Corporate America Withdrawing Support for LGBTQ Pride Celebrations
While the Boston Red Sox Organization continues to celebrate Gay Pride Month by hosting, yet again, gay pride and a gaggle of drag queens at a home game at Fenway Park on June 9, the Wall Street Journal reports that corporate America’s enthusiasm for underwriting June Pride celebrations has greatly diminished.
The New York Post reveals that a growing number of companies — including Pepsi, Citi, Master Card, Nissan, Garnier, and Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp — have dropped or greatly scaled back their financial contributions to this year’s Pride events. Fear of backlash from an increasingly conservative consumer base, combined with a general distancing from diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. has led these companies to scale back their support. (RELATED: This ‘Pride Month,’ We’ll Find Out If DEI Is Really Dead)
These cowardly companies will continue to donate to the celebrations, but they have decided that they no longer want to be associated with what has become contested terrain.
And although some — including Eve Keller, a spokesperson for the United States Association of Prides, a nonprofit that supports Pride event organizers throughout the country — have attempted to blame the “economic uncertainties” related to the Trump tariffs as the reason for the gay marketing pullback, the truth is that many of those who have been pressured to continue their economic support have requested that their names and logos be removed from official displays and apparel.
And who can blame them? Most corporate decision makers likely look at the cautionary tale of the Anheuser-Busch disastrous LGBTQ marketing campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. A slick video featured the transwoman Mulvaney in a bathtub drinking a Bud Light beer as part of the advertising campaign. Teaming up with Mulvaney to sell Bud Light cost the world’s largest brewer as much as $1.4 billion in sales because of backlash and boycotts of its product.
It is hard to imagine what could have possessed Anheuser-Busch to allow this to happen. The person blamed for the disaster was Anheuser-Busch’s out-of-touch VP of Marketing for Bud Light, Alissa Heinerscheid, who told an interviewer that she was inspired to recruit Mulvaney in an effort to update the “fratty” and “out of touch” humor of the beer company with “inclusivity.”
Hired to lead Bud Light in 2022 as the first woman to lead the brand, Anheuser-Busch fired Heinerscheid in 2023. She is now working for LIV Golf, the controversial professional tour backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund that launched a few years ago as a rival to the PGA Tour. According to her LinkedIn page, Heinerscheid is working in “Team Business Operations” at LIV.
Bud Light is finally beginning to recover also but it has been a struggle to regain its former status. After years of being the number one beer on tap, Bud Light has slipped slightly to second place. Bud Light has also lost its position as the best-selling overall beer to Modelo Especial. And Michelob surpassed Bud Light as the second-best-selling beer, dropping Bud Light to third place.
Learning from its mistakes, the brewing company announced that after a 30-year partnership, it was pulling support for St. Louis Pridefest in 2025. Sparking anger and renewed calls for boycotts of Anheuser Busch from the GLBTQ community, Pride St. Louis President Marty Zuniga told an interviewer for St. Louis Public Radio (NPR) that “For them to walk away from the table in negotiations, simply to note that we just don’t see the value in it anymore, it’s like a bad breakup.”
Yet, an organizer for Tower Grove Pride — an independent St. Louis Pride festival — claimed that Tower Grove has long sought to “limit the size and visibility of corporate sponsorships to help insulate the festival from the corporatization of Pride, and the fears, now being realized that big businesses are likely to withdraw their support when they assess we are no longer worth the expense.”
This is true as companies are finally beginning to realize that it is not helpful to their bottom line to alienate a significant portion of their customer base by promoting a lifestyle that is offensive to many. The Los Angeles Dodgers organization learned that in 2023, when they hosted the controversial drag queen “nuns,” the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
Calling the response to the Dodger decision a “big league backlash,” the Los Angeles Times reported that “about a third of Angelenos are Catholic, and many within the Dodger franchise and its fandom are devout.” The vulgar Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is a group that has spent the last four decades denigrating Catholic religious sisters by dressing in drag and performing obscene gestures at Gay Pride parades and in 2023 at Dodger Stadium.
According to a study cited in the Wall Street Journal, 39 percent of executives plan to decrease their recognition of Pride in 2025. This data is derived from a survey of 49 senior company leaders conducted between March 27 and April 4th by Gravity Research.
While this is not a sufficient sample to make sweeping generalizations, it must be noted that the 39 percent who are decreasing their support of Pride this year is a significant increase from the 9 percent who said they planned to change their Pride activities in an equivalent survey last year. With the growing conservative trends in the country, it is likely that this trajectory will continue. For those with June “Pride Fatigue,” this is welcome news.
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