It seems that this Pride Month in the United States will not be as lavish as the ones before—and this comes straight from the horse’s, as in the organizers’, mouth. The Washington Post recently ran an article about the lack of funding compared to previous years for LGBT organizations putting on pride marches. Evidently, they chalk this up to ‘the Trump effect’.
The piece starts with Marty Zuniga of the St Louis, Missouri-based non-profit PrideFest complaining about his corporate contacts not answering his emails anymore. This lack of support also manifested in a lack of funding, which, in turn, resulted in the St Louis Pride March having a major gap in the budget for this year’s event. Even some companies that do decide to give money, he adds, choose to keep their names off the march.
And this problem goes beyond St Louis. Flagship pride events in major, very liberal cities such as San Francisco, California, or New York City, New York, are facing the same issue, according to the article by The Post.
Interestingly, the first corporation Zuniga brings up as an example of one who cut contact with his group is the brewer Anheuser-Busch, which has probably the biggest reason for shying away from sponsoring an LGBTQ pride event. As the piece itself brings up later, in April 2023, their primary beer brand, Bud Light, decided to start a marketing campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which infuriated their consumer base. As a result, Bud Light sales dropped by 26 per cent, and the brand lost its market-leading position in the American beer market.
‘These companies have likely recognized that aligning themselves with the LGBT agenda could hurt their business’
It is also important to note the date of that controversy—in the spring of 2023, when Democratic President Joe Biden was still in office in the White House. In fact, the Democrats had just been through a very encouraging midterm election cycle, outperforming all expectations. So, the idea that Donald Trump’s presidency sparked a sudden wave of popular backlash against the LGBTQ agenda in the United States is not entirely true.
What is undeniably true, however, is that President Trump’s administration has been cracking down on DEI initiatives in the government, and has also shown the willingness and ability to challenge such a programme in the private sector if they feel it violates equality of opportunity protections for all races and genders. However, this still does not mean that a private company could be sued or face criminal action by the Trump administration for simply sponsoring a Pride event, as the piece at times seems to imply.
Rather, these companies have likely recognized that aligning themselves with the LGBT agenda could hurt their business, and thus are opting out of doing so.
The article by The Post also cites Luke Hartig, a consultant for Fortune 500 companies, which seems to confirm this thesis. ‘Pride has become a particular point of anxiety in the past couple of years [for American corporations], Hartig said, as executives took notice of how some brands’ efforts to embrace the LGBTQ+ community backfired,’ they write.
In the previous Biden administration, US Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman spent considerable time and effort promoting LGBTQ activism in Hungary, with special attention to the Budapest Pride March events in June. Now, less than a year after leaving office, he must be quite stunned that not only, as per the current state of affairs, is the Budapest march not happening this year, but even such events in the United States are facing significant problems.
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