The Year Pride Went Beige w/ Matt Bernstein
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I could reliably make like a third of my annual income from Pride partnerships. And that year there were zero dollars.

For years, Pride Month meant rainbows on everything: in storefronts, on sneakers, burger wrappers, and an endless array of t-shirts. But this June, after a decade of cashing in on queer identity, corporations are pulling back. From the aisles of Target to the Instagram feeds of big brands, the rainbow logos are gone, the Pride campaigns are non-existent, and the merch shelves are empty.

Matt Bernstein is a podcaster, cultural critic, and content creator who covers LGBTQ issues. Today, we're going to talk about the rise and fall of rainbow capitalism, the history of the commodification of queer identity, what it says about our culture, our economy, and why this year everything has gone so beige. Matt, welcome to Power User. Thank you for having me back, Taylor. Last time we were here, we had the pleasure of talking about heterosexual men, and I'm so thrilled that today we are not doing that.

I want to kind of like start by talking a little bit about the history of the gay rights movement and like when brands first started to play a role. I feel like throughout the 1960s and then certainly even into the 70s, there wasn't commodification of like gay rights yet because there was just so much equity.

activism happening on the ground. Like it was still this like underground fringe thing. Like the first pride march was in 1970. The original pride flag wasn't popular until the late 1970s. And I guess you could consider that pride march. You kind of could. And it

it's so representative of sort of the limitations of that at the time because the rainbow flag was originally made by Gilbert Baker. People think that it was just like kind of this gay rights symbol that's always existed, but it wasn't. I mean, before the rainbow flag, really we had any number of things, but mostly the inverted pink triangle that was used as a badge of criminalization for queer prisoners during the Holocaust. So the rainbow flag comes about in the 70s

And what's interesting about it is it originally had more colors. I love talking about this. I actually always use the original eight color flag whenever I use rainbow iconography on Instagram in my posts because it initially had, in addition to the six colors we traditionally see now,

pink and teal, and the pink was too expensive to mass produce, so it was dropped. And then the teal, my understanding is that it was dropped as well so that it would have an even number of stripes. They could split it in half when they were marching it down the parade. It's just interesting that from the beginning, like the idea of mass production of these symbols was like always in mind and at first very difficult. I think that's so interesting and like

like you said, it just shows also how like commercialization or at least production or like the economy is already shaping the symbols of LGBTQ life. I mean, the inverted pink triangle, like you said, I feel like that ended up becoming more of a symbol in the 80s with ACT UP and the AIDS crisis. And it seemed like the 80s, there was also a lot more awareness of LGBTQ issues, mostly because of the HIV AIDS crisis. But you didn't see brands starting to

really get involved yet. I feel like it was more this struggle and it was still heavily stigmatized in that era. Like just being gay in the 80s was still seen as fringe and like the advertisers in outlets like The Advocate were more like fringe, local, like gay specific people.

businesses. One thing we did see emerge in the 80s was a lot of art, like queer art. Keith Haring, obviously, is a famous artist. There's a bunch of like sort of iconic queer artists in music and art and culture that sort of started to become more well-known, where like you could see the cultural influence of

sometimes closeted or tacitly out gay men. Yes. Oh my gosh. So Keith Haring is also such an interesting example of all of this because Keith Haring was a gay HIV positive artist who ended up dying from AIDS before there was any treatment from it. And it's interesting because a lot of his work, the majority of his work,

body of work that you'll find in art museums. It's explicitly political. It's about political corruption. It's about homophobia. It's about serophobia, which is the fear of HIV/AIDS and people living with it, and about discrimination against people living with AIDS as an artist living with AIDS. And Keith Haring was also very conscious of how

how he could break into the mainstream, which was with less, I would say, surface level political stuff. So which is why when most people know Keith Haring, they know his sort of rainbow dancing figures. But most people do not know who Keith Haring was or that a lot of his work was

political because I think it was kind of limited in what he could push into the mainstream. And then the other thing about the 80s and why I don't think there was really like this rush of rainbow capitalist merchandise that we would later see is that like there just wasn't a market for it. The HIV AIDS crisis was a time of enormous homophobia, which, you know, there hadn't really like in the US been a time free of homophobia before that, like the 70s

The gay liberation movement started, but it wasn't like some haven post Stonewall. But, you know, HIV AIDS made it worse and Reagan made it worse. And so as we will see, the availability of this kind of stuff and corporations willingness to cash in on it really depends on the market. And that will ebb and flow to right now. But let me not get ahead of your outline.

The first example that I could find of actual kind of like what I think would be considered like modern pride merch were these freedom rings, which became really popular in 1982 because a bunch of MTV music video hosts were wearing them. Have you ever seen these before? No way. I want to see.

So these Freedom Rings were created. They were six aluminum ring sets, and they were created for San Francisco's Pride Parade. They were originally created in 1989, but then they sort of became popular and they became this status symbol. And I want you to open up this New York Times style article from the time, from 1992, about these rings, because I found it to be hilarious.

It sort of explains what they are. So it says a set of six anodized aluminum rings in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Again, colors of the rainbow. Introduced as a fundraising item. They're lightweight, fun to fiddle with. They're designed by this New York artist who hung to fiddle with.

He hopes that they'll be worn by straight people as a universal pro-tolerance sentiment. And then there's a big all caps, what they mean. A way for gay people to flaunt their wholesomeness. The rainbow is stubbornly mainstream.

almost a Hallmark card emblem, a la unicorns and kittens. And then it says, it symbolizes happiness, Mr. Spada said, who designed the rings. He also added that it represents diversity. And then there's the somewhere over the rainbow connection. For generations, gay people have grown up clinging to the idea that someday, somewhere, they can fly. This is insane.

