It’s hard to take Pride

For the entirety of June each year, companies and institutions go rainbow for Pride. But this year, social media seems a little less awash with multicoloured flags – and fewer and fewer companies have bothered with their annual logo change. Could it be that we have all, finally, tired of this mandatory rainbow charade?

Donald Trump has certainly made his feelings known. World Pride was held in Washington DC this year. An awkward stage for the annual global celebration considering that when asked what his position was on Pride, Trump’s spokesperson said that the president was “fostering a sense of national pride that should be celebrated daily”. Eek.

And last week, the US Embassy in Israel informed the Israeli Foreign Ministry that it would “not be conducting programming related to LGB issues”. That lack of TQ+ isn’t an oversight – the Trump administration’s hard stance on the trans issue is certainly not all talk.

Perhaps Pride is just becoming too much of a pain. Last year’s New York City Pride Parade was disrupted by pro-Palestine activists. After forming a human chain which blocked the parade, the group said: “We stand in solidarity with Palestinian queers, and their struggle against imperialism”. It’s unclear why “queers for Palestine” don’t appear worried that gays are beheaded in the West Bank and pushed off buildings in Gaza.

All of this is enough to put off corporate sponsors who previously saw Pride as an easy bit of positive PR. Mastercard, Nissan, PepsiCo, and Citi have all reportedly pulled their sponsorship of the 2025 New York City parade.

While the Trump effect is real, the move back to monochrome was well under way before the anti-woke administration came to power. Back in 2023, Anheuser-Busch InBev sales dropped 15 percent. Why? Bud-light-drinking conservatives had taken umbrage with the company’s new face – trans woman and influencer Dylan Mulvaney. In an effort to try to recoup some of its dad-bod drinkers, Bud Light’s 2025 Super Bowl commercial featured Shane Gillis, Post Malone and Peyton Manning as bumbag-wearing cul-de-sac dads. This screeching u-turn in PR strategy was about as subtle as Mulvaney’s makeup.

The political power and weight of Pride has actually been waning for some time. You don’t have to be a MAGA fan to feel a little bored with the corporate day-out that Pride has become. Many gay people now boycott events themselves, objecting to pink-washing in the business world or the fact that what used to be a protest is now treated as a playground for middle-class mums.

While homophobia is still a real and present reality for many gay people living in America, society’s attitudes to gay men and women have by and large changed for the better. For some, Pride month began to feel less like an authentic celebration of everything queer, than a forced virtue signal to show where your allegiances lie. A bit like the BLM black squares on Instagram, if you don’t go rainbow there must be something a bit off about you. If Trump’s presidential win told us anything, it’s that people don’t like being told what to do.

And the rifts between LGB and the TQ+ sections of the so-called rainbow coalition have meant that even members of the Pride family are turning away. Why would lesbians want to march alongside trans women who call them transphobic for not wanting to date them?

Call me a queer tourist but the parties I used to go to, during what was then merely pride week, were some of the best I’ve ever been to. Real fun rather than this month of forced joy. Would a Pride-less America be a poorer one?

It’s certainly worrying that Pride marches have been banned in Hungary, for example, where people’s freedom to be out and proud seems genuinely under threat. But in its current form of complicated chevron-emblazoned flags, right-on finger wagging and seas of corporate floats, there’s little to be proud about Pride anymore.