The Parade to a Market: Sanitisation of Queer Liberation
- Merull Shah
- Jun 5
- 9 min read
Pride and Its Discontents
Every June, the world dons a rainbow mask, colourful, commercial, and conveniently forgetful. What began as a riot outside the Stonewall Inn, a Molotov cocktail hurled at police repression, now echoes faintly beneath the basslines of branded floats and influencer campaigns. The soul of queer rebellion, once ablaze with anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-carceral fervor, flickers dimly under LED lights sponsored by banks and beer companies.
This evolution is not just cosmetic; it's ideological. Pride has drifted from protest to performance, from confrontation to commodification. As corporations wrap themselves in the rainbow for profit, they often do so while outsourcing merchandise to countries where queerness is criminalised, a paradox in plain sight, aptly called a “vanity project” by Newcastle artist Laura Crow [1]. Even companies once praised for progressive stances, like Procter & Gamble’s 2004 campaign against Cincinnati’s anti-gay laws, have since helped reframe queer inclusion as a branding strategy, not a moral commitment [2].
This is the heart of the paradox: a movement born from the margins now finds itself clinking glasses at the table of the establishment. The question is no longer just about inclusion but the cost of that inclusion. What was sacrificed in the journey from rebellion to recognition? And who gets left behind when liberation starts to look like assimilation?
A Radical Inheritance
Pride was born of riot, not rainbow logos. The Stonewall Uprising in 1969 was a fierce act of resistance against police brutality, led by trans women of colour like Marsha P. Johnson [3] and Sylvia Rivera [4]. Living at the margins, houseless, criminalised and targeted by law enforcement, they co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) [4], a collective that provided shelter and support for queer youth rejected by both their families and the state. This wasn’t about assimilation into existing systems. It was a refusal to disappear.
Early queer liberation was deeply entwined with Black Power, feminist, and anti-colonial movements. At gatherings like the 1970 Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention [3], organised by the Black Panther Party, queer activities joined in building a new, collective vision of justice [5]. They recognised that the same systems, capitalism, patriarchy and racism that oppressed black and brown people also shaped queer marginalisation, These coalitions weren’t incidental; they were intentional and intersectional.
Into the 1980s and 1990s, queer anarchists and direct-action collectives continued this legacy. Groups like ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) refused to let silence equal death. Their disruptive protests—storming the FDA and shutting down Wall Street— forced the world to confront the government and the pharmaceutical industry’s indifference toward HIV/AIDS [6]. They called out the system that profited off delay and denial.
This vision was shared by feminist collectives like OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent) [7], who challenged both racism and sexism in Britain, and later echoed in the 2017 Women’s Strike, a global protest that redefined labour to include unpaid care and reproductive rights [6]. Early queer movements aligned with these politics, imagining liberation not as military service or marriage rights but as dismantling every structure that kept people in chains.
That legacy wasn’t safe. It was revolutionary.
The Turn: From Liberation to Inclusion
What began as a thunderous march against the structures of oppression has been rerouted into the hushed corridors of boardrooms and ballot boxes. The queer struggle, once ablaze with calls to dismantle empire, patriarchy, and capital, now flickers dimly in the shadows of institutional acceptance. The radical fire has not been extinguished, but it has been domesticated.
The so-called “gay rights” movement, particularly post-Stonewall, traded rebellion for recognition. Its focus narrowed: marriage equality, military inclusion, and anti-discrimination in the workplace became the benchmarks of progress. These victories, while significant, came at a steep price. Despite legal milestones, 64% of LGBTQ+ adults in the U.S. still report facing discrimination in their everyday lives, exposing the gap between symbolic progress and lived reality. The collective cry for liberation was muted into a polite plea for inclusion. No longer a question of upending systems that criminalise queerness now, it was about fitting in.
