Hello, and welcome to Outward, Slate's podcast about queer life.

I'm Christina Cauterucci, a senior writer at Slate.

And this week, we're getting an early jump on the holiday rush and talking about pride.

Usually, these past few months of the year are when the organizers of big city pride celebrations

start nailing down their sponsors. Companies shell out millions of dollars

to prides across the country for the chance to slap their logos on some banners and send

a float down the parade route. The proposition is simple. They get to look like allies and

engender goodwill among a community with quite a bit of spending power. And Prides get funding to

produce these massive events that seem to get more professional and elaborate and pricey every year.

This year, though, things are looking a little different. Comcast, Procter & Gamble, Nissan, Anheiser

Bush, Deloitte, Booz Allen Hamilton. These are just a few of the companies that used to be major sponsors of prides that have decided to withhold their funds from this year's June events.

They're mostly saying it's for budgetary reasons. They just don't have the money this year. But come on, the Trump administration is trying to crack down on DEI, and corporate

leaders in all sectors are trying to curry favor with the president who's waging a full-bore

assault on trans people. It doesn't take a genius to see businesses pulling out of pride and

realize that it's part of a pattern of corporate leaders abandoning values that they

used to claim to have just to make nice with Trump and maybe keep their government contracts.

To be clear, this pattern didn't start when Trump retook the White House in January.

We did an episode two years ago about how Target was rolling back its legendary Pride collection,

and fewer and fewer

companies were making those rainbow social media avatars for Pride Month.

Businesses have been bending to the right-wing anti-LGBQ backlash for a minute now.

This just marks the next phase of what I think might be the slow demise of corporate pride. All of this offers us a good

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