Pride month isn’t the same kind of seasonal celebration as Christmas. You can’t slap a rainbow on it and call yourself an ally. Why? Because Pride is a political movement about acceptance, structural discrimination and community. It’s not straightforward joy for those it was built for. It’s complicated and so we need to engage with Pride month with a little nuance in order to do any good.
What the celebration is actually for
Pride began as a riot. The Stonewall uprising of 1969 was queer people — many of them trans women of colour — fighting back against police harassment in a New York bar. The first Pride marches the following year weren’t celebrations. They were political protests. Demands for the right to exist without violence, criminalisation, and erasure.
That history didn’t become irrelevant. Queer people are still fired for their identity, still denied housing, still subjected to violence at elevated rates, still navigating legal systems that don’t fully protect them. In Australia, sexual orientation and gender identity won’t even be counted in the national census until 2026 — after years of advocacy just to be asked the question. We don’t yet have comprehensive data on how many LGBTQIA+ people own businesses here, what barriers they face, or what the funding gap looks like. That’s not an oversight. That’s erasure in spreadsheet form.
When businesses participate in Pride, they’re borrowing from that history. The question is whether they’re adding to it or just using it.
What happens to the community when brands perform
In 2023, Bud Light partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a single Instagram post. The conservative boycott that followed cost Anheuser-Busch $1.4 billion in North American revenue. Bud Light lost its position as America’s number one beer after more than two decades. Target’s Pride merchandise collection the same year contributed to their first quarterly sales drop in six years.
These stories get told as cautionary tales for brand managers. Don’t take a stance, the lesson goes, or this could happen to you.
But here’s what that framing leaves out entirely: when mainstream brands retreated, the money didn’t go to queer-owned businesses. It evaporated. LGBTQ+ creators who relied on June brand partnerships saw deals fall from $14,000 to $1,500. Major Pride events faced funding shortfalls — NYC Pride was down $750,000, San Francisco Pride down $200,000 in sponsor contributions. The community paid the cost of corporate cowardice twice. Once when brands showed up inauthentically. Again when they disappeared.
Corporate rainbow-washing doesn’t just embarrass the brands doing it. It actively harms the ecosystem it claims to support.
What genuine participation actually looks like
In February 2025, London-based designer Conner Ives walked out for his London Fashion Week finale wearing a plain white t-shirt he’d made the night before. Three words: “Protect the Dolls.” A term of endearment for trans women, rooted in 1980s ballroom culture. He announced that 100% of profits from the shirt would go to Trans Lifeline, a trans-led crisis support organisation in the US.
His studio had five people. He hoped to raise around £60,000.
The shirt raised over $600,000.
No celebrities got the shirt for free. Everyone who wore it — Pedro Pascal, Tilda Swinton, Troye Sivan — paid for it. That was the condition. The campaign wasn’t a marketing strategy. It was a designer with a small studio deciding, the night before a show, that he needed to say something out loud. The money went directly to the community under attack. That’s what it looks like when it’s real.
Contrast that with Anheuser-Busch. When conservative backlash followed their 2023 Bud Light partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, the company’s CEO released a statement saying he “never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people.” He called it “one can, one influencer, one post.” The trans community — and the queer community broadly — noticed. At least five LGBTQ+-owned bars in Chicago promptly pulled all Anheuser-Busch products from their shelves. Sidetrack Bar, a 41-year institution in Chicago’s LGBTQ+ community, said the company had “wrongfully validated voices of hate.” 2Bears Tavern Group, which owns four queer bars, said it plainly: “This is not about economic prosperity. This is about human rights.”
Those bars took a commercial hit to hold a line. That’s costly allyship. Anheuser-Busch flinched, tried to please everyone, and ended up trusted by nobody.
The through-line in both stories isn’t scale or budget. It’s whether the position holds when it costs something.
What genuine participation actually does
76 to 85 percent of LGBTQIA+ individuals say brand participation in Pride is important to them. 56 percent say Pride merchandise is only authentic if brands are consistent in their support year-round. The research is clear: queer consumers are not asking for a rainbow logo in June. They’re asking whether a space is actually for them.
That question matters in ways that go beyond purchasing decisions. A business that visibly and consistently signals its position on LGBTQIA+ inclusion is doing something concrete in the world. It tells a queer customer whether they’re safe here. It tells a queer job applicant whether they’ll be respected. It tells a queer supplier whether the relationship will be straightforward or exhausting. It contributes — in a small but real way — to the normalisation of queer people in professional spaces that are not automatically safe for them.
That’s not a marketing strategy. That’s just being a decent participant in a community.
The businesses that do this well aren’t the ones that run a campaign in June. They’re the ones whose year-round behaviour makes the June participation feel true. They work with queer-owned suppliers. They have explicit inclusion policies. They don’t quietly drop the rainbow when it gets complicated. When it costs them something — a client, a contract, a comfortable neutrality — they stay anyway.
Where Matriarch stands
Matriarch plants an intersectionally feminist flag. It’s there on the homepage year round: “This practice is explicitly for women, trans women, non-binary and gender queer people, people of colour, disabled people, and anyone the mainstream business world has historically told to make themselves smaller.”
This year our Pride campaign includes this post and an investigation into the real hurdles LGBTQIA+ businesses face. I truly believe that business is political — that it’s one of the few levers left to us to make real change in this capitalist hellscape. Pride month for me is an opportunity to light a fire, plant a flag, welcome my queer folk to a space that wants to lift them up.
My challenge to you: look at what your business is saying this month, and what it’s doing year round. Do they match up?
Nelle