Outside the gate at San Antonio’s Pride festival in June, there was a folding table on the sidewalk. Free water. Free watermelon. Free Gatorade. Not a logo on any of it.
That was the protest.
“Today we are here as the Gay Agenda,” said an organizer who identified herself only as Dahlia. “And we’re here outside of Pride, as our official act of protest is by mutual aid.”
The Gay Agenda is a coalition of San Antonio organizers made up of Oppressed Revolutionaries for Worker Power of San Antonio, Mujeres Marcharán and the Autonomous Brown Berets. In June 2025 the coalition called for a boycott of Pride Bigger Than Texas over what it described as the festival’s corporatization, and it published five demands. It wants all San Antonio Pride celebrations to be free to attend. It wants organizers to focus more on sobriety and disability access. It wants a transparent expense report. It wants a clear-cut political agenda. And it wants law enforcement excluded from the festival.
In August 2025 the group held its first Reclaim Pride event at Read Free, a radical bookstore on the East Side. The second one is this Saturday, and its theme is “Piss on Pinkwashing.”
Dahlia gave only a first name when asked for her full one. She gave her pronouns as she/her and they/them, and described the coalition’s politics plainly. “We’re communists.”
The word on their flyer was pinkwashing.
Dahlia’s own definition tracks the dictionary’s closely.
“Pinkwashing is when you use queer imagery, you know, rainbow colors, like queer folks, queer celebrities … to prop up your corporations for public image. It’s to make it seem like you’re woke, progressive. And it’s really a marketing technique … at the end of the day, a corporation has one and only objective, which is to earn a profit.”
The word is newer than the argument. Dictionary.com only added it in 2023. And it did not start with queer activists at all. It was coined in 2002 by Breast Cancer Action, a San Francisco nonprofit, as part of its Think Before You Pink campaign, aimed at companies selling pink-ribbon products while also selling products linked to the disease.
It belongs to a family of words. Whitewashing came first. Then greenwashing, which Merriam-Webster dates to 1990. Then pinkwashing. LGBTQ activists picked the term up around 2010, and by the middle of the last decade it was pointed at corporate Pride.
Merriam-Webster still has no entry for it.
Most queer Americans already think so
In a survey published in May 2025, the Pew Research Center found that 68% of LGBTQ adults say all or most companies that promote Pride Month do it because they think it will help their business. Sixteen percent say all or most have a genuine desire to celebrate LGBTQ people.
Follow the money
There is a paper trail.
In July 2024 the campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets reported that Delta Air Lines, which sponsors Pride events in California, New York and Washington, D.C., gave more than $300,000 to Republican candidates that cycle. That included $8,500 to Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and $5,000 to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise. OpenSecrets also reported that Mastercard, a sponsor of NYC Pride and Miami Beach Pride, gave more than $100,000 to Republican candidates.
The fullest accounting came a month earlier. The accountability newsletter Popular Information identified 25 corporations that rate highly on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index and had collectively donated at least $17.8 million to anti-LGBTQ politicians since the 2022 midterms. Among the largest givers were AT&T, Comcast, CVS Health, UnitedHealth Group and Walmart.
It reaches Texas. A 2022 analysis by Data for Progress tracked 121 companies giving more than $3 million to sponsors of anti-LGBTQ legislation in six states, 34 of which had publicly sponsored Pride events. Toyota alone accounted for $601,500. The single largest recipient in the entire dataset was Gov. Greg Abbott, at more than $2.2 million from the companies surveyed.
A company can do all of that and still post a perfect score on the Corporate Equality Index. The index rates workforce protections, inclusive benefits, internal culture, and outreach and engagement. Campaign contributions are not among its criteria. The Human Rights Campaign does deduct 25 points for what it calls a large-scale official or public anti-LGBTQ blemish, which covers corporate charitable giving to groups that advocate against LGBTQ equality, but not donations to candidates.
And then the corporations left
Here is the strange part. She is making that argument after the sponsors started leaving.
Fortune 500 participation in the Human Rights Campaign’s index collapsed between 2025 and 2026, falling from 377 companies to 131. That is a 65% drop in a single year.
In a survey published in April 2025, Gravity Research asked 49 senior corporate communications executives about Pride. Thirty-nine percent said they were cutting their Pride engagement. Not one said they were increasing it. A year earlier, only 9% had reported changing anything at all.
Pride organizations around the country reported losses. NYC Pride says it lost more than $750,000. Seattle Pride projected a $350,000 gap, roughly a quarter of its operating budget. Tampa Pride put its festival on a one-year hiatus.
Lockheed Martin, which sponsored Capital Pride in Washington as recently as 2023, dropped its Dallas Pride sponsorship in 2025 and said in a statement on its own website that it had “permanently sunset” its “Business Resource Groups and Employee Networks organized around demographics, identities or advocacy.” In November 2025 the Human Rights Campaign confirmed it is not currently sponsored by Northrop Grumman or RTX, and declined to say how the relationships ended.
Suzanne Ford, executive director of San Francisco Pride, put it this way.
“I know that they’re facing tough decisions inside those organizations, and I don’t want to call them out. I want to call them in. We will remember who stood by us and who didn’t. When it was politically popular, they were lined up.”
What’s left when the money goes
Dahlia’s answer is that the money was never the point.
“Just having a seat at the table isn’t enough,” Dahlia said, “because they can just as easily remove those freedoms that are gained through electoral politics or through corporate representation. Just as easy as it came.”
“We’re just going to reduce Pride to a celebration,” she said, “when it’s an act of rebellion that should be happening all year round. Not just in June.”
Go
2nd Annual Reclaim Pride Celebration Saturday, Aug. 29, 2 to 9 p.m. River Alchemy of Creative Arts, 2600 S. Flores St. #4A, San Antonio, TX 78204 Free. See the listing.
SATX.gay observed the protest outside Pride Bigger Than Texas at Crockett Park on June 27, 2026, and interviewed the organizer on site. Reporting drew on the Pew Research Center, OpenSecrets, Popular Information, Data for Progress, the Human Rights Campaign, Gravity Research and the San Antonio Current. A video report is forthcoming.