Conservative-led boycotts against companies that once embraced Pride festivities, like Target and Anheuser Busch, have led to billions of dollars of corporate losses. The backlash has also entered the 2024 presidential race, as Gov. Ron De Santis of Florida has staked his Republican primary hopes on opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and has clashed with corporations, like Disney, that support them.
Heritage of Pride, which organizes the march, recognized the worsening political climate in an open letter earlier this month that was co-signed with the organizers of dozens of other Pride events across the country. In it, they warned that the L.G.B.T.Q. community was “under threat” and criticized “fair weather friends” in corporate America.
“Despite the progress we have made together, we are currently under siege,” the organizers wrote. “An alarming rise in legal disruptions and targeted intimidation by extremist groups at these events, across the United States, is making our celebratory gatherings feel less safe. The threats are becoming tangible, terrifying and can no longer be ignored.”
Those threats have taken many forms.
Across the country, a wave of state legislation has targeted L.G.B.T.Q. young people in particular, banning transgender health care for minors and barring teachers from discussing gay and transgender topics in schools.
In a report released last week, two civil rights groups documented more than 350 acts of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. harassment, vandalism or violence in the United States between June 2022 and April 2023, with more than half explicitly referring to gay or transgender people as pedophiles.
Some of those incidents have been deadly. Last week, a man was charged with plotting a mass shooting and bomb attack on Nashville Pride. Such a plan was carried out by a shooter in Colorado who killed five people and injured 17 more at a gay bar last November, in what prosecutors have said was a hate crime.
That same month, anxieties were high in New York after a gay bar had its window smashed by bricks four times in one month. Weeks later, the office of a gay New York City Council member was vandalized by opponents of Drag Story Time, who then vandalized his home and assaulted his neighbor.