First of all, first of all, first of all, what they mean. A way for gay people to flaunt their wholesomeness. It's like, we guys already know you're being sodomites in the bedroom, but if you guys can flaunt your rainbows and unicorns, maybe we'll start seeing you as normal human beings. I f***ing love that. It's so funny. The rings are also pretty ugly, I'm sorry to say. It's very, like, 90s, right? It's just, like, colored steel rings. They're just, like, they're just, like, like...

like aluminum bangles. Like, there's something really interesting about them. They're just colors. Yeah, and they had the original ring version. Like you said, there's the bangles, and then people were wearing them on, like, these ball and chain necklaces. You know, you would have them around. I'm looking at this...

this this photo advertisement of them with these two presumably lesbians wearing them and I don't know what to say other than they are Representing their wholesomeness. It's it's very I'm sorry. They're flaunting their wholesomeness. They're flaunting their wholesomeness I love the idea of just like being pro tolerance not pro acceptance It's like we hope that straight people can wear this as a symbol of tolerance like Taylor I was born in 1998 and

which is a lot later than these were introduced and which honestly wasn't that long ago in the grand scheme. And like, even when I was growing up, the word was tolerance. Like, it wasn't even till, I mean, as far as I can remember, like the way I internalize people talking about gay people, like it wasn't even really a conversation of like acceptance. It was about tolerance. Like, do you tolerate these people?

Which is bizarre, because it's like, they exist. Which is something to tolerate. I mean, it's crazy. It is crazy. But that word is definitely rings in my childhood.

Well, throughout, I mean, I guess you missed most of the 90s. I was barely sentient. But this is a one core memory that I do have because I do remember in elementary school, absolute vodka advertisements were very cool. Have you ever seen these from the 90s? No, I don't think so. I remember this because I remember going over to my friend's house who had an older sister and had her...

her bedroom plastered with absolute vodka ads and so then I started collecting them too to my mother's like horror because I was like a child well because absolute vodka has been like a pride partner for like a very long time well so it started it started back back then let me just show you some of these ads so I know that I know they're like rainbow bottle that comes around every year

Right. Well, we'll get to that in a second. Absolute Vodka had this really iconic advertising campaign in the 90s where they just took the Absolute Vodka and it would say like Absolute XYZ, Absolute Appeal, Absolute Zero. It would have ice. Absolute LA was like the bottle in the shape of a pool. Absolute Aspen was like the bottle in the shape of trees. And they did a pride campaign that was like considered very progressive at the

the time. They actually started this campaign in the 80s and then it really became popular in the 90s. Absolute perfection. And it's an absolute bottle with like an, it was like an angel's halo above the top of it. Yeah. So it's an ad that actually doesn't read as gay or like LGBTQ. I was going to say this almost looks like Christian.

Exactly. So I think-- But what was sort of subversive at the time is that they ran these ads in places like The Advocate and other gay publications. And so there was this, like, subtext to it that actually caused some backlash because people were like, "We know what you really mean," you know? And they're like, "What do you mean? This is just another one of our ads." Ah, like, "You're perfect the way you are."

Get drunk with us. The, like, religious, I guess, tolerance or, like, the religious notion at the time, too, because there was so much of the religious right that was obviously against LGBTQ people. And it was this idea of, like, you are blessed and you are great and now you should get drunk on absolute...

That's sexy and that's sophisticated and that's chic. That's like way better than the stuff that would come after this. I feel like I like this. I love it. I love it. And I think it's so creative and it's so in line with their brand, but it was also like subversive and interesting and not just like what a lot of brands ended up doing, which is just plastering rainbows all over, like which they eventually did. Right. They created the rainbow bottle and they actually say about the bottle on their website. Absolute launched the first ever spirits bottle to wear the rainbow flag.

which was made actually in collaboration with Gilbert Baker who designed the flag. So it's, it's nice. I hope he got money from it. Yeah. Yeah. But that happened much later, but absolute, yeah, absolute ended up like collaborating as you mentioned, they were like liquor partners were sort of ahead of the game on partnering with LGBTQ people. I think because gay bars served alcohol. Totally. And one thing about gay people, we can drink. Yeah.

Another iconic brand that started to do LGBTQ advertising in the 90s was Benetton. Their first ad in 1991 was this blanket campaign. And if you pull up the image, you can describe it on screen. So this is...

is three people. Is it a couple with a baby? I think what you're asking is something that's so consistent about a lot of advertising in the 90s that was LGBTQ advertising is, is it a couple? I don't know. It's a black woman, a blonde woman, both wrapped in a blanket and cradling an Asian baby.

This is one of those things that reads now as like a sort of confounding diversity quota advertisement, but it's beautiful. Yeah, this is a lesbian couple who were meant to be. It was. I think they meant it to be that way. It was perceived that way. Like, there was...

commotion over it as there was with everything but it's very like 90s like we don't see race we don't see color like this was kind of benetton's whole thing too is like the colors of the world campaign it was like a white woman a black woman an asian baby like can't we all get along yeah and to be clear like i love obviously it goes without saying i love diversity but it's just like sometimes it's a shoehorned in in a way that's a little i think less elegant maybe like a for effort

Basically. Yes. Yes. I mean, look, given where we are now, I'm going to stop complaining about literally anything. I know.

A brand that was a little bit more explicit in the 90s was Subaru. You know, Subaru is obviously so synonymous with like lesbian culture these days, but it was because of market research. Like they commissioned these studies where they realized lesbians in Northampton, Massachusetts and Portland, Oregon served as household leaders and key decision makers. And basically that this was like an untapped commercial market that they could really feed into. So yeah,

they ran these ads with taglines, including it's not a choice. It's the way we're built, you know, with the cars. Again, it's so subtle. Like if you were to see this now, it's so clever. Yeah, but it doesn't, it doesn't, there's no rainbows in any of this stuff.

