The Tired Corporate Critique of Pride Month Misses the Point
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NBC News ran a great and insightful essay about corporate gay pride virtue signaling and its critiques saying the desire to associate gay identity with a particular part of the political spectrum doesn’t reflect the community’s diversity.
More than 50 years after the famous Stonewall riots, the only Pride Month tradition more predictable than big city parades in June are the perennial complaints about the “commodification” of the gay rights movement.
These days, the month often features corporations and consumer brands participating in the celebrations, with bright rainbow packaging and gay-themed items for sale. Instead of this salutary sign of inclusion and tolerance being welcomed, however, it routinely gets attacked.
Claiming that a gay person needs to vote for a certain party or situate themselves on a certain point of the ideological spectrum is — to use some of today’s pop psychology terms — gatekeeping and gaslighting.
Critics often insist that corporations’ commitment to gay pride is shallow and self-serving, or that rainbow-themed merchandise and advertising during June end up tokenizing rather than celebrating the community. In the run-up to Pride Month, a typical tweet sarcastically enthused “2 days until companies pretend to care about us!,” while journalist Sherina Poyyail wrote an article titled “Why Rainbow Capitalism Is Making Me Start To Dread Pride Month As A Queer Person.”
While these critics claim that corporations are missing the true meaning of the season, they’re the ones missing the point of Pride Month. Buying a T-shirt with the phrase “Love Is Not a Crime” from Target won’t, on its own, change the world or end anti-gay discrimination. A person who wears it may hope to have some marginal positive effect on the people around, but it’s primarily an individual choice about self-expression.
Though there are historical connections between the gay rights movement and opposing capitalism, it’s a mistake for the LGBTQ community today to embrace an anti-corporate attitude. The desire to associate gay identity with a particular part of the political spectrum doesn’t reflect the community’s diversity and can actively alienate people who are not part of that political group — at the expense of the interests of the community as a whole.
What was originally known as the “gay liberation” movement was born out of a wide-ranging cultural ferment on the left in the 1960s and early 1970s that also gave rise to the women’s liberation, anti-war and Black power movements, a cross-pollination among activists groups described in Cornell University’s archive on the history of gay activism.
Given this background, and aided by the fact that their conservative antagonists were generally in favor of free-market economic policies, gay rights activists during the 1970s were associated with a hostility toward capitalism, markets and corporations.