No More Corporate Pride

Let's bring this hollow crap to an end, shall we?

Taylor Hill/Getty Images for Garnier

Last week, I was walking around near my office in Midtown Manhattan and could not help but notice that lots of our country’s biggest brands were very keen on displaying how cool they were with Pride Month. There was a giant Pride flag hanging in a Starbucks—and not just the classic Pride flag, but the updated version which includes stripes for trans people and people of color. Bergdorf’s was festooned with flags. A handbag store had a Pride display with the words “We Stand With You.”

Nobody, however, went as all-out as Nordstrom. I have to admit, I always saw Nordstrom less as “the embodiment of Pride” than “the place in the mall that’s kind of fancier than Macy’s.” But I was wrong! Because, if the display window I saw was any evidence, Nordstrom is now selling a pillow that says “BTM/TOP” on it.

This is what progress looks like—bad taste is for everyone.

The corporate festivities continued, as they do every year, at the actual NYC Pride parade on Sunday. The whole thing was seemingly sponsored by Garnier. The company also released a special rainbow version of its SkinActive Micellar Cleansing bottle, something that you or I might see as pretty blah but that Garnier framed as akin to throwing one of the bricks at Stonewall:

Boldly emblazoned across the front of this special edition micellar water is a poignant mantra we can all live by: “Remove your makeup, not your Pride.” As a commemoration of the hard-earned gains and a promise for an all-inclusive future, the Pride bottle’s deep symbolism finds its roots in the early struggles of the contemporary gay rights movement.

Uh, sure?

Now, none of this is new at all. Mocking corporate Pride has become as familiar as corporate Pride itself, and this blog has been happy to get in on the act. But this year, the effort by brands to show how queer-friendly they are has moved from “annoying but funny” to “very fucking tiresome.” And that is for two reasons—first, because the bland “love is love” pablum that everyone has been subjected to for the past 10 or 15 Junes has never felt more at odds with the five-alarm emergency actually facing so many queer people in this country, and second, because corporations have spent the last few months showing just how shallow their solidarity is.