Companies Are Spending Less on Pride
Last year, US research firm Gravity Research surveyed senior corporate executives in the United States and found that for 2025, 39% of companies planned to reduce Pride-related engagement, while no respondents planned to increase engagement. The same poll found 61% cited the Trump administration as the top reason for rethinking Pride strategies, and 65% were preparing for backlash.
Further, the Associated Press (AP) reported that in 2025, San Francisco Pride faced a $200,000 budget gap, Kansas City Pride lost about $200,000, roughly half its annual budget, New York City Pride was trying to close a $750,000 gap, and St. Louis PrideFest had a $150,000 shortfall after Anheuser-Busch ended a roughly 30-year sponsorship. AP also reported that about 20% of NYC Pride corporate sponsors either dropped support or scaled back.
CBS News separately reported that several organizers saw 20%–30% less corporate support than in past years, with Heritage of Pride/NYC Pride losing roughly one-quarter of its sponsorship dollars, about $750,000. In 2026, National Public Radio reported that sponsorships were down in cities including New York City, Salt Lake City, Louisville, St. Louis, Orlando and Pittsburgh, and quoted USA Prides as saying that a majority of Pride celebrations had seen reductions. Pittsburgh Pride expected to secure only 30%–40% of the sponsorship dollars it had raised a few years earlier.
And Saying Less About It Also
Further, analyses have shown that public corporate messaging about Pride has fallen sharply: The Guardian analyzed customer-facing social accounts of the 10 biggest US companies by market cap and found Pride posts fell from 39 in 2023 to 21 in 2024 to 18 in 2025, a 54% decline over two years.
Conservative commentators have long observed that corporate engagement with Pride always appeared to be driven more by perceived market realities than by any enduring commitment to the ideological cause. A cottage industry has thrived online comparing the rainbow-bedecked logos of multinational corporations operating in Western countries during Pride Month to the sterile, LGBT-free branding used simultaneously in Arab and non-Western states. The same companies that were branding themselves as LGBT-friendly along America’s progressive coasts had hardly anything to say about LGBT rights in Saudi Arabia.
Following the Herd
The downward shift in marketing spending and engagement in America is blamed by Pequeno in her piece on the Trump administration’s “aggressively anti-LGBT messaging”, but here she may have a chicken-and-egg problem. Polling data across the US shows that in recent years, the high and enthusiastic support for LGBT causes has receded moderately, in contravention of progressive expectations. As Pequeno herself notes:
“Support for same-sex marriage has declined, according to a recent Gallup poll. Fewer people believe that same-sex partnerships are ‘morally acceptable.’ Support for transgender rights has gone down.”
Those polls are real: in 2026, Gallup found support in the US for same-sex marriage falling to 65%, down from 71% in 2022 – a modest but notable reversal in a country where the trend had moved relentlessly in the opposite direction for 30 years. The same poll found that transgender issues are increasingly in a major political hole: when respondents were asked whether “changing one’s gender is morally acceptable”, the share who agreed fell from 46% to just 38%.
Indeed, across the board, on trans-specific questions, the shift is sharper. Pew’s February 2025 survey found that 66% favor requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams matching their sex assigned at birth, 56% favor banning medical professionals from providing gender-transition care to minors, 49% favor requiring trans people to use bathrooms matching their sex assigned at birth and only 22% favor requiring health insurers to cover gender-transition care. Compared with 2022, support rose by 10 points for bans on gender-transition care for minors, 8 points for birth-sex sports rules, 8 points for birth-sex bathroom rules and 6 points for bans on teaching gender identity in elementary schools.
Perhaps, then, the long-held conservative thesis about companies and LGBT Pride was correct: they were not leading public opinion, but following it. Now that public opinion is shifting, the companies are following once more, to the distress of those who may have – in their folly – thought that they had permanent allies.
