Guardian article 'Revealed: how big businesses are rolling back public support for Pride'

[RoyalCorgi]

We've observed before that corporate support for Pride has been dropping. The Guardian has helpfully carried out an investigation and found: "Analysis of social media posts by the country’s biggest companies found mentions of Pride had plummeted by 92% since 2023, mirroring a trend seen in large American firms."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/22/revealed-how-big-businesses-are-rolling-back-public-support-for-pride

In some ways it's sad because younger gay, bi and lesbian people won't see as much representation. But has the amount of representation through pride events and advertising reached saturation to the extent it puts some people off 🤔

I'm not sure that a few performative tweets and rainbowing of the websites really do any actual good to anybody. It's the gay equivalent of greenwashing to try and offset a bit of their other ethical issues. For example, look at some of the companies suggested in the article, which includes oil and tobacco.

copied from Guardian - Among the British brands were the technology company Arm Holdings, the pharmaceutical firms AstraZeneca and GSK, the nicotine products company British American Tobacco, HSBC bank, the chemicals company Linde, the defence and engineering company Rolls-Royce, the oil company Shell and the food conglomerate Unilever.

They don’t need to be branded and promoted. How undignified.

Gay Pride - or Lesbian Strength and Gay Pride as it was, briefly - was valuable at one point, when being gay meant you could lose your job, or even your life, and being lesbian mean you could lose your job, or your children.
It took guts to march under those banners at one time, and it was an occasion to feel, for once, not isolated and threatened.

It grew into a commercial, male-dominated event, and then into something vaguely for 'queer' people, which is actually anybody and everybody, with a big emphasis on transness.

It's benefit to young lesbians and gays - particularly young lesbians - has sunk to below zero.

I've referred previously to posters and local newspaper ads for 'Pride Week' I saw in a small town in Ireland. The accompanying photo was of a grotesquely-made up drag queen. That was the only image of being lesbian or gay being promoted.
I could imagine a young person in the area taking one look at the ugly parody of femininity and thinking 'If that's what gay is, I must be something else'.

It would be no loss if it disappeared entirely.

@MarieDeGournay

Spot on. Nowadays Pride is all about fetishists, pups and adult babies.

I'm not surprised. It's become a festival of drag artists, furries, BDSM, pups and men exposing themselves in the streets. It's no longer about support for lesbians and gay men, and opposing discrimination.

Good. The scope and focus of Pride had moved far beyond same-sex attracted people. Without discussion or their agreement Pride chose to force-team LGB with TQ+ & 'spicy straights'.

Enjoy cross-dressing? Animal or rubber costumes? Poly? S&M? No kink is too far. Safeguarding and child protection are just unnecessary & tedious right-wing gatekeeping. Everyone, and anyone, is welcome at our new intersectional all-inclusive Pride!

Though best we hide the terfy lesbians. They keep banging on about same-sex attraction, soooo last century. Of course you can have a penis, father children and still be 100% female and 100% lesbian. Now that's our true new Pride!

I'm very glad Pride, like Stonewall, is dying out. Both largely achieved their goals and could have wound down with dignity and grace, and protected their legacy. Instead they hitched themselves to a predatory men's rights movement, and deserve this humiliating end.

It's about time. The only thing Pride has been good for in recent years is mainstreaming fetishes and advertising Absolut Vodka. A reset is long overdue.

If it's to have any future at all - and I could happily live without it - it would be to go back to basics and be a grassroots community thing. Of course 'the community' is not what it used to be.

I'm always puzzled by the economics of Pride. Manchester Pride is a huge event, one of the city's biggest tourist draws, and it's bust. It loses shedloads of money every year. How expensive can it be to set up a stage and book Sophie Ellis-Bextor and H from Steps?

I'm not surprised. Pride has taken an alarming change of direction, banning lesbians from marches, etc. What company wants to be so publicly homophobic?

I thought this is what Pride were asking for a few years ago - less of the pink washing (or whatever it was called). I guess businesses took them at their word. I recall on one of the It’s not working podcasts someone heavily criticising one of the banks (I think) for something or other without a second thought at how they came across. It’s like they thought they were so super special that they could say what they wanted.

Big businesses are being lobbied by their own gay staff that there is no universal support for Pride from the gay community. I have a male gay acquaintance who is vociferous against the exhibitionism of it.

Pride is way past its time.

and of course there's Stuart Ireland and Surrey Pride. Not a good look.

Stephen Ireland.
But not the Stephen Ireland who was an attacking midfielder for Man City and the Republic of Ireland football team in the early 2000s - you'd think that 'Stephen Ireland' was unusual enough to be unique, wouldn't you?

It seems to me that the article has it all the wrong way round. It implies that big business pulling away from Pride has caused people to feel less positively about the LGBT+ movement and Pride.
I believe that the cause and effect to be flipped - big business realised that their customer base wasn’t that interested in Pride after all, and that their business didn’t acquire a sheen by being associated with it, so are therefore directing their marketing budgets elsewhere. Marketing spend and impact per pound is tracked and evaluated. Maybe Pride just isn’t delivering enough uplift.

Activists have overplayed their hands. But, I think this is a net gain for LGB++ because people who were not in board with the performative aspects might nevertheless be supportive passively.

"Pride comes before a fall".

It was always weird that Pride became such a big thing. Almost as if suddenly local Polish or Lebanese festivals all around the country suddenly had masses of corporate money, tat in every store, streets shut down through the cities, flags at city hall and every school, and needing all kinds of police resources to manage.