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Hello all,
We’ve spent the past few months inundated with news about how, under Trump, big brands are axing diversity initiatives and dialing back their performances of corporate responsibility.
This past month, I went to St. Louis PrideFest, and I saw what those shifts [ [link removed] ] in acceptable corporate jargon translate to in real life. It meant a budget shortfall for the region’s largest Pride festival. It also meant a reckoning with how the LGBTQ+ community of St. Louis sees itself.
For years, the weapons manufacturer Boeing sponsored St. Louis Pride. Last year, a group of queer activists blockaded the parade route, saying they didn’t want their liberation celebration tainted by munitions money. And this year, Boeing was notably absent from the weekend’s festivities: the missiles are still flying, but rainbow-logo Boeing t-shirts and balloon-adorned floats may now be too controversial for the corporation’s bottom line. “The protest worked,” one activist told me.
Still, that might not be the whole story. Even in cities without antiwar pride protests, weapons manufacturers are withdrawing monetary commitments to local pride parades, dissolving internal support networks for LGBT employees, and adjusting their branding away from inclusion.
K*, a queer Boeing engineer in her mid-twenties, supported last year’s protesters. “I’m pretty thoroughly anti-Boeing, on account of the war crimes,” she said. Knowing her employer was sponsoring Pride didn’t make her feel supported; it made her feel uncomfortable. “I’m like, why do I kind of dislike this?” K said.
“But if they aren’t sponsoring pride, I hope it wasn’t because they’re being cowards during the Trump administration,” she clarified. In fact, K hadn’t heard that her employer dropped their Pride sponsorship until I told her so, on the day of the parade. Employees, she said, get little information or influence at Boeing.
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