What’s happening at Target and Starbucks is much grimmer than it seems.

Business

What’s happening at Target and Starbucks is much grimmer than it seems.

Slate

June 15, 2023

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In years past, queer discourse around the annual Target Pride collection has taken on a tenor of loving mockery. TikTokkers roasted the box store for its hideous rainbow-strewn garments. Artists asked: What’s the use of a tank top printed with every single mainstream pronoun?

Radical queers mustered a requisite amount of disdain for the company as it profited off the visual trappings of a civil rights movement and the jargon of a marginalized group, but most people I know were more amused than offended (and some were reluctantly delighted): Target had carved out its own little niche in outfitting budget-conscious gays during our holy month. As long as we weren’t giving the corporation undue credit for what amounted to a business decision—selling products tailored to a growing demographic group—it didn’t seem as if there was much wrong with what the company was doing.

This Pride season, everything changed. Driven by outrage from right-wing personalities and social media influencers, conservatives across the country began starting confrontations with Target employees, sending in bomb threats, filming themselves vandalizing store displays, and calling for a boycott of the store. In response, Target removed certain items from its shelves and, in many places, made the Pride merchandise less visible in stores. The company instructed managers to take down some featured displays and move Pride products to low-traffic areas. Some Target employees said their stores no longer sold any items referencing transgender identity at all.

For queers who have long been suspicious of corporate Pride branding, the situation provides another bit of proof that rainbow-washed corporations are fair-weather allies, equally as eager to convey their support for our rights and safety as to withhold it—depending, of course, on what the market demands. But the question of how much to care about what Target has done is a bit more complicated.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in recent weeks, as Target has drawn accusations that it is not adequately standing up for LGBTQ+ people. This line of criticism suggests that the Pride products and displays themselves constituted some form of meaningful support (otherwise, their presence or absence wouldn’t matter) and that the products were a statement of the company’s values rather than a calculated business move (otherwise, the company’s selling of Pride paraphernalia would not reflect anything about its principles).

I have never believed either of those things to be true. To be mad at Target for pulling its Pride items would imply that there’s something materially or politically useful about selling mass-produced rainbow tank tops, that the stocking of queer-themed products in big-box stores has a role to play in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights and protections.

Why, then, does the end of the thirsty, full-throated Target Pride tradition feel like a loss? If the product line was never a political asset, why does its rollback still seem like a political threat?

Clearly, queer movement leaders believe that there is something to be won when companies adopt the aesthetics of Pride. Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the largest LGBTQ+ advocacy groups in the country, recently issued a statement chiding Target for its decision. “Target should put the products back on the shelves and ensure their Pride displays are visible on the floors, not pushed into the proverbial closet,” she said. “That’s what the bullies want.”

This is consistent with the idea that corporate marketing campaigns during Pride have contributed to the rise in public support for LGBTQ+ rights, in addition to the relative mainstreaming of our identities in pop culture and social discourse.

I’m sure there is some truth to this, in an Overton-window kind of way. When Lockheed Martin is sending its warplane-themed float down the Pride parade route, and when one of the largest retailers in the country begins selling T-shirts that say “Support Trans Futures,” the prospect of LGBTQ+ people gaining (and retaining) civil rights no longer seems so radical. And surely there must be trans and queer people out there, particularly those in hostile families or communities, who feel more optimistic about their lives—or more comfortable being out—when they see a Pride flag hanging at their local Wells Fargo branch.

This co-opting of queer celebration happened so quickly, and so shamelessly, in some of the strangest corners of the corporate universe that it seemed to trick a lot of us into thinking that our culture had made more of a decisive, permanent breakthrough on LGBTQ+ issues than it actually had.

But corporations are, by their nature, small-c conservative. They exist only if they make money; public companies like Target are also beholden to the interests of their shareholders. The overwhelming reason companies have sold Pride merchandise or promulgated rainbow versions of their logos is because risk-averse executives have calculated that it is more profitable for them to do so than not—and the benefits of corporate Pride participation accrue primarily to the corporations, not to the queers.