This pivot wasn’t organic. It was engineered, in part, by corporate infiltration into queer spaces. Brands draped themselves in rainbows, sponsoring Pride floats while profiting off exploitative labour or funding anti-LGBTQ+ politicians behind the scenes [8]. They offered visibility, but a sanitised version tailored for mass consumption, one that belied the truth that over 230 Pride-supporting corporations in 2023 simultaneously donated $14 million to anti-LGBTQ+ lawmakers. The queerness they celebrated was palatable, professional, and apolitical. It was queerness that could sit quietly at a desk, not one that threw bricks at police.
Where once the movement declared "We will not be silenced" [9], legal teams and PR departments vet today’s slogans. In this shift from the streets to spreadsheets, from riots to HR policies, much has been gained, but much more has been lost.
The Tools of Erasure
The radical roots of queer resistance were once fierce, messy, and unapologetically confrontational. Today, they are wrapped in rainbow packaging and handed out like party favours by those who benefit most from maintaining the status quo.
Pinkwashing is the first blade. It glints brightly; brands don a rainbow for a month, but the blood on their supply chains tells another story. Take, for example, companies that proudly launch Pride campaigns while sourcing products from factories in countries where LGBTQ+ identities are criminalised or where labour rights are virtually nonexistent [10]. These contradictions are not exceptions; they are strategies. A rainbow logo can distract from human rights violations and environmental harm, allowing corporations to polish their image without changing their practices. The rainbow, in this case, doesn’t shine; it conceals. The roar of resistance is commodified into the rustle of receipts [11].
Rainbow capitalism, the second knife, carves queerness into a product line. Pride becomes a season. Identity becomes inventory. From limited edition sneakers to rainbow-coloured fast food wrappers, the political power of queer resistance is reduced to product placement. In its wake, the spirit of Stonewall, the riot, not the parade, is reduced to a sales pitch. Even corporations with histories of lobbying against anti-discrimination legislation or donating to anti-LGBTQ+ politicians have marched in pride, rebranding themselves overnight as “allies” when it’s good business. Consumerism replaces collective action, and radical politics are repackaged into palatable hashtags [11].
Then comes the velvet rope: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, cloaked in corporate jargon, promising equity but delivering illusion. These departments often function more like PR shields than engines of justice. They trade in optics over substance, tallying up diversity statistics while ignoring the rot of systemic exploitation underneath [12]. They rarely confront capitalism’s complicity in queer oppression or the racial and colonial violence stitched into its fabric [11]. Instead, they pacify dissent, converting grassroots agitation into office-friendly "inclusion training" that ignores the burn of real injustice [13].
These tools, slick, insidious, and seductive, don’t just silence. They gentrify the struggle, painting over protest murals with pastels and replacing marches with marketing. The United Nations has warned that the use of “public morals” rhetoric, often drawn from colonial religious codes, continues to legitimise violence and discrimination against LGBTQ+ communities worldwide [13]. Yet many corporations sidestep this reality entirely, embracing sanitised narratives that ensure nothing truly changes.
What remains is a hollow victory. A seat at the table, perhaps, but at a table built atop the bodies of those who were never invited in the first place. True liberation doesn’t wear a name tag. It doesn’t clock in for Pride month. It burns, it questions, it refuses to be bought.
What We’ve Lost
In the long, bruising march from rebellion to respectability, queer liberation has bled out more than just its radical edge; it has lost its soul. What once rose like a firebrand of collective defiance has flickered into a flickering LED on a corporate float, sanitised and stripped of its teeth.
The price of assimilation is paid not just in politics, but in lives. While rainbow logos dominate June, queer elders are evicted, trans migrants are denied healthcare, and Black and Brown queer youth are criminalised or disappeared by the very institutions once stormed in protest [14]. As movements chase palatable milestones, marriage licences, military inclusion, and Fortune 500 allyship, the systemic rot remains intact. Affordable housing slips away, hidden beneath the gloss of gentrification and ignored in DEI boardrooms where “diversity” rarely means the poor, the racialised, the undocumented [15].
