Perhaps the most ghoulish of these instances, though, was when Target released a t-shirt bearing the pink triangle associated with ACT UP, the grassroots organisation that helped to end the Aids epidemic. Subject lines were laden with words like “identity” and “they/them” only for me to realise that I was actually being asked to purchase a tin of CBD-infused gummies, or worse, a plug-in air freshener. intercoursed the contents of a DFS warehouse.įrom early May, my own inbox began to read like the treatment for a Nationwide advert. This suit, the Home Office’s technicolour rebranding, and all those IKEA sofas that look as though the cast of Monsters, Inc.
The rainbow fanny packs, the LGBT sandwiches, and the concept of Pride A Manger. Yet the aesthetic crimes that accompany all the honking Pride floats and retina-burning merch are just as, if not more, heinous. Every June, internet thinkers will enrage themselves over successive examples of pinkwashing, with someone guffing about how neoliberalism killed the radical roots of gay liberation, and another about how queer culture has been commodified under Primark and late-capitalism.
At this point, to comment on the corporatisation of Pride is a fairly anodyne undertaking.