That boost to the bottom line can take a variety of forms. Ads featuring gay couples can make queer consumers more likely to purchase a given product or service. A queer Hilton campaign, for instance, might make some gays feel safer staying at a Hilton property—or believe they’ll be less likely to be asked at check-in if they and their partner are siblings, an insult many of us have endured. And a company with a strong Pride presence may find it easier to recruit and retain top LGBTQ+ talent at a time when a growing percentage of the population is queer or trans.

Also, well-meaning heterosexual liberals get the warm fuzzies when they see Facebook and Uber disseminating swag at Pride festivals, making them prone to forgive the companies for privacy breaches, labor violations, and the facilitation of genocide. The average center-left American has a stronger emotional connection to their gay loved ones than they do to an amorphous class of exploited workers, and it’s easier for them to make a mental jump from a rainbow logo to a cute gay wedding than to see the connection between, say, a company’s lax content moderation policies and the explosion of disinformation that is burning through the fabric of American democracy.

So it made sense that as American public opinion shifted considerably in favor of gay people in the early to mid-2010s, companies shifted along with it. But corporate America’s eventual embrace of Pride aesthetics should be read as a reflection of the country’s progress on LGBTQ+ issues, not as a strategic instrument that helped bring that progress about.

That is why, for the past couple of years, as anti-LGBTQ+ movements have amassed an increasing share of cultural and political power, companies have started to dial back their enthusiasm for Pride month. Fewer companies appear to be designing those rainbow logos, or they’re keeping them up on social media for just a day or two at the beginning of June. This year, Target, Budweiser, and the Los Angeles Dodgers have caved, to varying degrees, to anti-LGBTQ+ pressure campaigns. Starbucks workers are reporting that their managers have begun taking down Pride decorations, too (though the company has denied the claim). The zeitgeist that once incentivized corporate rainbow-washing has mutated: Now, there are no straightforward wins to be had from festooning one’s stores and brand assets in Pride paraphernalia. It’s starting to look like a liability, and companies are changing their approach in real time.

It’s not that the right-wing elements behind the Budweiser boycott campaign or the spate of Target videos (and abuse toward employees) has attracted a particularly sizable following. By and large, Americans still support LGBTQ+ rights and protections. But the unabashed homophobes and transphobes have gotten louder, the conservatives who’d been harboring a latent disgust for queer people have embraced their antipathy, and mainstream political figures have assured them all that their desire to wipe trans people off the map is a righteous crusade. All the excitement and momentum on LGBTQ+ issues is coming from the right. The GOP is passing laws against trans people and gender nonconformity in states all over the country. It’s the party’s hottest topic this season.

So it’s no wonder that the reasonably intelligent, profit-minded executives at American companies have surveyed the political landscape, studied the market research, and decided that it’s not in their best interest to throw their lot quite so far in with the queers this year. No harm, no foul, no homo: It’s not that they don’t “Love Is Love” us; it’s just that they were never too concerned with us qua us to begin with. Our lives, our safety, our health, our happiness, even our ability to wear a kitschy fanny pack or gender-affirming swimsuit at Pride—none of that was ever any of Target’s business. Target’s business is money, and when something starts causing it to lose money—or becomes a political risk that could lead to less money—it will probably change accordingly.

Even still, Target’s Pride rollback feels like a bit of a bummer. I admit that I have found myself, to my profound irritation, wishing that this Pride season were just as filled with lighthearted corporate tributes as it was a few years ago—that I could still ridicule the desperate, depoliticized, sexless attempts to ape a message of solidarity through branding. The de-rainbowification of corporate Pride is another sign of the times, a proof point that shores up a set of hardening facts: that the social stigma against homo- and transphobia has been drastically diminished. That white Christian nationalism and its rigid, punitive gender paradigm are gaining power. That violence and threats against a company’s employees are an effective means of changing a company’s policies, and that a vocal political faction is not afraid to use them.

It isn’t that we’ve lost anything of significant value when companies slowly back into the bushes and hide their Pride merch. But it’s sickening to watch them mirror back at us the terrible truths we already know.

Source: Slate

What’s happening at Target and Starbucks is much grimmer than it seems.

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