This past weekend, I was at Seattle PrideFest with my partner. It is a massive event (the largest free Pride festival in the country, per the website) with a parade, live music, beer gardens, and so on. We try to go every year.

There's a whole lot to see and experience at Pride each year. Good and bad. I wanted to collect my thoughts on what I dislike about Pride and PrideFest, as well as what I love about Pride and PrideFest.

pride is corporate

Pride is corporate. You've probably heard someone say this before. Or someone making fun of someone who has said this before.

Sometimes something is repeated so much that it begins to lose meaning. It's called semantic satiation. I find that when I begin to feel satiated with a particular word or phrase, it's good to go back and figure out what people are trying to say in the first place.

This year's PrideFest was presented by a whole slew of different corporate brands. The top tiers belong to Delta, Amazon (I'll get to them, don't worry), Nissan, T-Mobile, Smirnoff Vodka, White Claw Hard Seltzer, Hyatt Vineyards, and Voodoo Ranger (makers of various IPAs and hard teas). Various others occupy the lower tiers and the parade slots.

I'd like to note that half of those brands at the top are for alcoholic beverages. More on that later, though.

PrideFest is a massive event requiring a lot of paid vendors, equipment, permits. It's also free admission. Corporate sponsorships are a way of getting the necessary funds for paid vendors, equipment, and permits.

We took over the festival in 2007, when financial problems from the previous festival producers made it impossible for them to produce that year's festival. We only had six weeks, but it was a big success, and we've been building our festival ever since. One Degree Events couldn't do this without a lot of help.

Very little in this world is free, it's near close all bought and paid for. But, why is it such a big deal to have corporate sponsors?

corporations are not your friend

Corporations are not your friend. You've probably heard this before as well. This is true in the very literal sense. When MasterCard texts you, it's usually just to remind you that you owe them money, not because they want to hang out.

Corporations do spend a lot of time and money trying to convince you they're your friends, though. They do this towards everyone, even straight people. Nothing new. During Pride Month though, advertisers set their sights on the gays and their precious consumer dollars.

Let's take beer companies, for example. Plenty of beer companies advertise directly to gay people. Rainbow-flag beer bottles, sponsorships at parades, partnerships with LGBT organizations, the list goes on.

Why do beer companies, and alcohol companies in general, take the lead on this? Because gay people drink. These companies want to sell their product. Here's a pre-packaged marketing demographic with a tendency towards substance abuse. Match made in heaven.

Taking advantage of the vulnerable is not friendly, so again, corporations are not your friend.

corporations will turn their back on you

White Claw and Smirnoff weren't the only brands on display at PrideFest this year. The folks are Target were part of the parade as well. They were recently in the news for taking down Pride merchandise after backlash from conservatives.

In a statement, a company spokeswoman said, “Given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior.”

It must be understood, they were confronted. In the face of confrontation, the logic dictates they must immediately fold. Friends aren't supposed to turn their back on you. So yet again, corporations are not your friend.

corporations are, in fact, your enemy

The worst of them all, the big bad. Amazon and Glamazon.

Glamazon is an "official employee affinity group" within Amazon, initially for gay and lesbian employees, but later expanding to all LGBTQ+ employees.

What does Glamazon do? In the words of Amazon Web Services senior alliances manager Gareth Muc-Johnson:

Employee resource groups such as Glamazon can help LGBTQIA+ employees feel connected to a community and broaden the pipeline of recruitment, mentorship, and advising.

That's awesome. What sort of alliances need to be managed at Amazon Web Services? Per Haaretz:

“Amazon (AWS) and Google were selected as the providers awarded the government’s cloud services,” the Finance Ministry said on Wednesday, announcing the result of the tender for Project Nimbus, a multiyear project to migrate Israel's public information technology to the cloud.

“Project Nimbus is our flagship multi-year plan and the first of its kind. The project is intended to provide the government, the defense establishment and others with an all encompassing cloud solution,” the ministry said, adding it “would require serious investment in infrastructure and advancing the Israeli ecosystem in terms of cloud technology.

Okay. What's Israel going to do with its "all encompassing cloud solution?" The Guardian published an open letter from anonymous Google and Amazon workers who condemn the project:

This technology allows for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land.

