Pride Matters More Than Ever

With corporations and the federal government turning their backs, your support is vital to the LGBTQ community

The Long Beach Pride Parade kicked off Pride season last weekend. Billed as the third-largest Pride festival in the country, behind New York and San Francisco, LB Pride has been one of my favorite events of the year since I moved here in 2017. With all the anti-LGBTQ sentiment and DEI rollbacks happening across America, I headed to the parade wondering what kind of floats we’d see during the first festivities under Trump’s second term.

There was a certain big gay rebel yell in the air during the Prides of the first Trump administration. It felt especially fun to be visibly queer in an America that had inexplicably turned back the clock. You may have heard the phrase, “Pride is a Protest,” which dates back to the early days of the Stonewall Uprising. The parades grew out of coordinated marches going back to the 1970s.

Some people used to think of Trump as an anomaly back in 2017. Anomalies don’t get re-elected four years after staging a violent insurrection. Love does not always win.

Trump, of course, had some anti-LGBTQ nonsense in his first term, perhaps most notably the original transgender military ban. GOP efforts have intensified in the past few years, largely targeting school curricula and healthcare access. Corporations are starting to heed their hysteria. I’ve written about this extensively in previous columns.

Of course, the energy is different. We’re tired. We’ve been through a lot these past few years: the pandemic, inflation, the first hetero-sectional vice president. That same defiant, jubilant energy is bound to dissipate years after we expected to be finished with this madness.

Pride Parades over the past decade have traditionally featured plenty of corporations flying the Rainbow Flag. I always remark to my friends that, “I love a good corporate pride.” That line always elicits laughter, but I’m not really joking.

Sure, it’s silly to see a giant gas tanker with a pride flag in a parade in between two groups of drag queens. It’s performative. Despite what Mitt Romney said, corporations are not people.

It also matters greatly that these big companies feel compelled to give a shit about LGBTQ people. People of color, women, members of the LGBTQ community, and other marginalized groups have been disenfranchised from climbing the corporate ladder for as long as corporations have been a thing. The GOP has been attacking DEI initiatives because they want a whiter tent, not a wider one.

Some corporations showed up for the Pride Parade. Arco, a BP subsidiary, rolled out its big tanker. I’m not endorsing Big Oil, but as a member of Big Gay, I appreciate the pandering. Giving credit where credit is due, BP still has an active DEI page on its website.

Big Oil supporting Big Gay

Disney has a complicated history with DEI, recently capitulating to Trump. You may remember Disney’s mixed reaction to the Florida “Don’t Say Gay” bill that passed in 2022. Disney showed up for Pride, handing out their signature rainbow mouse stickers. Long Beach is only a half-hour drive from Disneyland, but I was still pleasantly surprised to see their Main Street Vehicles and a strong showing from the House of Mouse.

One of Disneyland’s Main Street Vehicles

Other corporations have been quite cowardly. I keep my dilators in a rainbow drawstring bag I received from Wells Fargo at the 2019 Pride Parade. Wells Fargo has the naming rights to the fourth tallest building in downtown Long Beach. Wells Fargo did not march in the Parade.

Wells Fargo at the 2019 Long Beach Pride Parade before they gave up on their allyship.

I did some digging into Wells Fargo’s phony sense of allyship. Here is a link to Wells Fargo’s expansive LGBTQ page from 2022, courtesy of the Wayback Machine. That same link, www.wellsfargo.com/lgbtq, now redirects to a bland page that makes no mention of the LGBTQ community.

We’re living in an era where the federal government is targeting any woman, person of color, or member of the LGBTQ community that’s been promoted to a position of leadership. The implications are as clear as they are asinine. By weaponizing our very existence, they’re trying to transform the very notion of inclusion into a left/right issue. Not being racist = radical left Marxism in the new GOP playbook.

Pride matters. It may seem silly to talk about who marches in a parade, but it’s not. Visibility signals to everyone that we’re not going to slink quietly back to the 1950s.