You know, like they're selling the products, but they're not. It's very like it's clever. It's like kind of under their radar to an extent, but it still communicates the message. I mean, this is gorgeous to me. It's not a choice. It's the way we're built, which is obviously like basically saying like we were born this way. Right. And that's actually saying something. Whereas like when you similar to the absolute original bottle, it was saying like you're actually perfect in God's eye.

which is meaningful to a lot of queer people to hear versus kind of the stuff where you slap the rainbow on where it doesn't actually say anything. And I think it's why it became grating to people after a while, especially queer people. Cause it was like, you're not telling me anything positive about myself. You're just saying, look, look, buy our product. It has a rainbow on it. You know what I mean? Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, all this advertising is happening in the nineties against the backdrop of the Clinton era. Don't ask, don't tell policies, which went into effect in

1995 and actually one of the first brands to kind of protest it was IKEA. They ran this commercial showing gay men shopping for furniture.

- Well, you know, we went to Ikea 'cause we thought it was time for a serious dining room table and-- - We have slightly different tastes. I mean, Steve's more into country. It frightens me, but at the same time, I have compassion. - We've been together about three years. - I met Steve at my sister's wedding. I was really impressed with how just well-designed the Ikea furniture was. - He's really into craftsmanship. - And his chairs are really sturdy. - This table concluded a leaf. - A leaf means-- - Commitment. - Staying together, commitment. We've got another leaf waiting when we really start getting along.

Oh, that's really cute. Wholesome. Yes. It says it's a big country. Someone's got to furnish it. I think that's so cute. All of this stuff is so much more elegant than what it became in the 2010s. It has like personality and love. And I feel like it's about like humanity, like, and I'm sure they're actors, but like it,

Reads is so authentic. Yes, and they're like arguing over their differing furniture taste. But like we meet in the middle and his taste in country furniture scares me. And it's just it's very cute. It's like actual relationship conversations. It's very it's very hearty. There were also makeup brands targeting the LGBTQ community in the 90s. MAC Cosmetics featured an ad with RuPaul.

I guess because of like drag makeup and because makeup was popular, but it was very theatrical. Like it was very focused. It seemed like on that community and not really like mainstream yet. In the 2000s is when I think we start to see more of the mainstreaming of corporations and pride kind of blending. Diesel did an ad which...

which had been, they'd sort of had some gay stuff in their advertising for a while. I don't know if you remember, but Diesel was running really provocative ads for a while. If you click on it, you'll see like the gay sailor one. Ooh. Okay. So we are looking at a

a whole bunch of sailors. Are they part of the military? So this ad was actually published in 1995, right around Don't Ask, Don't Tell. And it looks to be like a bunch of like Navy seamen recreating that famous photo of like the man holding the woman in Times Square and kissing her. I think it was D-Day. Yeah. And it's two male sailors doing that. Tribute to that. Yeah. Huh. Okay.

Okay, I mean, this is a beautiful photo. Anything where like queer people become tied into like military imagery, I always, I'm like, oh, it's strange combination, but it's a cool photo.

Yeah, I mean, it's a cool photo. It was definitely sort of commentary on the law. And Diesel started to be a lot more inclusive in their ad campaigns, especially into the 2000s. And in 2007, Ray Ban launched its Never Hide campaign, which was empowering audiences to show up in style with their glasses. This is cool. I will note that like almost all of these ads exclusively feature white gay men.

That's something that I wanted to bring up. The woke mind virus has infected us both. I know. Well, it was so interesting looking back, especially in the 2000s and the aughts. And we talked about this a little bit on the masculinity episode, but there was so much focus on men. And I mean, this was like the Will and Grace era. People's perception of gay life was attractive, young, white, cisgender men. And that's who was primarily featured in all of the advertising. And that's who was primarily featured in the media. People knew what lesbians were.

were, obviously like Ellen was a lesbian, but they weren't really being featured in advertising. And it was more about like selling to this new like male consumer. Yes, totally. And I don't have anything to add to that other than Will and Grace era. So triggering because in line with all of this, Debra Messing is now extremely openly racist. I know. But you know what? Who I think has remained unproblematic is Hilary Duff.

Ugh, I was waiting till get to this. This was a really famous ad in 2008 that came out. It was part of the Think Before You Speak campaign, which was trying to get people to stop saying "gay" as an insult, which unfortunately I feel like has come back. But if you were young, which I was in school in the 2000s, like people would just throw around the word "gay" as an insult all the time. So this ad ended up sort of becoming iconic.

Yes, this is a meme within the gay community. I mean, I love this video. I watch it all the time still. It's because it's like, it really hit all the right notes at the time. I think it's just kind of so overactive. - Do you like this top? - So gay. - Really? - Yeah, it's totally gay. - You know, you really shouldn't say that. - Say what? - Well, say that something's gay when you mean it's bad. It's insulting.

What if every time something was bad, everybody said, that's so girl wearing a skirt as a top. Those are cute jeans, though.

When you say that's so gay, do you realize what you say? Knock it off. When you say gay, do you know what you're really saying? It's so great. It's perfect. I love it. Hilary Duff and Marsha P. Johnson on the front lines. I love it. But it also was like when I think we started to see a lot more gay representation in the media. It was just like becoming more normalized. Obviously, it was still several years out from true pride merch like Bonanza. But Obama was elected in 2008. You saw this...

progressivism. You saw millennials having more cultural impact. And I feel like just queer life generally was receiving more attention. You also had the internet and Facebook, and you just had more out gay people online. I mean, some of the earliest YouTube stars, Tyler Oakley and others, were very out gay people. And so I think it just started to enter the conversation a little bit more. Again, mostly through the lens of cisgender white men, but it was out there a little bit more.