The promise of liberation has been traded for a performance of equality. Love wins, they said, yet queer people still die in silence, unable to access affirming care or safe shelter [16]. Mental health hotlines overflow when political rhetoric turns vitriolic, but no hotline can undo the damage of being told your identity is a debate topic.
Meanwhile, the police, once the adversaries of queer protest, are now called in to "protect" parades. Yet those same forces brutalise sex workers, trans folks, and queer people of colour, reinforcing the very violence once resisted with bricks and blood [14][15]. Queerness that doesn't look white, cis, middle-class, or docile is still pushed to the margins, invisible at best, expendable at worst.
This is not evolution. It is strategic forgetting, a pruning of history’s unruly branches to grow something more brand-friendly. The UN itself warns that systemic exclusion of queer voices from policymaking reproduces structural violence [17]. What we’ve lost is not abstract; it’s the lifelines of those who were always most at risk, now more unheard than ever.
Reclaiming the Rage
In the quiet aftermath of rainbow capitalism and institutional co-optation, a different kind of Pride is taking root, one that doesn’t ask for permission but remembers where it came from. Across cities and communities, grassroots queer groups are reclaiming the language of protest, bringing back a politics grounded not in performance but in survival, solidarity, and systemic change.
Black trans activists are at the heart of this resurgence. From the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement by queer Black women to the ongoing demand for justice for lives like Tony McDade, Riah Milton, and Dominique Fells, these organisers remind us that queer liberation has always been inseparable from racial justice [18]. Their leadership continues to reframe national conversations, ensuring that queer and trans people of colour are no longer sidelined but centred in the fight against state violence.
At the same time, mutual aid networks, often led by queer and trans people of colour, are reviving a politics of care that is deeply collective and defiantly anti-capitalist. These efforts— providing support for incarcerated individuals, distributing resources, and organising community defence— aren’t simply acts of kindness. They’re strategic refusals of systems that neglect and punish the most vulnerable [19]. Mutual aid in this context becomes a form of organising that resists exploitation and builds alternative structures of support.
Abolitionist organising further deepens this critique. Drawing from the legacy of uprisings like Stonewall and the Compton Cafeteria riots, today’s abolitionist queer movements reject mainstream reforms in favour of dismantling the systems that perpetuate harm. This includes fighting for the decriminalisation of sex work, opposing increased policing, and challenging carceral solutions under the guise of safety [6]. Their vision is not about inclusion within oppressive institutions but about imagining and building something else entirely.
What ties these threads together is a commitment to intersectional coalition-building, a recognition that queer liberation is bound up with the fight against patriarchy, racism, and colonialism. Grassroots groups are forging alliances across movements, using shared strategies to resist coordinated attacks on human rights and democratic space [20]. In doing so, they are not only defending what has been lost; they are expanding what is possible.
This is what it means to reclaim the rage: to remember that Pride began as a protest, and that protest remains vital. Not angry for its own sake, but purposeful. Not nostalgic, but forward-looking.
Conclusion
The path forward does not lie in polishing the glass walls of oppressive institutions but in shattering them entirely. Queer liberation, in its truest form, was never about fitting in; it was about breaking out. Assimilationist strategies, for all their symbolic victories, have lulled us into a dangerous complacency, offering inclusion without transformation and visibility without power. They present representation as revolution when, in truth, they preserve the very hierarchies that have always marginalised the most vulnerable among us.
It is not enough to be tolerated within systems that were never built for queer survival. From the police presence at Pride to the rainbow branding on sweatshop-made products, every symbol of inclusion must be interrogated. As anti-trans laws multiply and right-wing extremism escalates across continents, the urgency is clear: we cannot afford the illusion of progress any longer.
To reclaim queer liberation is to remember that Pride was a riot, that queer history is one of resistance, and that our future depends not on seats at oppressive tables but on building new, just structures from the ground up. This is not a return to nostalgia; it is a demand for radical continuity. Because true liberation is not given, not marketed, not legislated, it is seized.
We don’t want permission to exist within the margins. We want the margins gone.
Article by:
Merull Shah
PES MUN Society
Very well written.