As the clock hits midnight on 1st June, it’s almost like the whole of cooperate has the same trello account that automatically turns their logos rainbow. For 30 days, big cooperations are allies and stand for LGBTQ+ rights; the same trello account automatically changes the logos back to regular settings at 11:59 on 1st July.
Where does that leave LGBTQ+ persons who wake up on 1st July still gay? When cooperations can tick diversity off their annual target while still making millions from rainbow merchandise; what happens when the biggest percentage of the queer persons cannot afford the merchandise apparently made for us?
When was the last time big corps thought beyond turning their logos rainbow and actually investigated the lives of LGBTQ+ persons and how they can be supported? The United Kingdom has not changed its stand on conversion therapy for trans persons yet Pride is owed to people like trans woman Marsha P. Johnson! Last week Ruth Chigowe a lesbian woman in South Africa was stoned to death! Sadly she became another statistic added to the number of LGBTQ+ lives lost almost daily!
Visibility is important and for that we are eternally grateful but when it’s just rainbowed logos, we start to wonder; visibility for whom? The world is beautifully colored right now but in a few weeks you go back to your black and whites forgetting the people that gave you this color in June? Has the ‘use or be used’ law got us this out of hand to the extent we are juggling with actual lives? Have we become so superficial a world that we do not notice the red in the rainbow bleeding?
Logos and hashtags are bandaids, very short lived bandaids for discrimination. When the 30 days are done and not one policy of your organization has changed to favor LGBTQ+ then the only thing you’ve achieved is going with the crowd! As you remove the color from your logo on 1st July and realize there’s nothing you did to make life easier for even one gay person then you’ve managed to use a whole color palette to convince people you care when you actually don’t!
This Pride, do better! Be better! Use the influence you have to not only act like you stand with the LGBT community but to really stand with the community .
