Coalition calls on Twin Cities Pride to cut corporate ties 

Pride organizations across the country are seeing revenue sources dry up as corporations pull back from publicly funding diversity causes, fearing political retribution and shifting national attitudes. To the Taking Back Pride Coalition, that’s a good thing.

On Friday, June 26, the Taking Back Pride Coalition held a press conference at the Lucy Parsons Center calling for Twin Cities Pride to drop its corporate sponsors and remove its police presence. It’s the coalition’s tenth year of organizing around demands that Pride celebrations be explicitly anti-police and anti-capitalist.

In 2023, Twin Cities Pride, which organizes Pride weekend and year-round events, dropped Target as a corporate sponsor after the company rolled back its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices. The organization was able to replace the $50,000 donation through crowdfunding.

Taking Back Pride wasn’t involved in the Target decision, but members consider the move long overdue. They called on Twin Cities Pride to drop additional corporate sponsors, in particular Delta, United Health Group and 3M.

Delta was accused of operating deportation flights during Operation Metro Surge, including a flight involving 5-year-old Liam Ramos.

“As we saw this winter, Minnesotans are a progressive community,” said River Townsend, who represented the Minnesota Abortion Action Committee at the event. “We care about our neighbors. We care about our community, and gaining liberation should not be used as a marketing tool to cover atrocities and to make your company look more palatable to Minnesotans.”

Corporate sponsors provided $600,000 in funding to Twin Cities Pride in 2025, significantly less than the $1.3 million the organization received in 2024.

Taking Back Pride argues that pride organizations cannot and should not rely on donations from large companies. Members argue that recent “anti-woke” pullbacks of corporate support demonstrate the shallowness of corporate sponsorship and are a success in the coalition’s broader goal of eliminating corporate presence at Pride.

“We can do this on our own,” said Khrys Wetzel, who has been involved with Taking Back Pride for three years. “We don’t need them to validate us. They can change their mind at any time. We won’t leave ourselves stranded. We support each other.”

Putting on major public Pride events is expensive.

“It takes a lot of money to do this,” Dena Stanley, Director of Pittsburgh Pride, told NPR. “Permitting costs, security costs, headliner costs, staging costs, cleaning crew costs, insurance costs. All of these are expenses.”

The Director of Sponsorships for San Francisco Pride, Nguyen Pham, told Mission Local, “Corporatization of Pride is a perennial conversation. To put on a very expensive free event requires a lot of capital.”

Proponents of corporate sponsors say the funding allows events to be large-scale and free to the public. They argue that money is better raised from large businesses than small donors. A single $150,000 corporate donation can be difficult to replace through small-dollar crowdfunding.

Corporate sponsorship of Pride events can signal public acceptance and normalization of the LGBTQ+ community.

Jae Yates, co-chair of the Taking Back Pride Coalition, isn’t looking to assimilate into mainstream culture.

“Do we want to be like our oppressors or do we want to stand together and say you will not weaponize my identity to justify harm against someone else?” Yates said. “Because me, I refuse to be used to excuse genocide, war, and planet extinction to gain superficial acceptance that is withdrawn at the whim of shareholders.”

Taking Back Pride also called for the elimination of police presence at Pride events. The 1969 Stonewall uprising, which served as a major catalyst for the LGBTQ+ rights movement, began as resistance to a police raid. Yates connected the Pride movement to movements against police brutality and to the intersectionality of queer community members of color.

“As a Black trans person, I have no desire to be near officers from a department responsible for killing hundreds of Black people in my community in the past two decades,” Yates said.

To Wetzel, removing police and corporate presences from Pride are shared missions.

“They’re deeply connected in that oftentimes the folks who are funding one are also funding another,” Wetzel said. “So they’re both kind of hand in hand.”

Advocates for police presence at Pride argue officers are important for managing crowds and protecting marchers from far-right counterprotestors. Some argue that the politicization of Pride works against the movement’s mission.

“I can easily make the argument that absolutely no socialists/communists be allowed at Pride based on a long documented history of homophobia and institutional oppression by people and groups within those movements,” Amanda Kerri wrote in a 2017 essay for the Advocate. “But I won’t, because Pride does not belong to any one political ideology, any one philosophy of social progress and equality, and certainly should include all of the community.”

Taking Back Pride hosts an annual counter-protest to the Twin Cities Pride parade. This year’s event will be hosted at 10 a.m. on Sunday, June 28, in downtown Minneapolis.

Representatives from the Minnesota Abortion Action Committee, the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice, the Climate Action Committee, Women Against Military Madness, Anti War Committee, Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, US Palestinian Community Network and Minnesota 50501 also attended Friday’s press conference.

Anya Armentrout is a freelance journalist, a student at Macalester College, and a contributing writer for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder.