth. It’s where Karens swarm in a writhing orgy of mid-length khakis and big savings before molting, hunting redshirts not for sustenance but for the sheer joy of the kill, then crouching in the fell shadows of the decorative soaps endcap displays to spawn. It’s where Kyles gather around the outdoor grill floor models to renew the entanglement of the hive-mind, shed the burden of their polo-collared exoskeletons and ritualistically intone beef, beer, beef, business, beef, char, immigrants, beef, thinkin’ ‘bout gettin’ a smoker, medium-raaaare until a new indignant white podcaster is summoned forth from the nether-pits to begin his reign.

That rack at stupid Target represents such a vast and pervasive victory it’s hard to even call its corners.

There is nothing any single one of us can do that can come close to the sheer size of the massive neon sign Target hung up right in the faces of all those conservatives, the sign reading THIS IS FINE. THIS IS AS NORMAL AS 2 FOR 1 HEADS OF LETTUCE AND BACK TO SCHOOL SHOPPING. DEAL WITH IT.

Target and Bud Light and all those other brands have full market penetration to the deepest red parts of the country. And those deep red parts are also deeply capitalist. So when those angry voters who only ever had to meet a gay or gender non-conforming person when one of their poor kids came out, whereupon they immediately blamed school or TV or wifi or vaccines or literally whatever random object was nearest to them when they found out, see Target selling Pride merchandise, they know something deep down in the sub-cockle area of their all-American football-shaped hearts, something they would never believe coming from any one of us, but can’t ignore when it comes from their sacred beloved Free Hand of the Market.

The logic that frightens them so much, that makes them hate June with such seething, curdling venom, is this: If corporations, who are so good and right they deserve all the tax breaks and rights and control Republicans have shoveled into their waiting maws like a mama bird feeding her babies the vomitous future of mankind, are selling all these rainbows and vocally, loudly supporting Pride every year, that means the LGBTQ+ community is not something the state of California made up to enrage Grandpa. It’s not a tiny minority that doesn’t matter and can be oppressed at will for fun and profit. There are enough of us and enough allies that it is more profitable to support us than to ignore us. It’s a cold equation, and the impersonal, calculating alligator of capitalism is no longer facing their way.

And then there’s the deeper, tremulous, whining, wormy fear festering in their backbrains: none of these mainstream companies explicitly sell shirts reading White Pride or Assigned Fascist at Birth or You Know What Is Awesome? Hurting Other People! or The Future Is Aggressively Straight, not at any time of year. That means they know it’s also more profitable to ignore them than to support them. And that means they might not be so firmly at the rudder of everything ever as they imagine themselves to be.

And it lasts a MONTH.

That kind of cognitive dissonance and radical perspective-shift is intolerable to them. Because it’s not wrong. They are a minority, they aren’t nearly as profitable to market to as the bulk of people who, shockingly, identify as Not Actually Lovecraftian Asshole Every Single Day. They have lost the culture war and it wasn’t close. If they want to try again, they’ll have the full force of popular culture and the status quo to contend with this time, and they spent their whole lives clinging to exclusion and invisibility within popular culture and the status quo to soothe their soft goddamned baby hearts every time they heard a bump in the night and were filled with dread at the thought that the bump might be gay. They love popular culture and the status quo! they believe its theirs, and Pride month just sits there like a giant happy rainbow hippopotamus shaking its groove-thing, blowing smoke in their faces, and proving them wrong.

That’s why the discount Authoritarianism & Fitch gang starts shrieking like eels in the Straits of Florin around May now, as they feel hives start breaking out in proximity to the barest concept of tolerance and love. It’s why they turn into cartoons with teakettle-steam coming out of their ears every time a gay or trans or darker-than-printer-person person takes a breath in a television show. They used to never ever have to see or hear about those kinds of people unless they were the punchline of a sneering shitty “edgy” joke. They used to be able to turn in a thousand directions and only see themselves reflected back. And even now, for more or less the rest of the year, they can pretend to be whatever MAGA tiger blood, high-fructose-corn-syrup-souled, Ayn Rand-fondling, not like other Nazis, cool Nazis they like, but every year there’s thirty straight days of being reminded they’re full of shit, they aren’t the sole focus of marquee culture corporate bearhugging anymore, and their kids probably hate them.

Because that rack in Target also tells their son walking quietly alongside, the son who’s terrified of coming out, that it’s okay to exist and he can live and grow and get out of there. It’s what tells their daughter she’s not defective. It’s what tells that daughter it’s fine, even wonderful, that she’s not the son they see when they look at her. It’s what tells their kids that someday they can be their authentic selves and there is a world out there that will love them for it. It undermines all the hard work those parents have done to crush their kids’ actual authentic gorgeous spirit. Don’t think they don’t know it.

Marketing matters. In America, it’s everything.

The problem is, over here on the left, we’re spending so much time online complaining about the very idea of corporations supporting us that there is no counterbalance to the “boycotts” and hysteria of the right every June. It starts to look like doing this Pride thing isn’t worth it, if literally no one likes it. This year we finally saw all that Pride support start to waver. I am not looking forward to next year.

If we lose corporate Pride, they’re going to think they won the whole war, and it will get very, very much worse for us out there, very, very quickly. Without that blinking neon sign dropped into the heart of their neighborhoods, the right will feel incredibly empowered in their crusade against anything not created in a Wonder Bread Repression Factory and not even have that one month a year where they have to sit with the pernicious, wriggling idea that they might be wrong about something.

If everyone has a Pride flag, yours is just one more beautiful thing in a sea of color.

If no one has a Pride flag, yours will get you fucking killed.

And this year, they began to stop, or at least slow down. Target did scale back merchandise, Bud Light did get real quiet all of the sudden, sports teams did cancel Pride nights, and cities cancelled parades.

That is a BAD SCENE, guys. That’s the creaking of a big fucking closet door. Next year we’re going to see which way it means to swing, and if it shuts, I don’t know how we’ll manage to wedge it open again.

I’m not saying run out and make yourself a fetching corset out of copies of Wealth of Nations or set up an altar to Ray Kroc in your living room. But we have to fight in the world we actually live in, not in some future post-scarcity bubblegum-world where money, marketing, corporate influence, and looming brutal fascism don’t exist and don’t matter. And in this real, pragmatic, garbage world, corporate Pride is one of the best weapons we’ve got to keep what has been won over decades by blood and agony and sweat and marching and grief and anger and hard, grueling work. Politics is the art of the possible, not the art of what life in paradise is going to be like someday after someone else does all the glass-crawling to get us there and also human nature completely changes.

Pride has made a level of acceptance possible that would be unimaginable even 20 years ago, let alone in the days of making a massive fucking quilt just to say Could You Please Stop Having a Grand Old Time Watching Us Die and Saying It’s God’s Work?

Consider this: If Ron “100% Authentic Human Laughter” DeSantis hadn’t gotten his crocodile-panties in a twist over Disney mildly, tepidly, meekly whispering thank you but they would probably keep saying gay for now and tilted full-speed at the Mouse’s meatgrinder-windmills with his pants around his knees, he would probably be a whole lot closer to the Presidency after all those indictments instead of a national joke. Corporate Pride killed the DeSantis Presidency.

We regular rainbows and allies are just people, and frankly, we are the exact people the right doesn’t and never will listen to. Corporations are who they listen to, because corporations conditioned them to listen over the better part of a century. What sits on the front rack at Target is so much more convincing than anything somebody Uncle Fuck Your Feelings decided not to respect before he even learned how to sit up on his own could possibly say.

So next June, before companies, who are generally amoral and simply follow the wind, stop putting up rainbows so no one at the sunglasses kiosk or the beer fridge has to contend with the notion that LGBTQ+ people exist and their problem with that is their problem, can we go easy on the total rejection of corporate Pride? Support a couple of the better companies who do it? Not tell the entire concept to fuck off quite so often?

The corporate world does so little that helps, we could stand to give them some positive reinforcement when they do. If corporate Pride stops, it’s not the corporation part that stops, it’s just the Pride part. It doesn’t defeat capitalism to the roar of the masses, just the part that actually benefits us.

Because we really can’t afford to lose any allies right now. It’s a fight, it never stopped, it never will stop, how far we’ve come is frankly astonishing in the context of the history of the entire planet, and when you are in a fight you do not spit on somebody handing you a nice fresh set of brass knuckles, even if that somebody is a an egregious screaming tentacled asshole outside the fight. It’s the fight that matters.

The right is laser-focused on erasing the LGBTQ+ world from the historical record and the present worldview, not just pushing us back into the closet but setting the closet on fire with us inside it. Their goal is to make us so invisible and silent that it is possible to pretend there simply isn’t any such thing as a human who isn’t straight, cis, and monogamously pumping out white babies with someone who barely considers the opposite sex the same species.

We don’t need to help them by refusing to accept the substantial solid corporate Pride does for us. It forces them to see us in the most everyday, commonplace, unremarkable parts of their lives—and we’ve already seen what they’ll do if they think no one’s watching, or no one cares enough to stop them.

If corporate Pride vanishes, it will be a terrifying sign of what’s to come.

In this precarious place in history when we are wobbling on the edge of an abyss with no bottom, if a June comes without rainbows, ask the oldest gay you know what will take their place.