Then we had the 2010s. And this is when things really went off the rails. You started to see a lot more conversations about LGBTQ culture. And also, this is when I think brands started to lean in. And it started with more like, quote unquote, edgy brands like American Apparel. They did a GLAAD collaboration. Target in 2012 introduced its Pride merchandise. And a lot of these brands were doing it in partnership with an organization. So they wouldn't just be like, it wasn't a naked cash grab yet.

But they would be like, "We're releasing t-shirts to celebrate Pride Month. 15% of the sales are donated to GLAAD." Which, by the way, is almost nothing. I think Target donated a little bit more. They donated 50% of their sales to an LGBTQ organization. But it was this idea of being out and being open and expressing yourself through merchandise and hashtags. Target launched their campaign with the hashtag #TakePride.

I remember that American Apparel t-shirt. Every gay influencer had it. It was like, had the equal sign on it. And like, I remember like Tyler Oakley. I remember Connor Franta like had a shirt with glisten. The other thing about it at this time was like culture was still very homophobic.

and like not doing that much still felt significant and there wasn't a whole lot of precedent for these like mass-produced like oh target is like making something for us like that's cool and then obviously very quickly it became very saturated and we're like wait none of this stuff is actually saying or doing anything doing anything well

Well, I feel like it's like Target and American Apparel and some of these other early advertisers, they kind of clung to this like nascent social media movement because you had so much LGBTQ activism happening in the first half of the 2010s up until basically fighting for gay marriage, which passed in 2015. And so you had, again, a lot of these hashtags. It was so much hashtags. When I was looking at merch from this era, everything has a hashtag on it.

Hashtag pride. Hashtag lesbian. Hashtag bisexual. Like the IKEA bisexual couch. I have to look up what year that came out. But, you know, the bisexual couch, of course. But there was a lot of like hashtag activism and it seemed very tied to activism. So, again, the merchandise always had to sort of like go to an organization to feel legit. It was like, hey, buy this. And like you're fighting for gay rights and you're fighting for gay marriage, too, by buying our T-shirt collection or whatever.

And I think 2015 was a turning point or it sort of was like gasoline on that fire because in 2015, you had Obergefell passed, which was this landmark Supreme Court decision that essentially legalized gay marriage across America. And that's when I think corporations, because it was like

legal and sort of sanctioned and becoming so mainstream. And this was like the end of the Obama years, like almost peak progressivism in terms of like institutional political power that corporations were just like, okay, we can do it. We can cash in now. There's money to be made. And that's when you started to see like every brand under the sun hop on board.

like by 2016. Yeah, Obergefell, it was such a cultural moment. Like that was hashtag love is love. And there's a broader conversation here around the idea that gay rights could be achieved through sex.

marriage rights, which obviously that wasn't the case. And we've seen that that's not the case. I mean, gay marriage is still legal across all 50 states for now. And we've seen that like homophobia in recent years has gotten way, way, way, way worse. So there were definitely limitations to thinking that we could just like unite the country

against homophobia through a very heteronormative framework of marriage. I think this was an easy moment for a lot of people who weren't queer to just be like, "Well, it's done." And honestly, for a minute, there were a lot of people, I think especially like cisgender white queer people who were like, "It's done. We're all now on the side of good and like we have our rights and like let's party until the end of time." And, you know, we see for so many reasons that that was not the end of the fight. This stuff was always doomed, I think, to end up where it is right now.

Yeah, it's interesting. There were so many headlines back then that were just celebrating. And like you said, it felt like this finality. It was like, we made it. We did it. We legalized gay marriage. Now everyone can have a house and a home and two kids and...

you know, a double income household or whatever. And it was also interesting even back then too, just when I was looking at the pride collections, you didn't see as much like non-binary and trans. Like it was very focused on like gay and lesbian to a lesser extent, but it was like

gay men were still kind of centered in this way, even in that sort of merchandise. You started to see a little bit more intersectionality actually after Trump was elected and we started to see the rise of the resistance, which God help us. But 2017 was like, I would say when activism really started to get

commodified where it was like you couldn't be too woke. I mean, this was like when the term woke became popular. There was this intense resistance to Trump. And I think shock, as you mentioned, from people that felt like, wait a minute, we just did it. We just got all the rights we could get. And now we have Trump and this like backsliding. And you started to see like companies also participate in resistance capitalism or whatever, you know, like they were all really eager to declare like a pride collection because there was so much anti-Trump sentiment that they could

capitalize on and profit off of. Totally. It was similar, like post-Trump, similar to post-Obergefell, which actually those times kind of overlap because Obergefell was 2015 and then Trump was in office at the beginning of 2017. But like, it was really this moment for corporations to monetize the resistance, as it were, the pantsuit nation, the pussyhat nation, what have you. The only other thing I just want to tack on to the Obergefell sentiment and the idea that like,

gay marriage equality could end the fight against homophobia and transphobia somehow. It's just like gay marriage is important. I think that everyone should be able to marry, obviously. But like what you were just saying about like, okay, yes, like finally gay people could have the freedom to have a, you know,

a husband and a house and two kids. And it's like, obviously that's not the reality for the majority of queer people. And it's just, again, why marriage equality without justice for trans people, without economic justice and equality, without racial justice, it's like all of these things fit together or else what you have is such a shallow win in many ways, which is why if you don't keep going all the time,

against all of these systems of oppression that are working together, they just will end up receding back like a shoreline, which is, you know, of course what happened. Well,