We cannot look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the international criminal court.

So Israel is committing war crimes, and the war criminals are using computers. Nothing new. The Holocaust, for example, was very logistically complex. The Nazis crunched the numbers on IBM card systems.

If you end up with blood on your hands, you can just "pinkwash" it off by using gay people as a public relations tool. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Sarah Schulman explains the concept of "pinkwashing" in relation to Israel. I believe the same criticism can be applied to Amazon, given its relationship with the Israeli government.

The growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation has named these tactics “pinkwashing”: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life. Aeyal Gross, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, argues that “gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.”

and yet i keep going to pride

Every year I go to Pride. No matter what city I'm in, I'm there. It's important to me.

i go to pride to see the protests

Everywhere I looked, I saw mentions of Palestine. Flyers on every street lamp. Stickers on every barricade. Flags in the parade.

At the lawn at the terminus of the parade, there were grave markers interspersed between all the vendors for dead Palestinians.

Various anti-war organizations were tabling and selling newspapers, as well.

In St. Louis, protestors blocked the Boeing procession since they sell weapons to Israel. I didn't see Boeing in the Seattle parade this year, even though it's a Boeing town. I suppose they know how people feel about them these days.

i go to pride to see that people are fighting for our rights

As usual, the "repent now" crowd was out. Come to Jesus, hell awaits you, sodomy is a sin, etc. Small numbers.

Some more feisty gays set up a small counter-protest. "You shall not wear a garment made of two kinds of fabric." "Spit on hate!" "Protect trans youth!"

A lady with some ornate-looking goat horns had a megaphone labeled the "bigot blaster." It seemed to be a bit cheap, so I couldn't quite make out what she was saying. Certainly drowned out the "repent" guys.

The last time I passed the group, the main "repent" guy looked pretty well defeated.

i go to pride to feel good about my body

The nude cyclists were one of my favorite groups in the parade. I like body positivity. I like seeing people who have bodies like my own, and I like seeing those same people confident and happy.

I am a fat, gay man. Last year I had my face ripped off in a cycling collision. I have scars all over my body.

This was the first time since my crash that I had taken off my shirt in public. Seeing everyone else in various states of undress had me feeling bold and confident. The sun felt good on my skin. The water from the fountain felt nice and cold.

i go to pride for the community

After the parade, and after running around the fountain, my partner and I came across an open DJ set at the meditation garden. We got to lay in the grass, in each other's arms, surrounded by people doing the same.

People were in all sorts of kink gear: leather, rubber, diapers, nothing. Everyone was expressing their sexuality freely.

When you are at Pride, the atmosphere is different. People are smiling. People make conversation. People pay compliments. People cheer and clap and support you and you feel safe and happy and comfortable and all sorts of other positive feelings that you don't expect to feel during your day-to-day life.

Everyone's happy. Happiness is contagious. I like being happy.

i go to pride to see people be creative

The parade isn't just Salesforce and Experian Group.

The Seattle Opera was there, with their gorgeous masks.

Sound Transit brought out a vintage bus and had it all decorated.

Various local robotics teams had their little robots scurrying around shooting beachballs.

The furries had a massive procession, with everybody in their custom fursuits.

All sorts of different groups were playing DJ sets and live music out of the beds of pickup trucks.

Creativity is nice.

i go to pride so that others can see that it's okay

There were a lot of families at Pride. Straight parents and gay parents alike.

I think that's great. As a gay man, I was once a gay child. Would've saved me a lot of trouble had I gotten a little more positive exposure, in my view.

Some people balk at the idea of kids getting exposed to nude bodies at Pride. I don't see the harm. Is the concern that kids will stop being ashamed by their own bodies in turn? Don't worry, there's a multi-billion dollar ad industry dedicated to getting them to feel bad about themselves.

i will keep going to pride

I'd like it be less corporate though. Maybe that means it has to be smaller? Do we need massive sound systems, rented fences, private security guards, food vendors, and diesel generators?

All the stuff about Pride that I like is mostly free. My nude body is free. My attitude is free. My community is free. My creativity is mostly free (art supplies usually cost money, but there's ways to cut costs if you're creative).

I think that's something people can work with.