Above: A die-in queer protest in Israel against the state’s pinkwashing
Growing up as a LGBTQ+ teen I cried out for mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ+ identities. As a pansexual, non binary adult every June I see institutions, companies, and even governments deck themselves out in the rainbow flag for Pride Month. I have just come back from Edinburgh Pride and it was attended by hundreds of people. In an event marking a riot against police brutality which targeted New York’s gay scene I saw Police Scotland advertising themselves. Stonewall Scotland has found that Police Scotland routinely ignored anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes, and three quarters of victims were not comfortable reporting hate crimes to the police in 2014. Almost a decade later things have barely improved, and hate crimes against trans people have sharply risen according to the BBC. Police Scotland attending Pride and putting rainbows on their officers’s cheeks does not suddenly erase a long history of violence against the LGBTQ+ community which they have done little to rectify. This post will be discussing how Pinkwashing and Rainbow Capitalism continues to perpetuate harm against marginalised communities.
Terminology
Pinkwashing – A portmanteau of ‘pink’ and ‘whitewashing’ this term was coined in 2011 by Sarah Schuman. Here, a government or organisation uses a seeming progressive attitude towards LGBTQ+ rights as a way to distract from violence against marginalised communities. Schulman coined the term to describe Israeli policy of using its apparent progressive attitude to gay rights as a way to delegitimise Palestinian activism, although Israel is far from the only state to do this. Many far-right politicians in Europe, including France’s Marine Le Pen, Italy’s Alessandra Mussolini (yes, she is the granddaughter of Benito Mussolini), and Germany’s Alice Weidel, use a support for gay rights justify violence against Muslim communities for homophobia within these communities.
Rainbow Capitalism – A sign I saw at Edinburgh Pride today perfectly summarises Rainbow Capitalism: ‘I’m a lesbian only in June when I have to buy rainbow products‘. Rainbow Capitalism is the specific targeting of queer communities as a market base by companies. Initially, this was a way for LGBTQ+ people to safely be themselves through gay clubs, queer media, and companies producing queer specific products – such as binders. However, from the 1990s, when gay rights was slowly progressing companies realised that they could take advantage of the ‘pink pound’ by targeting queer communities. This resulted in companies specifically changing their logos to rainbows during Pride Month, and increasingly appearing at Pride marches. Many people within the last few years have protested the increasing commodification of Pride as companies attempt to hijack the festival. More often than not, Rainbow Capitalism and pinkwashing go hand-in-hand.
Mainstream rainbow capitalism is a relatively recent phenomenon. As gay rights started to improve from the 1990s to today this allowed more and more queer figures to become assimilated into mainstream society. However, it has been a very slow process. In 1996 the video game Duke Nukem 3D was even advertised with the slogan ‘If you don’t play Duke Nukem 3D you like men‘. Mainstream society has also decided what was ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ behaviour for LGBTQ+ communities. The 2003 MTV Awards had Gollum for The Lord of the Rings calling Dobby from Harry Potter ‘a fucking fag’, but then had t.A.T.u. perform their gay classic All the things she said with lesbian couples kissing. For mainstream society, which is heteronormative and patriarchal, slurs against gay men is fine and homosexuality is okay as long as it is ‘sexy’ according to society. Twenty years later, capitalism determines who is represented through advertisement. Hence, we see the emergence of rainbow capitalism – for the month of June a primarily white and middle class queer community is expected to buy their specific rainbow products.
Police at Pride
A common issue at Pride within the last few years has been the presence of police at Pride. As mentioned earlier, Police Scotland was actively advertising themselves at Edinburgh Pride today. The police are not the friends of the LGBTQ+ community. After all, Pride began as a way to commemorate Stonewall – a riot in response to police violating New York’s queer community. While many things have changed since 1969, the police remains an institution which preserves the power and ideas of the state. For marginalised communities, the police offer brutality over protection. In the UK, homophobia and transphobia has been rampant in the police. In 2016 the ‘Grinder Killer’ Stephen Port managed to murder three young gay men, and the Metropolitan Police of London refused to investigate the very clear connections – their bodies were deposited in the same place, and the same person discovered two of the bodies! It took the relatives of the victims to begin investigating before the Met began their investigation. The Met didn’t investigate these murders exactly because they were the murders of gay men, and this is the fourth time which this has happened since the 1970s. This is also ignoring the horrific flaws in the justice system which routinely fails to acknowledge hate crimes. In the UK, trans women are often sent to male prisons, although our goal should be prison abolition. Prisons are designed to punish, not rehabilitate, and reinforce attitudes of the outside world, meaning that trans women are more likely to face transphobic and transmisogynistic violence.
