Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Death of Rainbow Capitalism w/ Matt Bernstein

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

DONATE TO POINT OF PRIDE: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/point-of-pride/taylor-lorenz-s-pride-2025-fundraiser-for-point-of-prideFor years, Pride Month meant rainbows on everything, in storefronts, on sneakers, burger wrappers, and an endless array of t-shirts and merch. But this June, After a decade of cashing in on queer identity, corporations are pulling back. From the aisles of Target and the Instagram feeds of big brands, the rainbow logos are gone, the merch shelves are empty. Matt Bernstein is a podcaster, cultural critic, and content creator who covers LGBTQ issues and he's been covering this transformation. He joined me to talk about the rise and fall of rainbow capitalism, the history of the commodification of queer identity, and why this year everything has gotten so beige. I know that there is a lot going on in the world right now, but Point of Pride is a trans-led nonprofit that makes gender-affirming care more accessible for the trans and gender diverse community. The organization directly helps trans people obtain things like financial aid for surgery, electrolysis, HRT or free binders and shape wear. Since 2016, Point of Pride has helped more than 29,000 trans people in all 50 states get the care they need and deserve.Trans people are finding it harder and harder to access crucial, life saving gender care right now. When you donate to Point of Pride your money goes directly to funding these efforts and helping to build a future filled with safety, joy, and possibility for all trans people. Please donate today, every single dollar counts!! DONATE: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/point-of-pride/taylor-lorenz-s-pride-2025-fundraiser-for-point-of-pride***** Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co ***** Subscribe to my newsletter: ⁠⁠https://www.usermag.co⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenzhttps://bsky.app/profile/taylorlorenz.bsky.social

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 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 merch. You kind of could, and 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 so 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 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.

were more like fringe, local, like gay-specific businesses. One thing we did see emerged in the 80s was a lot of art, like queer art, Keith Herring, obviously famous artists. 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 like tacitly out like gay men. Yes. Oh my gosh. So Keith Herring is also such an interesting example of all of this because, Keith Herring 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 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 Herring was also very conscious of 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 Herring, they know his sort of rainbow dancing figures, but most people do not know who Keith Herring 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 U.S. but 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 corporation's 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. Wait, 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. They're by this New York artist. 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. Speda 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 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 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 their round. I'm looking at 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 very. Oh, 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, 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. It's wild. It wasn't even till, I mean, as far as I can remember, like, the way I internalized 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 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 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 X, Y Z, 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 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. 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 were blessed and you're 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 launch 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 nice. I hope he got money from it. Yeah. Yeah. But that happened much later. But absolute, yeah, absolutely 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. Another iconic brand that started to do LGBTQ advertising in the 90s was Benetan. 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 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 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 Beneton's whole thing too. It was like the colors of the world campaign. It was like a white woman, a black woman and 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, like, Lesbians in North Hampton, 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 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're 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 eyes, 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 grading to people after a while,

especially queer people, because it's really, 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, 100%. I mean, all this advertising was happening in the 90s 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 because we thought it was time for a series. We have slightly different tastes. I mean, Steve's more into country. It frightens me, but at the same time, I have compassion. You've been together about three years. I met Steve and my sister's wedding. I was really impressed with how just well designed the IKEA furniture was. He's really into craftsmanship. Then his chairs are really sturdy. This table concluded a leaf. A leaf means...

Commit, 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 2010. 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 hardy. 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 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 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. It's, um, huh. 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, Lawn 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 like 2000s and the aughts. I mean, we talked about this a little bit on the masculinity episode, but there was so much focus on like men. And I mean, this was like the will and grace era.

people's perception of like 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. 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, Deborah Messing is now extremely openly openly racist. I know. But you know what? Who I think has remained unproblematic is Hillary Duff. I was waiting till I'll 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 overacted. Do you like this top? So gay.

Really? 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, Oh, that's so girl wearing a skirt as a top. Oh, you are.

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. Hillary 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 normal.