Well, I think you make such good points there. And I mean, again, like I was saying, it was so interesting to go back and just see how these things that feel so central to LGBTQ rights and the fight for LGBTQ rights, really like, you know, gender expression and identity and trans rights and stuff like was foreign. I remember Sam Escobar, who's a really amazing beauty editor, wrote this article in 2016 that was how I told the world I'm neither a man nor a woman. I

different kind of coming out story. And it was about them coming out as non-binary. And I remember even being in media group chats where people were very confused and people were like, wait, so like what genitals does Sam have? This is very confusing. What does this mean? You know, like there wasn't even like a public awareness, I think even within, and I'm talking about like pretty like

successful media people, right? That like were writing articles about LGBTQ issues that like still didn't even understand the concept of what a non-binary person was. And so I think it's like, you started to see like a little bit more conversations around those things and inclusivity happen

through the late 2010s, like when we were peak rainbow capitalism, like there was this idea, and I argue in other videos of mine that it's like it was completely performative, this idea of intersectionality, but it was something that you would hear about a little bit more. I mean, they were just so desperate to target anyone in the LGBTQ world. This is when Tesla had a rainbow logo and Elon Musk himself was saying...

Crazy. Crazy. What a time. I mean, you could do this whole episode just through the evolution of like that one brand and its founder. Yes. I'd like the evolution of their like social media avatar over time and like what it says about their value set. And I mean, you could look at so many of these companies. I mean, you had like the Unilever pride collection and they would rebrand their Facebook profile and their Twitter account. And Twitter had like the rainbow hashtags. And it was something too, where like,

every advertising agency would pitch a pride activation, right? Like every brand would be rolling out a pride collection or targeting the market. And I do think that you started to see fatigue. People started talking about this thing called rainbow washing, which is basically like Lockheed Martin draping itself in a pride flag and trying to like...

make it like, hey, you know, and this idea of who's accepted at Pride. Every single brand wanted to be involved all of a sudden in like every sort of Pride celebration. And I think people rightfully started to feel a little bit weird about that and be like, OK, wait, do we need Deloitte marching alongside like

like weapons manufacturers at our pride event yeah I mean there were during sort of the latter half of the 2010s and early 2020s there were so many insane examples of like Rainbow capitalism rainbow washing just various versions of really like egregious pride marketing materials one of my favorites least favorites what have you have you ever seen the post from the US Marines I only sort of remember this

So this was a few years ago and it was the US Marines official. They posted it on Twitter and Instagram. Oh my God. Is this the rainbow bullets? Oh my God. I forgot about this. This is one of the craziest things I've ever seen. It's insane. Wait.

describe this for people that haven't seen it. This was one of those things that I saw all over Instagram and I was like, this is an edit. There's no way this is real. And it was real. Yeah. So the U.S. Marines posted a like happy pride month thing with a photo attached of

sort of just like a clipart Marines uniform helmet. Like a camo hard hat. Yeah, a camo hard hat. Sorry, I don't know what these things are called. And within, like, the headband, there are six bullets, one of each color of the rainbow. It's just crazy. Don't forget my favorite part. They're on the band holding the bullets. Oh, yeah. The rainbow bullets. It says, proud to serve. Right.

And I mean, you can see a direct link between something like this and like in the early days of the genocide on Gaza, you had photos of Israeli soldiers standing atop mounds of rubble in Gaza that they had just bombed, planting rainbow flags in the soil to be like, we are going to bring pride to Gaza. I remember that was an actual caption, I think on a Noah Tishby Instagram post. And

not to, like, stretch too far in a bunch of different directions, but it just shows the limitation, like, the really extreme humanitarian limitations of slapping rainbows on things. Right. Well, there was just this inherent hypocrisy because all of these corporations are pretty evil and bad.

I mean, obviously the US military is evil and bad and US imperialism is bad for LGBTQ rights generally. But you also had a lot of companies that had really exploitative policies and were exploiting people in the global south, like food brands, clothing brands. A lot of this like pride merch was being made in...

authoritarian countries where people were working for slave labor, basically, and sort of fast fashion, like the way that Pride March was capitalized on. At this point, they've given up the pretense of donating 15% of the profits to GLAAD or whatever. Like, it is just like sell, sell, sell. Yeah, this Pride March was made in a sweatshop, but, you know, get out there and buy it, wear it, be proud. And I think people that started to

pay attention and started to kind of think more critically about things were like, wait a minute, are you actually furthering LGBTQ rights or are you just trying to profit off us? Yeah. And, you know, I don't want to paint all of it with the same brush. I mean, some of it was more ethically made. Some people did donate the profits. Some people did work directly with, you know, queer graphic designers and queer artists. And some of them were, you know, respecting like queer hiring practices within their own companies. So like there was some good stuff like

I don't, this is where it gets kind of complicated. Before you say that, yes, there were some good stuff, but I would say it was the minority. And I only say that because when you think about the rise of e-commerce during this time and sites like Shopify, the way they started to allow like all of these sort of smaller vendors and Amazon's proliferation during this time where like you saw this explosion of e-commerce and you just had so many like vultures kind of come in like these opportunists making this merch and like

expendable merch also to wear during pride events or to buy for pride or decorations like yes I don't want to discount the few brands that did do things responsibly but I feel like 99 of them weren't and didn't have true dedication because we'll see what happens after 2023 as well yeah and the only other thing I want to say before you get to that you're totally right and again just like with the way that all of these issues intersect is like we're getting more and more rainbow vodka and

rainbow like you know made in china merch at walmart and target and at the same time like wealth inequality continues to get worse like transphobia continues to largely go unaddressed and and get worse

And so while you're having these brands continue to celebrate and be like, "We love Pride, we love rainbow," it's like you are also still having the conditions in this country where a disproportionate amount of LGBTQ people are still at suicide risk, at risk of being homeless, at risk of doing sex work for survival. And so it's like the sort of detachment from reality that started to happen every June

I think became more and more grating as well. Yeah. And then we saw, I mean, I think...

