#bb unpopular opinion
i’d rather have rainbow capitalism then living in constant fear of discovery. the woman in the pride flag disney t-shirt might be missing the nuance, but at least i know i can be myself. a street full of rainbow flags makes me more comfortable holding a mans hand. look. corporations aren’t your friend. they will sell to whoever will buy. but kids seeing gay everything every year is only ever a good thing, and a massive improvement in history
*Yes*
There is plenty to criticize about corporations rolling out cheap plastic rainbow shit every June for a quick buck.
But do you know how much it would have meant to 12 year old me if I could have walked into Target and seen even 1 cheap ass cup with a rainbow printed on it?
How much safer I would have felt? How much less of a freak and a weirdo? How much *less* realizing I was queer would have felt like a looming disaster? 1 rainbow cup or pair of socks or cheap little Love Wins button would have felt like a life preserver in my shitty little Texas town.
Hold those companies accountable if they turn around a donate to anti-lgbt causes in July. And support the fuck out of lgbt creators and artists now.
But remember that this visibility is a good thing- they’ve decided that its more profitable to pander to us than not. And that’s much better than the alternative.
On the one hand, absolutely. It is honestly a relief to me when I see a company have rainbow or pride or whatever logo or merch. But we need to keep in mind that many of these companies directly fund anti-lgbt legislation. Disney, for example, being a major monetary contributor to the Don’t Say Gay bill. They will use our own queer dollars to oppress, harm, and kill us. Normalization is absolutely a good thing, but these corporations are still our enemies. And I’m not saying OP isn’t aware of this, or that they’re trying to convince us these companies are our friends. I just think, respectfully, it is prudent to clarify that we still cannot trust these companies, and we shouldn’t let our guard down. If violence against us is normalized again, they will drop the rainbows and join with the status quo against us. They are still our enemies. Just, look, I have mixed feelings about it. Relief, for sure. But it’s a matter of survival that we don’t trust them.
i’d rather have rainbow capitalism then living in constant fear of discovery. the woman in the pride flag disney t-shirt might be missing the nuance, but at least i know i can be myself. a street full of rainbow flags makes me more comfortable holding a mans hand. look. corporations aren’t your friend. they will sell to whoever will buy. but kids seeing gay everything every year is only ever a good thing, and a massive improvement in history
50% of the (albeit comparatively few) people who misunderstand this post are conflating the idea that there is a nuanced impact to death by rainbow every june with the idea that i must love capitalism, am unaware of political lobbying and corporate hypocrisy, and believe the fight is over.
the other 50% are terfs and bullies and have been promptly blocked
i’d rather have rainbow capitalism then living in constant fear of discovery. the woman in the pride flag disney t-shirt might be missing the nuance, but at least i know i can be myself. a street full of rainbow flags makes me more comfortable holding a mans hand. look. corporations aren’t your friend. they will sell to whoever will buy. but kids seeing gay everything every year is only ever a good thing, and a massive improvement in history
In the US those companies then turn around and back politicians that support anti lgbtq laws. So, you know, thanks but no thanks. We can have saftey without pandering. And I hope some day we all get to feel what that’s like.
except its not pandering. this is how change happens in the us. rainbow capitalism is one of the results of years and years of laying the groundwork done by queer activists. when you have support by corporations, it means they know that you are a driving market. the more people support queer folk, the more corporations stop their lobbying, the more politicians say they support lgbt rights. this is a step in a process, not an ideal finishline. that doesn’t change the fact that we are much safer than we were just a decade ago, whether we recognize it or not
i’d rather have rainbow capitalism then living in constant fear of discovery. the woman in the pride flag disney t-shirt might be missing the nuance, but at least i know i can be myself. a street full of rainbow flags makes me more comfortable holding a mans hand. look. corporations aren’t your friend. they will sell to whoever will buy. but kids seeing gay everything every year is only ever a good thing, and a massive improvement in history
Target’s had Pride clothing since 2015 - which was highly controversial at the time. (They were also the first major chain to officially declare their fitting rooms and bathrooms trans-inclusive, a year later, which resulted in a lot of boycotts.)
June 2015 is when gay marriage was legalized, and I put my rainbow flag outside for the first time, after having owned it for years. Didn’t have a flagpole so I spent 20 minutes carefully attaching it across the front door with gardening wire.
I remember walking into a Target a few days after my flag had been vandalized, and crying. They had a whole display, rainbows everywhere, a whole section. And I had just been reminded, very forcefully, how much the people in my own neighborhood hated me, that someone on my own street hated me so much they came up my sidewalk to my front porch with wire cutters to tear down my flag. And right here, in a store that anyone could walk into, that they had to walk into, I was greeted with a whole section of flags. And, yeah, I cried.
I still wear the rainbow denim vest I got then weekly.
i’d rather have rainbow capitalism then living in constant fear of discovery. the woman in the pride flag disney t-shirt might be missing the nuance, but at least i know i can be myself. a street full of rainbow flags makes me more comfortable holding a mans hand. look. corporations aren’t your friend. they will sell to whoever will buy. but kids seeing gay everything every year is only ever a good thing, and a massive improvement in history
rainbow capitalism isn’t liberatory, especially not when we exist in a society that withdraws its support for queerness as soon as it transgresses respectability and commodified the rest of it. just yesterday the marines posted a picture of a helmet with rainbow bullets strapped to the back, and it comes off, to me, as entirely grim to say, “well, at least i feel safer” when the biggest imperialist project in the world continually reinforces homophobia and transphobia abroad and at home.
