What Pride means to us
by Lindsay Lee Wallace
In thinking about Pride today, three events come to mind.
The first took place on June 28, 1969, when the NYPD raided the Stonewall Inn in New York City. It was the latest in a series of escalating anti-queer police actions, at a time when “homosexual conduct” and “non-gender-appropriate dress” were illegal. Stonewall’s patrons resisted the raid and arrest attempts, and the ensuing riot and protests were a watershed moment in the fight for the rights to dignity and autonomy LGBTQ people have won, and those we continue to push for today.
That one’s pretty obvious.
The second is June 1st 2022 when, as they have every Pride Month in recent years, corporations of all kinds swapped their standard logos for rainbow versions, ostensibly in honor of these events. As they often do, they paired their logos with promises to spend the month donating a percentage of proceeds from one specific glittery t-shirt to advocacy organizations, and maybe released an ad campaign featuring (white cisgender) people draped in rainbows, achieving the pinnacle of joy with their products.
Many of these selfsame corporations will also continue their failures to meaningfully contribute to queer people’s wellbeing the other eleven months of the year—a phenomenon symptomatic of rainbow capitalism. As “Don’t Say Gay” bills work their way through state legislatures and trans people’s rights to affirming and life-saving healthcare are stripped away, hollow expressions of support one month of the year seem to be the modern legacy of Pride.
And the third? Today, June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, triggering laws that ban or severely restrict abortion in 21 states across the country. While, thankfully, abortion remains legal and protected in New York where our offices are located, we are furious about the suffering this decision will create, and the larger disregard it indicates for the human right to reproductive health care.
These events are tied to one another by the questions they beg: Is this what freedom looks like? Is this what dignity and autonomy look like? Is this what Pride looks like?
We’ve had a few conversations in our office about trying to make our blog less depressing. Contrary to the message we may be sending with our most recent posts, we don’t want to come across as downers—incidentally, we happen to think we’re extremely fun and cool people. Ultimately, the whole point of this blog was meant to be showcasing our positive, supportive, and transparent culture, of which we’re quite proud. But it’s also about discussing our values as an agency, which guide our internal operations, as well as the strategic counsel we offer our clients.
The three events I mentioned earlier are also tied together by legality: The Supreme Court’s ruling that the right to privacy doesn’t sufficiently protect the right to abortion doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Justice Samuel Alito says so himself in the decision, listing other decisions he feels are similarly unconstitutional, including Lawrence v. Texas, which decriminalized homosexuality, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which federally legalized same-sex marriage. The rights established by these rulings are also in question. When the framework protecting one group is under attack, all of our rights are jeopardized.
Our values are what guided us to write our post sharing resources and information about abortion access. They also guided our decision not to paint our logo technicolor this month, lest we erroneously align ourselves with organizations respecting LGBTQ rights in name—or logo—only. As a company comprised of both queer people and allies (personally I’m the former, so I can confirm the veracity of the latter), we would rather establish a consistent culture of respect for the LGBTQ community, and ensure it embues all we do.
Today, that includes writing this post.