British police are just as guilty of brutalising marginalised communities as their counterparts in America, Israel, and other countries with notoriously racist forces. Infamously in the 1990s, police dragged their feet in investigating the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, and the courts initially found his murderers not guilty. Meanwhile, in 2015 police in Kirkaldy, Scotland beat, sprayed, and shackled Sheku Bayoh resulting in his death via asphyxiation. The disinterest in Lawrence case, and the overt violence in the Bayoh case shows the inherent racism of British police – black people are either not worth their time or are disposable. Black, Asian, Roma, and migrant communities are more likely to face police violence than a white, British person, and that is before we even factor in class. Our esteemed prime minister Boris Johnson’s drug-filled shenanigans at Eton resulted in no penalties, whereas drug possession lands many poor people with criminal records every year.
This is what police at Pride try to make the public forget. A history of homophobia, transphobia, racism, and bigotry is tied up with policing – many branches of American police, after all, were formed as a way to capture runaway slaves. Slapping a rainbow on their uniform during June does not do away with that history, and the police have lacked a reckoning with this past. An apparent support for LGBTQ+ people in June is designed to overlook continued violence against marginalised communities.
Pinkwashing Companies
As mentioned above, when gay rights became marketable companies soon jumped on the bandwagon of being pro-Pride during the month of June. Thankfully, there is a strong pushback against rainbow capitalism with many Pride marches actively protesting the commodification of Pride. Speaking from personal experience, I saw far fewer companies at the centre of Edinburgh Pride this year than I did in Pride 2018 and 2019. However, they were still there. Pinkwashing has given many companies the opportunity to distract from their poor records on LGBTQ+ rights, and the rights of other communities. For example, I saw Barclays at Pride this year. Barclays has made sweetheart deals with the UAE and Qatar – two countries which have long persecuted their queer communities and employ slave labour. Furthermore, Barclays has funded a staggering $5.6 billion in fossil fuel projects, which makes it a major contributor to climate change. Barclays is just one of many companies which drapes itself in a rainbow flag, but has appalling records on LGBTQ+ rights. Sky was founded by the virulently homophobic Rupert Murdoch; American Airlines and AT&T are major contributors to Mitch McConnell; Walmart refused to recognised its staff who were in same-sex marriages for their spousal health care scheme until forced to by the Supreme Court; and Disney has ensured that its queer characters could easily be edited to appease homophobic areas.
Pinkwashing allows rainbow capitalism to exist. Companies follow their bottom line and not morality, so only when supporting a cause earns them a profit do companies learn morals. In the 1990s when Nike was being criticised for its use of sweat shop labour in Haiti and the Philippines Reebok began a reward ceremony to raise awareness of sweatshop labour – Reebok itself uses sweatshop labour. If we look behind the logo we can see how capitalism cynically uses queer rights for its own benefit. The desire for profit destroys ethics, but a veneer of respectability is needed. In June, positioning itself as pro-LGBTQ+ allows a company to create this veneer.
Pinkwashing and Bigotry
Israeli gay rights activist Hagai El-Ad has described the Israeli government’s pinkwashing in this way: ‘In no other arena has that been used in a more cynical way than in the context of LGBT rights.’ While Israel can be commended for its progress on gay rights, it is important to remember that the Israeli government is itself homophobic. Benjamin Netanyahu made conscious allies with hard-right figures, and his education minister in 2019 openly endorsed conversion therapy. This is also not to say that homophobia doesn’t exist in Arabic countries. However, Israeli authorities have used their stance on gay rights as an excuse to persecute Palestinians – ‘we have to be there to protect gays’. This is a narrative as old as colonialism. Gayatri Spivak famously described the rationale justifying colonialism as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’. We have to be there to protect xyz group, and any atrocities are for the greater good. This is instead another cynical appropriation of gay rights. Military occupation does not rescue LGBTQ+ people persecuted in other countries – how does bombs landing on Gaza help the gay man in the closet in fear of persecution from Hamas? Israel is far from alone in this regards.
