Corporate sponsors are taking a step back from LGBTQ+ Pride month, and the divestment will have a direct impact on the Utah Pride Center.
It’s not inexpensive for the center to throw the annual festival and parade in Salt Lake City. This year it's June 7 and 8. Executive Director Chad Call estimates the weekend event will cost around $1.2 million.
“Prices this year have increased dramatically,” Call said.
The biggest cost increase is with the contracted vendors who physically set up the festival, including fencing and security. Community members and businesses also play a role through volunteerism and donations. Still, corporate sponsors contribute a lot of money to turn Pride from a vision into a full-scale festival.
After President Donald Trump took office, companies that have long championed LGBTQ+ celebrations are scaling back their support.
“In ‘22 and ‘23, our corporate sponsorship was almost double what we're seeing right now,” Call said.
Out of 59 sponsors this year, 12 are Fortune 500 companies. At least two of those companies, Target and Goldman Sachs, publicly announced they would be rolling back their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives following Trump’s return to the White House. There has also been state legislation that directly impacts the community, including a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth and restrictions on what public bathrooms transgender people can use. And most recently, the display of pride flags on government buildings has been prohibited, although Salt Lake City adopted a novel workaround.
This year’s Pride also follows the last presidential election, where transgender issues were a big motivating factor for conservative voters who backed the president.
Call doesn’t know why corporations have decided to pull their donations. He can only make assumptions. But what he does know is that withdrawal will hit the Pride Center, which has faced a series of past financial woes, where it hurts. While this year’s Pride celebration is already underway, Call is concerned about the future.
“The funding impacts will have a trickle-down effect for years to come,” he said. “We're tracking to be somewhere in the $250- to $300,000 range behind.”
Corporate involvement in Pride started to ramp up in the 1990s. Karen Tongson, chair of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Southern California, said it followed political movements in the White House. Democratic President Bill Clinton was in office at the time and was doing outreach between businesses and LGBTQ+ groups. There was also a growth opportunity for these businesses.
“There was an effort to expand markets in different ways that included diversity and included sexual diversity,” she said.
That’s when Pride collections from department stores and company logo designs that resembled a Pride flag started to appear. And those corporations were onto something. As the LGBTQ+ community grows, so does its spending power. In 2023, an investment firm in the United Kingdom estimated the United States had more than 17 million LGBTQ+ residents, which equated to $1 trillion in spending power.
The corporate support, Tongson said, brought mixed reactions from the LGBTQ+ community.
On one hand, “it demonstrated the mainstreaming of queer issues, a certain level of acceptance and a certain level of economic acceptance.” On the other hand, she said others weren’t receptive to the “financial infusion without any real commitment to the political causes at that moment,” like funding AIDS research.
To Tongson, the retreat of corporate sponsors proves that the criticism some members had about their involvement in the first place is valid.
“I think now people really see that [it] was very contingent support,” she said. “It wasn't unconditional.”
Corporate involvement coined the term “Rainbow Capitalism,” which is the notion that companies present themselves as LGBTQ+ friendly for profit-driven reasons. Andy Holmes, a sociology doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, focuses much of his research on the relationships between different organizations and Pride festivities. He said there has always been resistance to Rainbow Capitalism because it took away from the origin story galvanized by the Stonewall Riots in 1969. Pride started as a protest against police violence and inequality. The original organizers, Holmes said, were also anti-capitalists.
“People are concerned, understandably, that when sponsorships are in parades, is this a surface-level, tokenistic kind of support?”
But it’s turned into a double-edged sword, Holmes said, because a lot of festivals rely on corporate sponsorships to stay afloat. The Utah Pride Center, for example, has become somewhat reliant on those dollars. Call said the community has tried to fill the financial gap. Corporate sponsorships equal big dollars and the center hasn’t seen the funding needle move even as smaller businesses step in.
“I don't think that any pride organization in the country right now could say that they are financially solid,” Call said. “I think every organization in the country right now is concerned.”
Even as corporate funding becomes questionable, there is one thing Call, Tongson and Holmes agree on: the LGBTQ+ community is resilient.
“Pride always exists,” Call said. “It has existed long before most mainstream folks recognized it, and it will continue to exist in one form or another.”
