“San Francisco Pride loses $300,000 after sponsors drop out: ‘The tone has changed in this country.’” — Them, 3/17/25
Dear Queer Organization,
This isn’t an easy letter to write, but after so many years together, we owe you honesty and transparency, so we will say this as plainly as we can: We, a multinational corporation, will no longer be funding your pride parade or any of its associated homosexual activities. We know that for years we donated funds, shamelessly appropriated rainbow branding for the month of June, and gave away countless branded T-shirts at pride parades, but now, we think it’s best that we go our separate ways.
We realize everyone says this, but it’s not you, it’s us—well, it’s not so much us as it is our shareholders who demand that we take any action, regardless of its inhumanity, so long as it leads to profits. In fact, the shareholders have helped us understand that we’re in different places. Your rights are being threatened in new and unprecedented ways. And us? Well, we’re just ready to try new things.
Maybe we’ll experiment with some kind of hellish AI chatbot. Maybe we’ll give our C suite a raise while keeping employee wages flat. Maybe we’ll do some performative fascist bootlicking in the form of eliminating programs aimed at bolstering diversity within our organization—the point is, it’s time for us to spread our wings and fly.
We want you to know that this doesn’t take away the incredible times we’ve had together. Remember that year we featured a single attractive white gay couple chastely holding hands in one of our ads? It was you and us against the world. And what about when you and your community spent millions of dollars on our products over years and years, believing that we were somehow more ethical and equitable than our competitors? And—gosh—we’ll never forget that time our corporate account tweeted “What’s tea?” and someone replied “Mother.” We were unstoppable together!
We think we owe it to each other to be radically honest. We’ll go first: You are a marginalized community, and as a bloodthirsty corporation desperate for profits, we’re just being honest when we say you will never be enough for us. We need to be with customers that are—how do we say this?—less… politically inconvenient? Less… likely to upset the conservative oligarchs sitting on our board of directors? You know what we mean.
We’ve been talking to the shareholders a lot—and before you say anything, because we know you guys never liked each other—they’ve actually been really supportive through this whole thing. They were saying that you were a suppressive presence in our life. Like, you never even tried getting into a single one of our hobbies. Would it have killed you to try price gouging even once?
Listen, we loved “us.” We loved counting you as a profitable demographic. We loved publicly performing our allyship in the loudest way possible, and we love how that ultimately hollow performance distracted from all the FTC regulations we must keep breaking to remain profitable. But the fact is, that time in our life is over. It’s dead. And it’s never coming back. Unless, of course, the political and cultural landscape radically changes in a few years, which is why we’d love to find a way to stay friends.
We really do want to stay in touch. We’d love for us to find a way to be part of each other’s lives. We don’t want you to think we’re just abandoning you at the exact moment when allyship would actually count for something tangible in this world.
Sure, that’s what this is, but we don’t want you to think that.
Sincerely,
A Multinational Corporation