I don’t want to spend this column going over all the ways that the Trump administration is targeting LGBTQ people, but one of their more recent acts of heinous cruelty bears mentioning. Late last month, a leaked budget draft revealed that Health and Human Services wants to cut funding for the National Suicide Hotline’s program for LGBTQ youth. RFK Jr., the man who thinks Wi-Fi causes cancer and fluoride is evil, who dumps roadkill in Central Park when he realized he wouldn’t be able to eat it himself, wants to cut a lifesaving program for LGBTQ youth.

The LGBTQ youth suicide hotline alone receives 2,100 calls a day on average. It is far from the only hotline of its kind. The Trevor Project has reported a 33% increase in hotline calls since the Fanta Fuhrer returned to power. LGBTQ people, particularly those of us in the trans community, attempt suicide at a far higher rate than the rest of the population.

In the interest of destigmatization, I feel it is important to disclose that I have used LGBTQ suicide hotlines when I was much younger. The closet is one of the most isolating experiences imaginable. LGBTQ youth especially turn to these hotlines when they feel they have nowhere else to turn. These hotlines are vital life-saving tools that RFK wants to take from some of our most vulnerable.

Visibility cuts down on the number of kids who have to go through life thinking that being gay is some horrible crisis that can be prayed away or solved by taking fluoride out of the drinking water. Republicans call it indoctrination for kids to know that some of their peers have two mommies or two daddies. There is no study to suggest that exposure to LGBTQ people activates the gay gene like something out of an X-Men comic book. I could, however, list study after study that proves the harm in the ostracization of our community.

Which brings us back to the parade. It matters that kids see that there’s nothing wrong with being gay or trans. It matters that they see people living full happy, out lives. It matters that our youth can grow up in a world where they don’t have to pick between poverty and authenticity. That’s why it matters that bland corporations like Wells Fargo suck it up and pretend to care about us. Fake it til you make it. We’ve got a long way to go.

Allyship is not always supposed to be easy. That’s not to say that anyone should seek self-flagellation as a means to prove themselves to LGBTQ people. Allyship is not measured by one’s usefulness to the cause.

I’m often asked by members of the straight community for advice as to how they can help the cause. For people in positions of power, I usually encourage them to simply give LGBTQ people a chance. There can often be an “us vs. them” mentality that serves as a barrier for marginalized people to climb the ranks of places like Wells Fargo. There’s a reason the term “boy’s club” has been so prevalent across history.

Many people are not in positions to radically promote queer liberation. That’s okay! We can all help, and it doesn’t need to be painful either.

The simplest, most meaningful way that you can be an ally is to speak up if you’re in the presence of someone spouting anti-LGBTQ nonsense. I certainly remember a time in school when “gay” was often used as a synonym for stupid or lame. That’s largely faded over time because people, plenty with no real dog in the fight, stood up and voiced their objection.

On a broader scale, that’s largely why I like seeing corporations at Pride. Most of us knew much of their “allyship” was performative. America went from having almost no major politicians supporting gay marriage to Obergefell being the law of the land in practically the blink of an eye. Late 2010s corporate allyship was often clunky because none of those suits were prepared for such a seismic shift in public sentiment.

I had a blast at the 2025 Pride Parade. There was a lot more gallows humor in the air than usual, reflective of this precarious position in American history. Republicans are trying to roll back the clock. On many fronts, they are winning.

Whether you’re gay or straight, I urge you to consider attending your local Pride Parade. The GOP wants us to be afraid. They’ve scared plenty of the cowards in corporate America, but there are a lot of people watching. LGBTQ youth deserve to grow up in a world that isn't relitigating the same homophobic talking points from the 1980s.

You can help, just by showing up. Wave a flag, wear some beads. It doesn’t sound like much, until you lock eyes and smile with a person who clearly came to find some community. We all need more of that in these apocalyptic times.