Corporate sponsors are dropping off pride parades like flies this year.

After 30 years of boozy support for its hometown pride, brewer Anheuser-Busch left a bigger hole in the St. Louis Pride Parade budget than a runaway Coors Light Party Train. Then it linked arms with Comcast and Diageo to pull the rug out from under San Francisco Pride. The name Diageo may not ring a bell, but it’s basically a parent company for cocktails. Diageo owns Smirnoff, Captain Morgan, Baileys and Guinness (new motto: Kiss me, I’m Irish. Unless you’re gay, yuck).

The situation isn’t too different in Seattle: Both of our major pride organizations are struggling this year.

Seattle PrideFest, which throws the event on Capitol Hill and another at the end of the parade in Seattle Center, lost $75,000, a third of its sponsorship funding. Today, it launched a GoFundMe to cover the loss.

PrideFest Executive Director Egan Orion says it’s a one two punch of a major funder going through bankruptcy and companies “either pulling back on DEI efforts or using the political environment as an excuse to cut funding to Pride events and other diversity outreach.”

The organization that throws the parade, Seattle Pride, expects to come up $350,000 short of its $1.5 million budget this year. Like PrideFest, Seattle Pride is also seeking donations. Executive Director Patti Hearn says no company has outright dropped Seattle Pride, but they have been slower to commit than usual. By April, Hearn says the nonprofit usually knows better what they’ll have to spend. The deadline for companies to sponsor pride is May 11. (Full disclosure: The Stranger is one of Seattle Pride’s media sponsors this year.)

Corporate foot dragging is part of the problem, but Seattle Pride has done its fair share of dumping, too. It started vetting sponsors more carefully this year, looking not just at workplace policies but political donations, lobbying, labor, supply chain ethics, contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), connections to private prisons, and military ties. For that last reason, Seattle Pride didn’t bother with Boeing this year, but it’s not operating on a one strike policy. Any flag raised during the vetting process prompts a conversation, either with employees or the companies themselves.

Not that Seattle Pride is in boardrooms with the bigwigs. When companies sponsor a pride event, the details are worked out by the check-cutting department or the queer employee resource group. People who are not calling the shots about a company’s image or “culture,” but are trying to work something out in the meantime. Seattle Pride told some companies that they could make a donation without putting their logo on anything.

“We’re talking to them about what their values are and what makes sense for them to show up,” Hearn says. “We hope they can push that they have some agency in their large companies.”

We compared Seattle Pride’s sponsors this year to lists from 2023 and 2024 and noticed a few missing names. We checked up on their plans.

Amazon, whose affinity group for LGBTQ employees (Glamazon), sponsored Seattle Pride in 2024 said it would get back to us and didn’t. REI sent a long statement that its approach to Pride Month is “grounded in our broader commitment to supporting LGBTQ+ communities everywhere we operate, all year long.” REI said it moved away from sponsoring prides in 2019, when it was a gold-level sponsor for Seattle Pride. But last year, the company’s LGBTQ employee resource group was a lower-level supporter.

GoDaddy says it is still in the planning process. Google says it hasn’t made a decision on sponsoring pride. TMobile says it’s still finalizing its plans and wouldn’t confirm if it intended to sponsor Seattle Pride.

Target didn’t respond to a request for comment. Neither did Assurant, the video game company Bungie, healthcare company Optum, Mastercard, Charles Schwab, KeyBank, Molina Healthcare, and PACCAR.

Not every company is shying away from Pride. Alaska Airlines is this year’s presenting sponsor. Starbucks is sponsoring Seattle Pride, “as it has for many years.” So is Fred Meyer and QFC, The Pokémon Company, University of Washington Medicine, Brooks, Symetra, Umpqua Bank, BECU, Nordstrom, Puget Sound Energy, Salesforce, Greystar, Overlake Hospital, Philips, Kaiser Permanente Washington, and Delta Dental of Washington which said it remains “committed (if not more than ever) to our DEI efforts internally and externally.” Seattle Children’s, which has paused surgeries for transgender people under 19 and won’t explain why, is also sponsoring Pride this year. (Smirnoff, whose parent company Diageo pulled out of San Francisco Pride, is sponsoring PrideFest. We asked about that apparent contradiction, but the company wouldn’t answer questions on the record).

We asked Los Angeles’s and New York City’s Prides if they’re seeing a similar trend. NYC Pride answered with a positive spin. Two-thirds of its sponsors had doubled down in support of the community. It was still talking to the last third, some of whom were “delaying decision-making.” Overall, it expected to be out $350,000 this year and encouraged the community to donate and volunteer.

How big a loss is this really? Plenty in LGBT community do not give a care for corporate-sponsored prides simply because they can be kind of lame (as former Stranger writer Matt Baume wrote about) and disingenuous. Airline floats and rainbow corporate koozies from some insurance company don’t exactly move me to tears, either.

There’s a good argument to look back to the old days when pride was a protest. It’s the one that Dyke Marches make every year in cities across the country (the Seattle Dyke Alliance could not be reached for comment). Trans Pride in Seattle doesn’t work with corporations or the Seattle Police Department. It’s proud to subsist on small donations, grants and community support, says Danni Askini, executive director of Gender Justice League, which organizes Trans Pride. Askini says GJL’s heart goes out to Seattle Pride.

“As trans people we sadly know all too well what it is like to have such fair weather friends as these corporations,” she wrote in an email. “Cowardly corporations can never cancel our shared pride.”

And they are cowardly. Corporate America goes where (it thinks) the money is. By the 2010s, most Fortune 500 companies decided gay was good. Big business adopted anti-discrimination policies. It threw its monied heft behind marriage equality. America’s CEOs had not had a sudden change of heart. America had a change of culture and they’d noticed. It made good business sense to glide along with the culture. Now that (they think) they’re seeing another shift, they’ve made another cold calculation. Even before that public shift, companies regularly talked out both sides of their mouths, professing a commitment to equality while bankrolling anti-gay, Trumpy Republicans aligned with their business interests. (As Baume also noted, Seattle Pride took money from corporations like that). Spineless or not, it’s obviously bad that companies are changing their tune over fear of retribution and a perception that American culture is turning against queer people.

Seattle Pride’s Hearn understands where the eye rolling is coming from. The first corporate logos she saw at a pride in the early 2000s were off-putting. But she’s learned sponsorships keep big events accessible. Over the phone, she ticked off the baseline costs for the parade and Pride in the Park: Tents and toilets—$145,000. Staffing, talent, ASL interpreters and ADA-accessible seating—$70,000. Security and radios—$50,000. City permits and insurance—$40,000. It’s not cheap.

Drag Queen Betty Wetter, emcee of Pride in the Park and host of the popular drag show Tush at Clock Out Lounge, is done with private corporate events. Even if it is a good way to make money in June, her career is stable enough that she can pick and choose what feels genuine. The way she sees it, the way the world is changing for queer people, there’s no use carrying on as normal.

“We have to let go of the idea that life is going to continue,” she says.

The community likes to joke that on July 1, corporations drop queer people like a fruit basket. Wetter says the reality of that joke hasn’t sunk in for everyone, that queer people have come to believe they need these companies.

In Wetter’s perfect gay world, unsanctioned in-your-face protest would take over. Pride in Seattle would be more like the first. But she knows people expect joy from her at Pride; she’s going to give the people what they want—or need. In the months since President Donald Trump has been back in office, her DM’s have been an outpouring of thanks after every show. They tell her Tush was the one night a month they felt happy, that her performances keep them going.

“I think joy is necessary,” she says. “Definitely throughout the day, I will be speaking my mind. Talking about how I feel [and] giving any opposition that Pride will allow.”

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