Pride Month—formerly known as June—began this year with the usual glut of rainbow flags, parades, school assemblies, and government and corporate cheerleading of LGBT identities in America’s blue cities and states.
But then, as the days passed, something happened. As June has rolled on, it’s increasingly looking as though Pride celebrations aren’t quite as popular as their backers had wanted them to be. In fact, there has been a significant and growing amount of open dissent to the omnipresent Pride hoopla.
It started with the sales collapse—still ongoing—of Bud Light, which was displaced from its position as America’s No. 1-selling beer, generating a $27-billion stock-price crash for its parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, after the brand’s marketers decided to highlight transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. A similar sales freefall and stock-price plunge has befallen Target, which in late May began marketing a line of Pride-themed clothing for adults and children to be prominently displayed at the front of its stores. The most controversial item was a “tuck-friendly” transgender swimsuit designed for hiding male genitals. Although the swimsuit came only in standard adult sizes, its display among items specifically marketed to children—including a kid-size swim skirt tagged as fitting “multiple ... gender expressions”—provoked boycotts so severe that managers at many Target outlets either moved the Pride-themed merchandise to the back of the store or removed it altogether.
What went wrong with Pride Month? My answer is: two things. The first is that Pride promoters and their allies in the mainstream media jumped the shark. Pride Month started as a commemoration of June 28, 1969, when a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York, sparked six days of street protests against the heavy-handed treatment of consenting adults in a private venue. The first gay-pride parade took place on June 28, 1970. The month of June became Gay History Month, and in 1999, President Bill Clinton declared June “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month.” President Barack Obama expanded that to “LGBT Pride Month” in 2009, and President Joe Biden made a further expansion to “LGBTQ Pride Month” in 2021.
Gay-pride parades always had a raunchy side, but they usually took place in urban settings where people uninterested in LGBT life or offended by LGBT morality could ignore them. But as LGBT people became an important political constituency for the Democratic Party and corporate America came to perceive them as an important customer base, Pride Month celebrations, pushed by aggressive LGBT activists, were suddenly everywhere: in schools, libraries, and government buildings and in bars, restaurants, sporting events, retail stores, and advertising of every variety. The LGBT activists became even more aggressive, determined to shove their mores into everyone else’s faces.
Second, Pride Month promoters have begun targeting children. Pride Month used to be an adults-only phenomenon, although some progressive parents did sometimes bring their children to the parades. But over the past decade, transgender and queer people—the “TQ” in “LGBTQ”—have taken over the leadership and become the public face of the Pride movement, pushing aside the gay men and lesbians who were historically its spokespeople.
It’s an imperative of transgender and queer ideology that children should learn about and express their “gender identity” when as young as possible and that trans-identifying children receive “gender-affirming care”—that is, radical hormonal and surgical interventions—as early as possible, preferably before they’ve matured into their hated adult biological bodies. And so we have Drag Queen Story Hour, “multiple gender expressions” kids’ clothing, and classroom sessions for 5-year-olds in which they learn to explore alternative gender and sexual identities, often without the knowledge, much less the consent, of their parents.
So not surprisingly, there has been a backlash. People are starting to resent what they believe is the compulsory celebration of a tiny minority of fellow humans with whom they don’t necessarily identify—and what they rightly perceive as the inappropriate sexualization of children. Perhaps Pride Month promoters should reflect on the original “pride month” in 1969. It lasted only six days. It wasn’t a top-down government or big business operation, and the people who cheered it on were there because they wanted to be there.