You mentioned the transphobia. I mean, I think COVID hit as well and like pushed everyone online to an insane degree, broke a lot of people's brains, including Elon Musk's. You really started to see this virulent transphobia from the right. Also just a backlash to quote unquote "wokeism." I've talked about this in a recent video as well, like how sort of COVID accelerated the far right radicalization of masses of the public. But I would say a real turning point in all of this was Dylan Mulvaney.

bud light do you want to explain what happened dylan mulvaney was hired to do a single sponsored instagram reel that was not even matriculated to her tick tock page where she had a larger following she did a one 60 second video promoting the beer

to her Instagram followers and it was like in a tie-in with like March Madness and like drink Bud Light and like you enter your this like sweepstakes for March Madness or something. It was so incredibly benign and like silly and as part of the partnership Bud Light sent Dylan one singular can where they had printed her face on it in a sort of like stylized graphic

And I just want to say, by the way, this is not hard to do. I have actually you can't see it behind me, but I have a coffee cup with my face on it that they printed one time for press at an event. Like it was not Bud Light. It was a coffee brand. Oh, OK. I'm just saying like the idea that like people have like this was some custom impossible thing. They probably did this for like 500 influencers. Yes, it was so silly. The right is very good at like contemplating.

consolidating around these moments of cultural rage and like feeding on them and building their movement on them. And so it immediately started to become this thing that like all of the big right wing influencers like libs of TikTok and like libs of TikTok, I think has talked about this probably upwards of 200 times people

People like Charlie Kirk and then on Fox News, Candace Owens, everybody was like, they did what with who? They made Dylan Mulvaney a transgender, the face of Bud Light, an American beard. And it spiraled out of control so quickly and so violently. Famously, you had Kid Rock filming himself gunning down cases of Bud Light in his backyard and then flipping off the camera. You had people throwing guns

actual tantrums, like filming themselves throwing tantrums in grocery stores, like throwing Bud Light down the aisles, like spilling open cases. It was so crazy. And I think for queer people and specifically trans people at the time, like it was so hard to look at. It was insane to be clear, but it was also like they're doing this to the cans of beer because they want to do it to trans people. Yes.

And it was such a violent outburst. And it was a very, very successful anti-trans campaign. And the result of that, because this was broadcast, there was essentially like a Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light segment every day on Fox News for probably a year.

a year. And the result of that was every other brand canceled their pride campaigns and more broadly stopped working with queer people and queer influencers. And I know that because that was my sole source of income was brand work up until this point. You know, I always tell people like before I started my podcast and before I started like Patreon and this kind of stuff is why I started Patreon because I realized I could not depend on advertisers anymore.

Having been canceled by many advertisers myself, I think it's like you start to realize that none of these brands actually want to work with anybody that's not quote unquote brand safe. If you are a content creator that's challenging power...

Please subscribe to both of us because like, we are not getting the brand money at all. At least, you know, it's a lot harder, I think, in this climate. I mean, I remember covering that story, just writing about that and seeing what Dylan went through. And I was telling you this earlier before I got on the call, but I used to do the Facebook page for Bud Light. Crazy. Way back the day. And like, Bud Light has

advertised with the LGBTQ community actually for a really long time. Like they were one of those brands as we're talking about those alcohol brands that like started to do outreach to the LGBTQ community pretty early. Yeah, the 90s, you can see early Bud Light, Budweiser, gay ads, which just goes to show you how, again, arbitrary this rage machine is.

is like people think that it's like oh we've suddenly gone too far because look our beer ads have gone woke and it's like no you just have 10 people who are very well established and have a big reach in conservative media telling you to be angry about it now you didn't care about this there's nothing natural about your outrage absolutely i mean i think one thing that's

change to is the internet and algorithmic feeds and these right-wing influencers gaining so much traction around the same time where they could really drive the news cycle. And I talked about the fact of like Libs of TikTok for a while was basically like the assignment editor for Fox News during this time, or like anything higher I took was covering was going to be on Tucker. It was going to be on Fox. And, you know, back in the day when Bud Light was advertising initially, like it was mostly in queer publications on queer websites, like in queer spaces with many other alcohol brands, but it wasn't seen publicly.

maybe by some of these more conservative people wasn't amplified to them in this bad faith manner. And I think the media played a major role in scaring corporations as well, because they kept, I mean, I remember there was this pressure to like call Bud Light and see if they're going to apologize. We want to get the apology. And it was this presupposition that they should apologize, that they had done something wrong, right? Even just the way, and I've written about this too, but the way it was framed as a

controversy when it was a hate campaign. But this was an intentionally manufactured Gamergate style hate campaign. But it was framed as if Dylan had done something wrong and she was persecuted and it became this like referendum on her. And I think that all sort of made it really corrosive and toxic for other brands who were like, whoa, I don't want this mob to come for me. And it's like, as you said, it was this whatever, 100 people on Twitter. But the mainstream media was playing such a key role in amplifying it.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. As a creator during this time, who, like I said, like I wasn't doing a podcast yet. I wasn't doing Patreon yet. I didn't have these sort of other streams of income. I was just like an Instagram influencer a few years ago. And I tell people like up until that point in my like career,

career i could reliably make like a third of my annual income from pride partnerships and that year there were zero dollars every brand cancelled whatever campaign that they were doing i lost opportunities that i'm sure i didn't even know that i had but i know other people other creators who like they had done the work in some cases the brands actually paid them