Right-wing politicians have used homophobia elsewhere as a way to justify policies limiting immigration and brutalising marginalised communities. For example, Marine Le Pen has said that to preserve gay rights in France Muslim immigration had to be limited, but opposes same-sex marriage and adoption. Her and many other members of the European Right who oppose migration and refugees to ‘help the gays’ have close ties with the overtly homophobic Viktor Orban of Hungary and Vladimir Putin. Furthermore, we see pinkwashing as a way to split the LGBTQ+ community where a defense of gay and lesbian rights is set against rights for trans and non-binary people. The infamous LGB Alliance in Britain has regularly whipped up bigotry against trans people, but itself has posted about how gay marriage has been a mistake. J.K. Rowling has spoken out in favour of gay rights, and when growing up having such an icon saying that Dumbledore was gay was fulfilling for me. However, she has used this as a way to distract from her rampant transphobia. In the 2019 Edinburgh Pride march transphobes proudly declared their lesbianism and even wore shirts with Marsha P. Johnson, the potentially trans woman behind Stonewall, while decrying that trans people have a right to exist. Pinkwashing serves as a way to continue the oppression of marginalised people, and it gets worse.
As a way to target trans people or other marginalised groups, it always benefits the established order or those who want to revoke rights. We have seen an unholy alliance between the far-right and transphobic ‘feminists’ over the issue of trans rights. While Ricky Gervais makes jokes about trans women sexually harassing cis women in toilets, hate crimes against trans women skyrocket. While transphobes cheer about the Olympics rooting out trans women from sports, Caster Semenya, a cis woman, is forced to take drugs as she is seen as too ‘masculine’. This itself is linked to a long history of viewing black women as being overly masculine compared to white women, or being men in disguise. While the British government hangs rainbow flags outside its buildings, it makes deals with the Saudi government which routinely executes gay men. This is the reality behind pinkwashing and rainbow capitalism.
The Alternative
As mentioned above, there is a consistent push against the commodification of Pride as many LGBTQ+ people realise that their identity is being sold to them by an uncaring corporation. Already, in Edinburgh Pride I have seen how companies have slowly been retreating, however, more needs to be done. Pride should be a protest, and in many parts of the world it still is. Pride should be a place where queer people can be themselves, raise awareness of continued persecution, and create links with support networks. Intersectionality is also needed. This term has been parodied so much that its meaning has been overlooked. Kimberle Crenshaw coined intersectionality as a way to describe how different forms of oppression face people in different ways – such as how a rich white woman will feel misogyny differently to a poor black woman. The gay rights movement has long exemplified intersectionality. Stonewall was led by mostly black and Latine queer activists challenging police brutality; Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera formed STAR to tackle homelessness and transmisogyny; during the Miners’ Strike in Britain in 1984 Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners was founded as a way to show solidarity with the miners, and the miners’ unions went on to force Labour to endorse gay rights; and gay Dutch artist Willem Arondeus burned the records of Dutch Jews so the Nazis couldn’t access them. As a community we have to continue this strong legacy, we have to create links with queer activists worldwide (not just the global north), and make ties with other rights movements. As of writing, the US Supreme Court has struck down Roe vs. Wade threatening abortion rights across the US, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which protects gay marriage, is now threatened. An injury to one is an injury to all. We have to come together to fight this.
No pasaran.
Bibliography:
- Peter Drucker, Warped: Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism, (New York: 2015)
- Stonewall Scotland, Protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people in Scotland, (2014)
- Illuminaughtii, ‘Taste the Rainbow…of Capitalism’, YouTube.com, (03/06/2022), [Accessed 20/06/2022]
- Peter Tatchell, ‘Why should we have uniformed police at Pride marches when the Met is so homophobic?’, The Guardian, (14/12/2021), [Accessed 24/06/2022]
- Sa’ed Atshan, Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique, (Stanford: 2020)
- Severin Carrell, ‘Officer fired CS spray at Sheku Bayoh despite lack of threat, inquiry told’, The Guardian, (19/05/2022), [Accessed 24/06/2022]
- Jillian Ambrose, ‘Barclays has financed $5.6 billion in new fossil fuel projects since January’, The Guardian, (02/11/2021), [Accessed 24/06/2022]
- Josh Milton, ‘A Marine Le Pen presidency would be a dark, chilling, time for LGBT+ rights, activists say’, PinkNews, (21/04/2022), [Accessed 23/06/2022]
- The YouTuber Shaun has also done several good videos on the BBC’s rampant transphobia. I was meant to write about it on this post, but it was getting a bit heavy so I recommend watching them here.
Thank you for reading. For future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.
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