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It’s ‘Rainbow-Washing’ Season
Look beyond a company’s new Pride-themed logo

As a gay man, Pride Month brings with it a basket case of celebrations and contemplations.
It’s a time to revel in one’s outright queerness. It’s a month to find love or simply fuck around — quite literally. It’s a 30-day review of LGBTQI+ history, reflecting on the progress made and the work that still needs to be done. It’s a calendar staple that pedestals inner authenticity; Pride Month is an homage to the breaking shackles, tethered by living in a world predicated on heteronormativity.
However, Pride Month — in more recent years, especially after the Marriage Equality Act was passed in 2015 — has become a month-long celebration inundated by glossy marketing campaigns selling you, the consumer, on a brand’s unshakable support for the LGBTQI+ community. It’s easy to start looking at the world with those colored glasses, which can adversely affect your conscious purchasing decisions. In a roundabout way, being enticed solely by a rainbow filter of a cheeky bit of queer website copy could even lead you to spend your hard-earned cash on a product made by a company that’s far from inclusive or ethical, or environmentally conscious.
Human beings are drawn and guided by a stimulus; it’s a survival instinct, quite frankly. Marketing drives and pushed advertisements, be them IRL or digitally splayed, play on that inherent quality — making it all that much harder to see past the guise of surface-level queer solidarity and flashy Instagram posts.
LGBTQI+ adults in the United States hold a combined buying power of $917 billion dollars. Referred to as “pink money” — the purchasing power of the “gay community” — recent years have seen massive growth in the economic spending sector held by queer people, catching the attention of businesses with increasing intensity.
(For context: 5.6% of adult Americans are now identifying as LGBTQI+; 9.1% of Millennials align as LGBTQI+; almost 16% of Gen Z see themselves as members of…