They're due for the contract, but they were like, we're just not going to post any of this. Take your money and let's just like walk away from the project because no brand wanted to be the next Bud Light. Well, that was the whole thing. Right. I mean, there was like marketing essays written of like how to not be the next Bud Light. Exactly. And, you know, God, I mean, I think this will be a case study for a very long time and rightfully so. You also mentioned Gamergate, which I think is a really interesting,

important style of campaign that was used here for Bud Light. And I say it's Gamergate adjacent because you basically just drum up a really viral, ferocious hate campaign to make something that is not controversial appear controversial, like women doing video game journalism or a transgender person drinking beer.

on Instagram. You make something totally benign, extremely controversial, and they had so much success doing this with Bud Light that now you see still attempts to cancel, to boycott any brand that works with anybody who isn't like Hitler's youth. And I just saw this yesterday because I have

been closely tracking these like very one-sided feud between Riley Gaines and Simone Biles, which I might be doing an episode on later this week. If you want to hear that, listen to my podcast, A Bit Fruity. But Simone Biles has had a partnership with Athleta for quite some time that focuses on empowering young female athletes, which is like

adds to the irony here, but basically because Simone tweeted to Riley Gaines and was like, stop bullying trans people. Now Riley Gaines is calling for a boycott of Athleta and it's getting quite a bit of traction online. So it is the free market kind of. Sure, protest with your dollar, but it's just interesting how quick to ponder

punish brands. Conservatives are now, you know, any brand who is even remotely kind to LGBTQ people publicly. It's definitely added to the national hostility. And I mean, this is just textbook Gamergate. And I've talked about this so much, but that's what it is. And like Gamergate is a

about misogyny and hatred of trans women is about misogyny. And so much of homophobia is about misogyny, but like the tactics that they use, as you said, it's manufacturing outrage and controversy around a person or a thing or an event or whatever, usually around a person, a queer or a feminine presenting person and making them untouchable, making them toxic. And obviously I've dealt with this so much myself where like any brand that I advertise with is brigaded.

Full stop. They're brigaded. They're attacked. People are going to make Instagram posts about it saying, how dare you advertise with Taylor Lorenz? She's XYZ. She's controversial. If you read articles, right? It says controversial, controversial Instagram influencer, you know, Dylan Mulvaney. It's like Dylan didn't do anything controversial. Dylan just did it

ad deal. It's this manufactured drama. And I think brands are so paranoid, not about even the online backlash, but it's the media and it's the mainstream media and the way the mainstream media participates and facilitates these campaigns. Because I think what people realized during Gamergate is that if the mainstream media did not participate, they would have nowhere to go. And we've seen examples of this, right? We've seen them try to take down other people in the media, not take the bait very early because now they take the bait all the time. Like it doesn't go anywhere.

But when you have, again, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or every single outlet calling the CEO of Bud Light saying, what are you going to do about this? It's successful. Yeah, it legitimizes it.

Everyone in the mainstream media, of course, participates in it, especially men, especially these male reporters. Like look at who writes a lot of this stuff. It is misogynistic journalists who continue to participate in these campaigns and launder these hate campaigns, especially male media reporters for the media. But yeah, there's just a lot of anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans sentiment. And I want to jump to like where that ended up going. Because I think 2023 was like this bloodbath of a year. Like you said, you lost so much income. All of these brands pulled

back. 2024, I feel like it was dicey. 2025 feels like it's just become like a nuclear winter. Also, you see these accounts on Twitter, like the Elon sort of orbiters that like monitor, like they're just waiting to see. Did GameStop change their logo? If so, like we have this army ready to brigade.

And like, I feel anxious for the companies and I hate these companies, but even I feel anxious for them where I'm like, God, I hope they don't step on the wrong thing where like, you know, but it's like you want them to express solidarity. But at the same time, it's so dicey for them. And I don't have sympathy. I think that they should still express solidarity. I think they should have a backbone. But I think it also shows that like this was always about consumerism. It was always about profit. And the minute that it's a brand liability, they're not going to do the rainbow logo. They're not going to do the pride merch. I mean, it just doesn't exist anymore.

Which I think this is the first year that that's been really clear to people because like June 1st hit and the logos didn't change. I mean, there used to be plenty of jokes on gay Twitter about companies on July 1st. And it was sort of like memes where like rainbows would be melting off the walls or something and everything would go back to being black and white. But now the rainbows aren't even on the walls. There's no more rainbow logos to turn back to black and white. They're just staying black and white. And I'm of several minds about...

rainbow capitalism now having seen what feels like a full cycle of this in my adulthood where it didn't exist and then it did exist and now it doesn't exist again and the place where i land is that now that i know what it's like for it to hit june and not see any sort of

solidarity from any of these corporations through like merch or logos. I can't say that I'd hate to see those again. I wouldn't mind seeing a rainbow logo or two. I think we just as a collective, as consumers have to be aware of what it is that we're looking at when we see everything go rainbow in June

if that ever happens again, which is that this isn't activism. It is the job of these corporations. It is the job of Target. It is the job of Pepsi. It is whatever to milk as much profit as possible for

from us, the consumers. That is their goal. The only reason that they are throwing rainbows up is because they think it's conducive to that goal. The other mind I have about this is that if we do see rainbows all over the place, we now know that that generally means that it's reflective of popular culture, which is maybe that popular culture is accepting of queer people. The other thing is like, I

I think it's good for, you know, a teenager living in wherever middle of the country maybe to go into Target and see rainbow stuff. That I think is a small good. Now, I will say a lot of these corporations, they will actually strategically only put their rainbow merch in locations closer to cities in blue states. In West Hollywood. In West Hollywood, in New York, in Miami, where it's already more accepted.

and where the people who need to see it most aren't living and aren't seeing it. I think like what you said is like, ultimately we live in this hyper-capitalist landscape and merch and products are this like reflection of the values of our culture. And I was thinking that when I read this article in Business of Fashion recently called The Year Pride Went Beige, they just did this sort of survey of pride merch across a lot of places and showing kind of how colorless it had become.

and how like even the companies that are still engaging very limitedly like in pride, it's a gray sweatshirt with a very tiny little rainbow sign or it's primarily just beige stuff with like a little touch of rainbow on the sleeve. These almost look like products that are like mourning LGBTQ rights.

