Corporate Pride was always conditional, and the brands pulling back have shown us exactly what their support was worth. The more interesting question is whether the people buying their products are going to let that pass without comment. According to a new Harris Poll survey of nearly 5,000 US adults, the answer is: probably not.
USA Today has been looking at this year's Pride Month, and the picture is a familiar one to anyone who has been paying attention. Levi's has a Pride collection celebrating queer motorcycle clubs. REI has a nonbinary artist-designed rainbow camping chair. Apple has a watchband. Abercrombie & Fitch is donating $400,000 to The Trevor Project alongside its "Made with Pride" range. But across the board, the rainbow bling is thinner on the ground, the corporate sponsorships fewer, and the energy noticeably muted compared to recent years.
The reason is not hard to find. Gay and trans rights became a culture-war flashpoint, the Trump administration came for DEI, and brands got scared. They watched what happened to Bud Light, Harley-Davidson, and Target when the right turned on them, and they decided that quiet was safer than visible. They may have miscalculated.
What the numbers actually say
The Harris Poll data is striking. Seventy-seven per cent of LGBTQ+ shoppers said they would pay more for a brand that meaningfully supports gay and trans people and issues. Among LGBTQ+ Gen Z respondents that figure rises to 86%. Two-thirds said they already have paid more. Nearly three-quarters said they stick with brands that support the communities they care about even when money is tight.
When a brand pulls back, 42% of LGBTQ+ consumers said they trust it less and 38% look for another brand altogether. That is not a marginal effect, it is a real shift in purchasing behaviour among a customer base with, according to a 2023 Merrill Lynch analysis, $1.4 trillion in annual purchasing power in the United States alone.
Tim Osiecki from The Harris Poll put it plainly: LGBTQ+ consumers notice when brands pull back, they can tell when support feels performative, and many change how they shop when it disappears. Consumer trust, as Bob Witeck of Witeck Communications observed, is hard earned and too easily squandered.
This is not a niche market
One of the things I keep coming back to in this story is the argument that brands may have badly misread their own customer base. Gallup now estimates that almost one in ten US adults identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual, and among adults under 30 that figure is nearly one in four. More than half of Americans either identify as LGBTQ+ themselves or personally know someone who does.
So when a brand goes quiet, it is not going quiet for a niche. It is going quiet for the friends, families, colleagues, and parents of a very large part of the population. The Harris Poll found that 80% of all respondents, not just LGBTQ+ ones, would be more likely to support brands that stand up for their values under public pressure, and 77% said they feel more positively towards brands that support the communities their loved ones belong to. This is not a minority interest. It never was.
What corporate silence actually costs
I have heard, over many years, from trans people and their families about what it means when the world goes quiet around them. Not hostile, just quiet. The message lands the same way: your existence is acceptable when it is politically convenient, and something to be managed when it is not. Trans young people in particular, who are already navigating an environment that has become genuinely more hostile, notice when the companies whose products fill their lives decide that this year is not the year to stand alongside them.
The brands that stayed visible this year, and there are some, are the ones that will be remembered when the political weather shifts again. Consumer trust, as Witeck says, is hard earned and long-memoried. A rainbow watchband in a good year and silence in a difficult one is not allyship. LGBTQ+ consumers can read the room just as well as any marketing director, and they are telling researchers, loudly and clearly, that they are paying attention.
The brands that opted for quiet this June may have avoided a few hostile headlines. What they bought with that quiet is worth examining more carefully. A temporary reduction in right-wing noise, at the cost of trust from a customer base that actually changes its purchasing decisions based on what it sees. That is a trade-off, not a neutral choice, and the data suggests it may not have been the smart one.
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Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives at the centre of both.