As a trans person, I’ve grown to dread Pride. When I was a kid, Pride was a weekend, a parade, a party. There were kisses behind the bike shed on an unseasonably warm evening in June, greasy shots of liquor with names like “Slippery Nipple,” cheeseburgers eaten on the sidewalk at 4 a.m. Pride was a hangover. A brunch. A girl or a boy or a someone-in-between who you (Dated? Hung out with?) saw for Pride weekend only, and then never again. It felt risqué and a little dangerous, and you always made sure to come in a group and leave in a group, because every year someone always knew someone who had been mugged or beaten up on their way home.
That last part still happens — the mugging, the beating up — though that’s hardly restricted to one month a year. Pride used to feel subversive, like part of a larger fight for equal rights and worker protections and gay marriage. Now Pride is rainbow wristbands handed out by your local bank, cops in riot gear with rainbow badges, sunburned straight girls complaining about the level of almost-nudity, and branded content as far as the eye can see.
In 2012, a friend sent me something that made me cackle: the image of an Oreo cookie with six layers of frosting, each a different color — a rainbow flag in the middle of an Oreo, with the word “PRIDE” in block letters stamped beneath it, just in case you missed the point. “Proudly support love!” read the caption for the image posted on the Oreo Facebook page. “Made with crème colors that do not exist,” it also read. (It was a fanciful image, not a real Oreo.)
The Pride Oreo set off virtual outrage, with some irate cookie customers calling for an Oreo boycott. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Oreo corporate parent Kraft told Reuters that positive comments “far outnumbered” negative ones, and asserted that the campaign was part of the company’s “proud history of celebrating diversity and inclusiveness.” A Change.org petition demanded that the Pride cookie actually be made.
It was a fun piece of advertising that I enjoyed, as did many of my queer friends. Gay-bashers screaming about Oreos on the internet? Hilarious. For the rest of the month, I got to feel political every time I ate a sleeve of Oreos in my boxers at home. Another cookie for the cause? Don’t mind if I do!
I’m sure this wasn’t the first piece of Pride-themed advertising, but it was the first I noticed because it garnered so much attention. And it was a huge success by any metric — everyone eats Oreos, regardless of their genitals or voting record. It seems like every year since then, the Pride cookie has taken on new forms, getting bigger and bigger, having less and less to do with anything tangibly LGBTQ. Earlier this month, Ralph Lauren’s Facebook page featured its polo-player logo in all rainbow, but no homophobes are burning their seersucker suits in protest — at least not yet.
This year is the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, the event that started the movement for LGBTQ rights and Pride itself. Many corners of the internet will inform you that the very first Pride parade was a riot. This year’s Pride parade will be a billboard, a march of the brands, a deluge of hashtags and selfies. You can buy a pair of rainbow Nikes, rainbow underwear, rainbow vodka. Playboy is selling rainbow-printed bunny ears that will look great in your Instagram stories. Harry’s, the razor company, launched ads featuring queer models, and Gillette did a spot featuring a father teaching his trans son how to shave his face. You can buy a Pride burrito from Chipotle and a Pride burger from Shake Shack — although my beloved Pride Oreo is nowhere to be found.
I love Nike and burritos, and that Gillette commercial did make me cry a little. But mostly I feel nauseated. Because nine trans women of color have been murdered so far this year, and half of these won’t be called hate crimes. Because every day, new videos circulate about violence toward queer folks — like the story about a lesbian couple being beaten up for refusing to kiss in front of a crowd of straight men on a London bus. Because Pride has become a dollar-generating machine, and precious few of those dollars make their way back into the pockets of the people who need them most: homeless queer youth, queer sex workers seeking health care, anyone who isn’t straight-passing and cis-passing and white.
At best, this all looks like lip service to a community that is facing huge threats under this president. At worst, it’s just dressed-up exploitation. Yes, some of these companies will be making donations to queer charities — but is that enough? What about their hiring practices? Their workplace conditions? Do they have trans workers, and if so, do they protect them? Do they offer them fair salaries and good health care?
I’m not going to any parade this year, and I’ll be avoiding anything rainbow until the middle of July. If you’re set on doing something this year, or if you just want to be helpful, avoid all the Pride-themed swag. Make a donation to your closest living trans person. Go out and make a queer friend, and ask them how they are. Go and see a local drag queen perform, and tip her (and the bar staff) really, really well. Yell at your Trump-voting uncle so we don’t have to.
Oh, and stop eating at Chick-fil-A. Those guys are the devil.
