By Yash Sinojia, Socialist Party Ireland. 9 June 2025
The news hit like a gut punch: Indeed, the global job-search giant withdrew its sponsorship from Dublin Pride. Their hollow justification? A desire to “focus on internal diversity and inclusion efforts.”
This corporate cowardice isn’t isolated – it’s the predictable collapse of rainbow capitalism under the pressure of Trump’s fascistic regime. Three quarters of Prides in the UK have seen a decline in corporate sponsors, with one quarter of organisers seeing corporate sponsors decline by 50% or more.
Across the Atlantic, the retreat is even more staggering: Target, Anheuser-Busch, Boeing, Mastercard, Pepsi, Walmart, and over 20 other major corporations have slashed Pride sponsorships this year.
The timing is deliberate – corporations signal compliance with authoritarian agendas while abandoning the communities they commodified for decades.
In Ireland, this manifests as corporate cowardice disguised as fiscal prudence, leaving Pride organisers scrambling for resources as Dublin’s celebration faces a €50,000 shortfall after Indeed’s withdrawal.
Yet this moment lays bare the fundamental contradiction of rainbow capitalism: corporations seek profit from queer communities while funding far-right politicians who criminalise our existence.
Capitalism’s LGBTQ+ “allyship” vanishes when confronted with reactionary backlash, exposing how homophobia and transphobia are in its DNA. The corporate exodus proves their allegiance was never to liberation, but to market calculations. Consider the hypocrisy:
- Target abandoned Twin Cities Pride’s $50,000 sponsorship after rolling back DEI, yet still seeks to march “silently” in New York – demanding invisibility to avoid conservative backlash.
- Citi dropped NYC Pride sponsorship but plans to march in 30 events globally – performing allyship without material sacrifice.
- Stealth Sponsors plague San Francisco and other Prides: corporations fund events but demand no public recognition, terrified of Trumpist fury.
- Far-right groups targeting refugees now explicitly mobilise against LGBTQ+ events in Ireland, with corporate sponsors fleeing rather than defending communities.
This betrayal isn’t just ideological – it has material consequences. Pride budgets fund critical year-round programs: gender-affirming closets, holiday meals for LGBTQ+ elders, security against neo-Nazi threats. When Target’s support vanished, Twin Cities Pride lost resources for its Rainbow Feast, feeding 300 people. Corporations starve these lifelines to appease the fascistic far-right.
Why corporations have no place in Pride
All corporations must be barred from Pride not merely for their hypocrisy but because their presence embodies capitalism’s fundamental contradiction with queer liberation.
Capitalism relies on the nuclear family – a heteropatriarchal unit ensuring unpaid reproductive labour and generational transfer of private property – making queer existence inherently antagonistic to its logic.
When corporations drape logos in rainbows during Pride month while exploiting LGBTQ+ workers through poverty wages and union-busting, they perform “pinkwashing”: using queer symbolism to mask how their profit model depends on oppression.
This exploitation extends globally, as banks like HSBC and Barclays march in London Pride while investing in US puppet regimes where LGBTQ+ people face execution – proving their “allyship” serves imperialist capital, not liberation.
Big Tech corporations are actively complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, deploying technologies like Google’s Project Nimbus, Microsoft’s Azure and Open AI, Amazon’s AWS, Palantir’s Quiver, etc that automate genocide and apartheid.
Their participation in Pride sanitises a business model that treats Palestinian lives – including queer and trans people – as disposable testing grounds for “battle-proven” technologies later sold to authoritarian regimes worldwide.
There is no solidarity in genocide profiteering. As Israel’s weapons exports boom – fueled by AI systems refined through Gaza’s destruction – these corporations exemplify how capital commodifies both queer joy and Palestinian blood.
Corporate participation also sanitises Pride’s revolutionary origins, transforming a riot against police brutality into a “marketing opportunity”, thereby neutralising its threat to systems that criminalise queer bodies.
Ultimately, allowing corporations to march signals complicity in commodifying queer resistance, turning communities facing “disproportionate homelessness and suicide rates” into target demographics rather than comrades in collective struggle.
Reclaiming Pride’s radical roots
This moment, however, is not a defeat. It’s an unmasking. The Stonewall uprising of 1969 – where Black trans activist Marsha P. Johnson and Latina trans activist Sylvia Rivera led collective resistance against police brutality – wasn’t an isolated event but the culmination of decades of militant queer struggle against systemic oppression under capitalism.
It erupted in a context where homosexuality was criminalised, trans people were targeted for “cross-dressing,” and bars like Stonewall served as rare sanctuaries amid constant police raids. Johnson and Rivera extended this revolutionary praxis beyond Stonewall by co-founding STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) in 1970, providing shelter for homeless trans youth and sex workers while centering the needs of queer people of color – all while organising with the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and anti-war movements in explicitly intersectional solidarity.
The subsequent Gay Liberation Front explicitly linked queer liberation to global anti-imperialist struggles, drawing inspiration from Vietnam and Algeria, demanding worker control over means of production, and condemning racism, militarism, and patriarchy as intertwined systems requiring revolutionary dismantling.
The crumbling façade of corporate allyship reveals the path back to Pride’s revolutionary essence: community autonomy. This was the missing ingredient after Liverpool Pride rightfully cut ties with Barclays, without replacing it with community involvement and support, ultimately leading to the event being cancelled.
Elsewhere, when corporations fled, working class queers filled the gaps. Amid this collapse of corporate support, Trans and Intersex Pride Dublin has built something extraordinary: a thriving, grassroots Pride entirely sustained by community power.
Their 2025 campaign has raised around €10,800 from thousands of small donors, accepting no money from any corporation. This isn’t merely a funding tactic; it’s a political manifesto embodied in anti-capitalism, queer, and Palestinian liberation.
Trans and Intersex Pride Dublin consciously points to the root cause of the oppression of trans and all LGBTQ+ people – the capitalist system. Only a socialist fightback uniting the struggles of all the exploited and oppressed can overthrow this system which promulgates transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, and economic exploitation.
To build liberated Prides, we must:
- Forge international solidarity: Our struggle is global – Pride must actively challenge capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and all other forms of oppression around the globe.
- End all corporate dependence: Follow Trans and Intersex Pride Dublin’s model – ban corporate sponsors entirely. Fund via community donations, mutual aid, and grassroots events.
- Center marginalised queers: Corporate Prides sanitised our politics, sidelining trans folks, disabled and queer POC. Autonomous Prides must prioritise their involvement and visibility.
- Occupy the streets: Reclaim public space with uncompromising visibility, making our bodies unignorable.