sounds like you have more of an issue with the capitalism than the rainbow in “rainbow capitalism.” as if corporations don’t act sociopathic everyday with everyone. take it up with the marines. i cant collapse capitalism, but i sure as hell can make my environment a safer place by putting up a couple branded flags in my store window. the millions of kids obsessed with disney are now obsessed with disney and aware it’s okay to be gay. my friend can get his tits removed and marry his boyfriend, and his mom can’t say bigoted shit to her social group anymore because they have pride events now. these little victories count.
good for you that YOU feel a little bit safer but you do realize that there are americans who still can’t get their tits removed right? or hold hands with their significant other? and maybe your friend’s mom can’t say bigoted shit to her social group anymore but literally what is stopping her from going out and committing a hate crime. do you understand that? you must live in a very liberal area which again like good for you, but not everyone has that same privilege.
like rainbow capitalism doesn’t solve anything for anybody. yeah it’s a short term solution to bringing awareness especially to younger kids but lots of these companies are still funding homophobic and transphobic legislation. so honestly i think it’s very backwards of you to attribute these little victories to rainbow capitalism and not the activists pushing these efforts on the ground everyday.
you realize in many countries you can get killed for being gay and no one would care, right? you understand how privileged our problems are here? how many ppl in the notes stating they would kill for a company to dare to have pride anything at all?
anyway, rainbow capitalism is an affect of queer activism, not a cause. and it’s certainly not the finish line either.
i’d rather have rainbow capitalism then living in constant fear of discovery. the woman in the pride flag disney t-shirt might be missing the nuance, but at least i know i can be myself. a street full of rainbow flags makes me more comfortable holding a mans hand. look. corporations aren’t your friend. they will sell to whoever will buy. but kids seeing gay everything every year is only ever a good thing, and a massive improvement in history
when i was a teenager and came out in 1996 at college, i wore a rainbow ribbon on my coat. a pink triangle pin. i made my own bi pride stuff bc we didn’t even have a bi flag back then. and at my rural college i was nervous someone was going to start some shit. there were so few out gay students that we would go to classes and do presentations where the students could ask us about our experiences, to educate and promote diversity. we did a demonstration called ‘homosexual acts on the quad’ and we just sat in the little fence doing our homework and chatting and reading books. we painted the school rocks with rainbow and slogans and they got painted over the next day every time.. or sometimes even later that night. but we persisted.
i was determined to be out and stand up for gay rights but it didn’t feel safe. and i know it still doesn’t feel safe a lot of places. but i feel like there’s a lot more straight people that would have my back than in the past. and corporations vomiting rainbows everywhere once a year is part of it! our society is commercialized. they are message makers but they also are only moving forward as society does… and when so many companies don’t feel it’s a risk to their bottom line to do this, things are so much better for us than they were.
now you can go on etsy or redbubble and get your pins and stickers and flags in whatever orientation or identity you want. you can go to target and get a fucking fuckton of rainbow shit. you can turn on the tv and find representation, actual normalized representation and not just pain narratives.
it’s fucking amazing.Same - I had to run into Target yesterday / June 1st & there’s a huge Pride pop up section right in front & it’s loaded with stuff. And here I am in my own “love is bigger than anything in its way” rainbow U2 T-shirt & paused sorta happily overwhelmed while a guy came around the corner of the display, looked at me & we both chuckled over the water bottles & themed sandals together.
Granted, I’m saving my money to buy stuff from local vendors at our city’s pride festival next weekend - it was still really nice to see all that in a big box store in a purple-ish area.
I bought a non-binary flag at Target the other day. I spotted it and realized I didn’t have one yet, so I happily dropped it in my basket with the tinfoil, wooden spoons, and bottle of ketchup I did not come in for. (Which was coffee, which I forgot.)
I grew up during the AIDS crisis. I was twenty when Matthew Shepard was murdered. Now I’m in my forties, and I can buy a kid’s t-shirt in the trans flag colors at Target. It’s mind-blowing. I never thought we would get so far as to be co-opted for profit just like the straights.
Maybe we can have a little Corporate Pride, as a treat?
i’d rather have rainbow capitalism then living in constant fear of discovery. the woman in the pride flag disney t-shirt might be missing the nuance, but at least i know i can be myself. a street full of rainbow flags makes me more comfortable holding a mans hand. look. corporations aren’t your friend. they will sell to whoever will buy. but kids seeing gay everything every year is only ever a good thing, and a massive improvement in history
rainbow capitalism isn’t liberatory, especially not when we exist in a society that withdraws its support for queerness as soon as it transgresses respectability and commodified the rest of it. just yesterday the marines posted a picture of a helmet with rainbow bullets strapped to the back, and it comes off, to me, as entirely grim to say, “well, at least i feel safer” when the biggest imperialist project in the world continually reinforces homophobia and transphobia abroad and at home.
sounds like you have more of an issue with the capitalism than the rainbow in “rainbow capitalism.” as if corporations don’t act sociopathic everyday with everyone. take it up with the marines. i cant collapse capitalism, but i sure as hell can make my environment a safer place by putting up a couple branded flags in my store window. the millions of kids obsessed with disney are now obsessed with disney and aware it’s okay to be gay. my friend can get his tits removed and marry his boyfriend, and his mom can’t say bigoted shit to her social group anymore because they have pride events now. these little victories count.
i’d rather have rainbow capitalism then living in constant fear of discovery. the woman in the pride flag disney t-shirt might be missing the nuance, but at least i know i can be myself. a street full of rainbow flags makes me more comfortable holding a mans hand. look. corporations aren’t your friend. they will sell to whoever will buy. but kids seeing gay everything every year is only ever a good thing, and a massive improvement in history
