The Pride Month that wasn’t

Merchandise displays at the Target in Johns Creek, Ga., this month featured American flag-inspired tank tops and baseball caps where, in recent years, customers may have instead encountered a rainbow flag–themed collection of cross-gender swimsuits. This year, shoppers looking for Pride Month merch would have had a harder time locating those items.

Target stores across the United States downplayed their in-store Pride Month offerings. “Not is it only in the back of the store, they literally put it by the clearance section,” one TikTok user complained.

This year, many corporations scaled back Pride Month advertising, merchandise, and community events in response to pressure from consumers and the Trump administration. Experts and insiders say the shift reflects a broader corporate pivot away from taking open stances on politically controversial topics, although many Fortune 500 companies may continue quietly supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

In April, Gravity Research published its annual Pride Pulse Poll, summarizing responses from corporate executives of major companies, including Fortune 500 corporations. According to the report, roughly 2 out of 5 corporations planned to reduce Pride Month engagement this year while zero respondents said they would increase it.

Not all brands backed down from promoting Pride Month. Levi’s and Puma still rolled out Pride-themed clothing collections. Wintrust Bank and Ulta Beauty sponsored the Chicago Pride Parade.

But overall, companies were noticeably quieter with their LGBTQ messaging this year. Forbes named 21 large companies, including Lowe’s, Mastercard, Target, Walmart, and Anheuser-Busch, that reduced or nixed sponsorship of Pride Month parades and events around the country. Organizations that host parades in cities such as San Francisco, New York City, Salt Lake City, and Washington, D.C. reported funding shortfalls totaling more than $1.6 million collectively.

Pride Month began as a commemoration of the June 1969 police raid on Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City. The following year, activists organized the first Gay Pride Liberation March on Christopher Street, where the raid took place. President Bill Clinton first named June as Gay and Lesbian Pride Month in 1999, four years before the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas to decriminalize gay sex.

Well-known corporations have long marketed to LGBTQ customers. In 1981, Absolut Vodka published ads in LGBTQ magazines. Subaru launched a campaign in the mid-1990s with taglines like, “It’s not a choice. It’s the way we’re built.” But it didn’t become mainstream for corporations to position themselves as Pride supporters until recently with the widespread adoption of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, explained that DEI is based on principles of fairness, but Marxism has largely shaped the underlying ideology. As a result, “it is a zero sum contest between those with power and those without power,” explained Butcher. “And DEI is the application of these ideas in the form of mandatory affinity groups”—like race, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

While corporate investment in DEI initiatives can’t be traced back to a specific date, diversity training programs became more popular among companies during the 2000s. They later began using DEI as a marketing strategy.

“In the last 10 years, [companies] realized that customers … expected brands to take a stand or support socio-political topics,” Amir Grinstein, a marketing research fellow at Northeastern University, told WORLD in an email.

By 2021, 9 out of 10 major companies felt pressured to comment on social issues, up from 60% in 2016, according to the D.C.-based Public Affairs Council.

That same year, NIM Marketing Intelligence Review published a report compiling evidence of companies taking stances on a variety of issues in addition to LGBTQ activism. Following the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Delta Airlines nixed promotional benefits for members of the National Rifle Association. After the NFL forbade players in 2018 from kneeling during the national anthem, Nike aired an ad featuring Colin Kaepernick, one of the first to take a knee in protest of racial inequality.

Andrew Crapuchettes, CEO of conservative job board RedBalloon, said most large corporations made those kinds of statements during the early 2020s to avoid the ire of the political left, not necessarily for ideological reasons. “It was a business decision,” he said.

And, in most cases, aligning with such politically charged causes turned out to be bad for business, particularly when it came to speaking out about LGBTQ issues.

Following a Bud Light boycott in 2023, prompted by the brand’s brief partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, parent company Anheuser-Busch may have lost as much as $1.4 billion in sales, according to some estimates.

When Target released its Pride Month collection in 2023, many conservative shoppers stopped buying from the retailer. In the second quarter of 2023, Target’s in-store and online sales dropped 5% and 10%, respectively. By that August, Target’s stock value had dropped 27% from the previous year.

Many executives now cite such consumer backlash as a reason for scaling back Pride Month engagement, according to the April report from Gravity Research.

“Retailers who are capitalists at the end of the day, like Target, care more about making money than trying to keep a smaller section, even if they’re a loud section, of society on the left happy,” Crapuchettes said.

In addition to consumer pushback, many executives felt pressure from the Trump administration. “It’s a cultural shift,” said Heritage Foundation’s Butcher.

In a Jan. 20 executive order, President Donald Trump declared, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.” The following day, Trump directed the attorney general to provide a report identifying “egregious and discriminatory DEI practitioners” within the private sector.

And the average customer just doesn’t like Pride parades, since many of the participants wear sexually graphic outfits, Butcher added. “This is the kind of stuff that Americans have said, ‘No, we don’t want this for the next generation,’” he said.

But the move away from DEI may be gradual. According to a November report that Butcher authored, only 14 Fortune 500 companies did not have a DEI statement, though that number might have risen slightly since the report’s publication.

Going forward, Butcher anticipates that larger corporations will rebrand DEI departments, possibly using phrases like “equity and belonging” instead. Still, most companies have moved away from louder forms of activism.

“My prediction is that it will be many years before companies feel like they can be as aggressive in support of Pride Month activities and DEI as they have been over the last five years,” said Butcher.

RedBalloon’s Andew Crapuchettes feels hopeful about the vibe shift, but he’s not sure that conservative consumers will keep sufficient pressure on companies to sustain it. “We’re going to get back to focusing on raising our families, which is a good thing,” he said, “And we’re going to completely pull away from the culture war.”