The self-expression promoted in Pride parades has been increasingly facilitated by corporate sponsors. Anyone who has attended a major Pride event in recent years has felt the heavy presence of big businesses: Wells Fargo, TD Bank, Walmart, and Diet Coke, to name a few. According to Project Queer, more than half of the 253 participants in the 2015 Chicago Pride Parade were corporations, businesses, and banks. In comparison, LGBTQ groups represented less than 10% of the participants.
Not only is it irresponsible to corporatize Pride, many of the sponsorships promote products or lifestyles that are inaccessible or insensitive to the LGBTQ community across the United States. In New York, the Pride Parade runs down 5th Avenue in Manhattan, passing mainly high-profile shops and neighborhoods fitting of high-figure salaries. The Guardian notes that many of San Francisco Pride’s biggest sponsors, like Facebook and Google, contribute to the growing income inequality in Silicon Valley, while members of the LGBTQ community struggle with homelessness in skyrocketing numbers.
And The Chicagoist points out that alcohol companies frequently sponsor Pride events—yet over 30% of the LGBTQ community is projected to struggle with drug and alcohol addiction, a rate three times higher than the general population.
Others feel unsafe by support from big businesses. Members of the LGBTQ community have rallied against Wells Fargo’s sponsorship in particular, criticizing the bank’s history of investing in private prisons that incarcerate LGBTQ persons, especially queer and trans people of color, at disproportionate rates.
The Capitalist Appropriation Of Gay Pride | Annie Utterback for The Establishment
The power of Prince. This is hilarious to me.
Ha!
😂😂 let it happen
😂😂😂
😂😂😂😂
(Source: http://theryanproject.tumblr.com/)
I want a character in a zombie apocalypse setting who is just inexplicably good at survival tasks – knows how to make a fire from scratch, cooks insanely well, can hunt, skin animals, makes cheese, butter, and such, but gradually the people in their group begin to notice they never seem to catch pop culture references or allusions to normal, everyday historical facts about the pre-apocalypse world.
And everyone has all these theories about them like, what did they do before? Why are they like this? How do they just automatically know how to sew clothing, milk a cow, and build quality shelter, but….. they don’t know who Chris Evans was. Never heard of Buzzfeed. Can’t drive a car. They’ve apparently never seen Star Wars OR Star Trek. Who the hell is this person? Why are they so weird?
And eventually it comes out: When the apocalypse happened this person took the opportunity to blend in, reinvent themselves. But in the old world?
They were Amish.
There are people alive at this very moment who are experiencing their final days on earth because they are going to do something stupid and die on the 4th of July.