It was, 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 like out gay people online. I mean, some of the earliest YouTube stars Tyler Oakley and others were very like out gay people. And so I think it just started to like enter the conversation a little bit more. Again, mostly through the lens of like 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 like lean in. And it started with more like quote unquote edgy brands like American Apparel. They did a glad 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 Glad, 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 Take Pride. I remember that American Apparel T-shirt, every 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, like, wait, none of this stuff is actually saying or doing anything.

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 into 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's 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, you know, 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 have 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 like 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 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, 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. we're 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-Obergafel, which actually those times kind of overlap because Obergefell was 2015 and then Trump was an 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 pussy hat 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 is 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, of course, what happened. 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,

a 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. Like, 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. Don't shy. You know, if. 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 to talk 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, okay, wait, do we need Deloitte marching alongside 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 U.S. Marines? I only sort of remember this. So this was a few years ago, and it was the U.S. 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 clip art 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. holding the bullets. It says, proud to serve. 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 raybows on things. Right. Well, there was just this inherent hypocrisy because all of these corporations are pretty evil and bad. I mean, obviously the U.S. military is evil and bad and U.S. imperialism is bad for LGBTQ rights generally. But you also had a lot of companies that had really exploitative policies and we're 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 glad or whatever. Like it is just like sell, sell, sell. Yeah, this pride merch 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 somebody 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 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 grading 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 and 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 TikTok 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 way. 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 but like it was a coffee brand oh okay i'm just saying like the idea that like people have of 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 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 lives of TikTok and like lips of TikTok I think has talked about this probably upwards of 200 times 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 in American beer and it spiraled out of control so quickly and so violently famously you had Kid Rock filming himself gunning down cases of Bud Light and his backyard and then flipping off the camera, you had people throwing actual tantrums, like

filming themselves throwing tantrums in grocery stores, like throwing bud light down the aisles, like spilling open cases of it. 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. 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. 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, like, I think it's like you start to realize that like none of these brands actually want to work with anybody that's not quote unquote brand safe. Like 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, in the 90s. You can see early Bud Light, Budweiser, gay ads. Which just goes to show you how, again, arbitrary this rage machine 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 has changed 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 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, a hundred 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, I could reliably make like a third of my annual income from pride partnerships. And that year there were zero dollars.

Every brand canceled 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 gamer gate which i think is a really important style of campaign that was used here for bud light and i say it's gamer gate 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 it pretty but Simone Biles has had a partnership with Athleta for quite some time that focuses on empowering young female athletes which is like adds the irony here but basically because Simone tweeted to 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 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, much. But that's what it is. And like GamerGate is 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 present in 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, da-da-da. 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 an ad deal. It's this manufacturer 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 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 and the media not take the bait, I mean, 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. And I think it was- it legitimizes it. It legitimizes it. It scares them. Because they, that they know that, like, you know, those outlets are the ones that, like, institutional investors care about. shareholders care about like yeah it legitimizes it in this really horrible way and 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 laundry these hate campaigns especially male media reporters and for the media but yeah there's just a lot of anti-lgptu and anti-trans sentiment and i want to jump to like where that ended up going because i think 23 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. We're 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 they, 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 first 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 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 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 accepting 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 like visual manifestation of the loss of rights, the loss of color, like the loss of like so much, I don't know, it feels like fascism kind of. It's kind of on the nose, but like 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 dissent 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 I, 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 And 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 Earl. Yeah, literally, which is depressing. And so I hate to like mourn rainbow capitalism and corporate pride. 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. Like 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 better place where like LGBT 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 going to last. Yeah, of course. And when you see jokes online, you the listener, about people mourning rainbow capitalism, I'm 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 and 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 people who had to drastically rethink how they made money in the way. 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. Yeah. 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 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 patrons by their artist's merch, you know, directly from them, buy their stickers, by 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 market. 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 queer 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 Fruitie 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.com. That's usermag. 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 bestselling 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.