Well, that's how it feels. It feels like this visual manifestation of the loss of rights, the loss of color, the loss of like so much. I don't know. It feels like fascism kind of. It's kind of on the nose, but I recently saw the current production of Cabaret here in New York on Broadway. And part of in Cabaret, how at least this production...

depicts the descent into fascism in 1930s Germany is at the beginning of the show, everyone in the cast is wearing these bright colors and bright makeup, and at the end, everyone is just wearing beige suits. And this feels a lot like that. It does, and it makes me sad and like,

Like you said, I am of multiple minds because it was such a ridiculous time when we did have the rainbow drenched everything. But I would love to live in a world where that was normalized. I don't love the like cheap profiting off of it. But at the same time, the complete erasure of Pride Month is bleak.

Like you said, I think it also has led to a lot less opportunities for LGBTQ people. They're not getting the brand deals. They're not getting the influence. It's funny, Unilever, I heard recently, which had done so much pride stuff. I spoke to a conservative influencer recently who said that they were invited to some panel or something they were doing with conservative, basically looking to work more with conservative influencers. That Unilever was? Yeah. And I don't, I haven't seen any of those campaigns go live, but apparently they were like having a

session to like learn more or whatever. But this person that was telling me this is a very extreme far-right influencer. And what I have heard as well from other consumer brands is that they do feel like conservatism is dominant. They're looking at some of these people, for instance, that Elon was amplifying, Trump is amplifying, and they're saying, hey, look, like again, we're a corporation. I mean, look at all of the brands and companies that sponsored inauguration events.

including all of the tech companies, including Apple, like, you know, donating to Trump's inauguration fund and things like that. All of these companies that were like clawing to work on LGBT pride campaigns five years ago are now the most radical person they will work with is Alex Earle.

Literally, which is depressing. And so I hate to like mourn rainbow capitalism and corporate pride, but it does feel like you said the end of an era. And I hope what we can kind of like build back in its place is something better. I don't know what that looks like, but I do hope for more like normalization and

at least when we do normalize hopefully we get to a place where like lgbtq rights are normalized again that it is more inclusive like you said than the previous version but it feels like we're in this like dearth right now and i'm not sure how long it's gonna last yeah of course and when you see jokes online you the listener about people mourning rainbow capitalism like

none of us are really missing, you know, the $3 felt bird at Target that's holding a lesbian flag. I mean, maybe some of us, but like Taylor and I, and probably you were mourning the culture that went with it, or at least parts of the culture that went with it. And what I will add to the end of this conversation is something that I actually said recently at like a live podcast show that I did when people asked about like, what do we do now that like queer influencers, it's like harder to get paid in that

kind of stuff. Because one of the truly good things about corporate pride projects that were happening for like a good just under 10 years there was that they did employ queer people, both in the companies that ran them and in the talent that they would choose. Influencers, artists, illustrators, writers, like they employed a lot of queer and trans artists for a period of

time. And I am one of many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many people who had to drastically rethink how they made money in the wake of this political and cultural tide turning. And the only reason that I can still make

content professionally that I can still make work that I can still do a podcast is through Patreon. And I feel really fortunate because I have now a community there who helps make my work sustainable. But there are so many smaller, especially creators who

who are just trying to build up their work independently without the help of the target sponsorship because those don't exist anymore, without the help of whatever Dove soap campaign or whatever that used to be able to pay their bills for potentially many months. And now those don't exist. And so what I will say is if you like

a queer creator's content, whether they do a podcast or YouTube videos or they're an illustrator, buy from them directly. Subscribe to their Patreons, buy their artists merch, you know, directly from them, buy their stickers, buy their prints. Just support people directly because Taylor and I have talked a lot about this, but like if you want to get online and be a creator and say all the things that Peter Thiel wants to hear,

who's going to give you money to make that an enterprise that sustains itself? Peter Thiel or someone exactly like him. And a million brands and the entire right wing economic ecosystem. Like they have a right wing version of Amazon. They have right wing stakes. They have right wing razors. They have an entire product DTC marketplace of right wing brands that will advertise with those people. Right. We don't,

have progressive brands that are giving us money at all ever. No, no, no, no, certainly not. And at least not an ecosystem of them. And so just like what I tell people now is like, if you love a queer person, a leftist, a queer leftist work, just support them directly. And I am almost certain that if you look not that hard, they are giving you a way and an opportunity to do that. Because I think for right now, that's the way forward because Target,

My friend has gone beige. - Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people continue to follow your work other than Patreon? - Before you subscribe to Patreon or anything, you can listen to my podcast, "A Bit Fruity" with Matt Bernstein and decide if you like it. You can find me on any of the social platforms,

Matt XIV, like Roman numeral 14. And it was such a pleasure to be here. I feel like as a queer creator, I have been like living the narrative that we talked about in this episode over the last seven years since I started working in this space. And it's been so tumultuous and also so clarifying. So, you know, I hope that we can also provide that clarity for some other people too.

Well, thank you so much. It was so great chatting with you. All right. That's it for this week's show. If you want to support my work, please subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.co. That's usermag.co, where I write about all of this stuff and more. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz.

please don't forget to rate us and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. My best-selling book, Extremely Online, is out now, finally, on paperback. It's about the history of the content creator industry. You can get it wherever books are sold. Thanks again for watching. See you next week.