Well, here’s a turn-up for the books. Corporate sponsors are fleeing Pride events faster than hen nights from a leather bar, leaving organisers scrambling to cover funding gaps. Pride in London needs £1.7 million to put on their 2025 event, but longtime American sponsors have stepped away, and three-quarters of UK Pride organisers have seen corporate partnerships decline this year. Some smaller Pride events have lost over 50% of their funding. Apparently, when the political winds shift, rainbow capitalism melts faster than mascara in a July downpour.
The irony is exquisite, really. Events in Southampton, Hereford, and Taunton have been cancelled entirely. Plymouth’s official parade has been replaced by a community-led one. Pride in Edinburgh, which boasted 13 sponsors last year, now displays just five partners on their website. These same corporations that spent years slapping rainbow logos on everything from Tesco meal deals to banking apps are now ghosting Pride organisers like bad Scruff dates.
Please, Sir, can I have some voice?
But as a Pride-as-Protest old Queen myself I ask: since when did we start asking permission to be visible?
I distinctly remember a time when Pride wasn’t about corporate budgets, security barriers, and merchandise stalls. It was about rage and resistance, about taking up space that was never freely given. Yes, Queer culture rightly celebrates Stonewall, but let’s talk about our own British Queer revolutions too. The Gay Liberation Front didn’t politely request permission to exist when they started meeting in the LSE basement in 1970. They didn’t wait for corporate sponsorship to organise the first UK Gay Pride Rally in Highbury Fields in 1972.
Or what about the protests against Section 28. Remember those glorious, furious demonstrations? The magnificent lesbian abseil into the House of Lords in February 1988? The invasion of BBC News where women chained themselves to Sue Lawley’s desk and were sat on by Nicholas Witchell? Twenty thousand people marching through Manchester in protest? That was resistance without a marketing budget, activism without a media strategy, pure queer fury channelled into direct action.
Even our protests had that peculiarly British character – one of the BBC News invaders said “thanks very much” as she was cut free from her handcuffs, whilst expressing dismay at Witchell’s language: “I couldn’t believe his language, especially someone from the BBC. It seemed so out of character and, in my opinion, so unnecessary.” Politeness in the face of oppression; how wonderfully, absurdly us.
The corporate retreat tells us everything we need to know about fair-weather allyship. When support was politically expedient and profitable, they queued up to monetise our movement. Now that Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders have corporate America running scared, suddenly our rainbow pounds aren’t quite so shiny. According to Pride in London, sponsorship withdrawals have been “particularly pronounced from American businesses.” It’s almost as if their commitment to our community was as authentic as a knock-off Prada bag from a Camden Market stall.
It’s what I’ve banged on about for years – don’t be fooled into thinking we’re accepted. Once we stop being young / beautiful / fashionable / fuckable / profitable, the support will vanish. It’s not they’ll turn on us, they’ll simply stop supporting us. And that is enough for our rights to vanish.
The UK’s intensifying debate over transgender rights hasn’t helped either. With the Supreme Court recently ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex, some brands are sidestepping Pride partnerships altogether to avoid controversy. As Jamie Love from Pride in Edinburgh puts it, this is proving to be “the driest year” for sponsorships.
Stop Asking
So what happens if we just… don’t? What if we stop prostrating ourselves before corporate altars and simply show up anyway?
There are events that run on volunteer labour, community fundraising, and a lot of nerve. Take the London Dyke March, which happens without permits, without corporate sponsors, without police liaison officers ensuring “public order compliance.” Hundreds gather in Soho Square and simply start walking. The spectacle of beautiful, chaotic, ungovernable display of queer joy, embodies everything Pride was meant to be before it got sanitised into a corporate marketing opportunity.
Just Do It
Here’s a radical thought: what if London Pride just happened? Not the sanitised, ticketed, barrier-lined procession we’ve become accustomed to, but something more authentic. Something that didn’t require corporate blessing or Westminster Council permits or hi-vis volunteers with clipboards looking perpetually stressed.
Imagine if we simply gathered in Trafalgar Square one Saturday morning and started walking down Whitehall. No floats sponsored by betting companies whose algorithms target vulnerable gamblers. No corporate speeches about “inclusivity” from companies that will drop us the moment the political temperature changes. Just us, in all our glorious, messy, unmonetised queerness.
The authorities would be apoplectic, naturally. The Met would be beside themselves. But what are they going to do – arrest thousands of people for being gay in public? We’ve been there before, and frankly, we were rather good at it. Ask anyone who was at the Section 28 demos.
My friend and activist Dan Glass as always been, and continues to be an inspiration to me. He reminds me there are not variations of acceptance. His inspiring activism came to me the other day when I was told that Queer people in Israel should be grateful they are not hated as much as Queer people are in Palestine. As you can imagine, that didn’t go down well with me. Either you accept me, or you don’t. Degrees of acceptance are piles of shit.
Independent Spirit
The beautiful truth that corporate Pride has obscured is this: we don’t need their money to exist. We’ve been existing magnificently without corporate approval for decades. The Gay Liberation Front didn’t have a marketing budget when they organised that first torchlight rally on Highbury Fields in 1970 – 150 people with balloons, streamers, flares, and fireworks, protesting the treatment of gay people in Britain. They certainly didn’t have corporate partners when they stormed Mary Whitehouse’s National Festival of Light in 1971 with their glorious “Operation Rupert” featuring male nuns dancing the can-can, lesbians staging a kiss-in, releasing mice and stink bombs whilst a girl guide blew bubbles.
OutRage! didn’t have corporate backing when they chained themselves to Buckingham Palace. The Section 28 protesters didn’t need Tesco’s approval to abseil into the House of Lords. ACT UP didn’t wait for Barclays to sponsor their die-ins.
If you came of age when Section 28 banned the “promotion” of homosexuality, when teachers couldn’t tackle homophobic bullying for fear of breaking the law, seeing big-name brands don your colours could make you feel as if you’d made it. But making it on whose terms? And at what cost?
Poorer and More Powerful
The current funding crisis might just be the best thing that’s happened to Pride in decades. It’s forcing us to remember that our power never came from boardrooms or marketing budgets. It came from community, from solidarity, from the simple act of refusing to be invisible. It came from angry queers who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
So here’s my modest proposal: let’s call their bluff. Let’s organise a Pride that exists entirely outside the corporate-municipal complex. No permits, no sponsors, no security briefings. Just Queers being gloriously, unapologetically present in public space. Let’s reclaim the radical spirit that got sanitised out of Pride when it became a “celebration” rather than a protest.
Picture it: thousands of us streaming down Oxford Street without permission, blocking traffic not because we’ve paid for road closures but because we’re taking back public space. The same energy that brought down Section 28, channelled into reclaiming Pride from the corporates who never really understood what they were sponsoring anyway.
“The damage is already done and we don’t forget. We will remember that they weren’t there when we needed them the most.” Ian Howley (LGBT HERO)
The corporates can keep their thirty pieces of silver. We’ll keep our dignity, our autonomy, and our ability to tell uncomfortable truths without worrying about which logos we might offend.
After all, the best things in queer culture have always been the ones we created ourselves, in defiance of authority, without asking permission. The Gay Liberation Front didn’t ask. The Section 28 protesters didn’t ask. OutRage! certainly didn’t bloody ask.
Why should Pride be any different? The only thing worse than having your Pride defunded is having it funded by people who were never really on your side in the first place.
The revolution will not be sponsored. And honestly? Good.
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