This year, corporations across the country have quietly pulled their sponsorship from local pride parades. Companies that once faced criticism for surface-level allyship — changing their logos to rainbow colors during Pride month, for instance — have now abandoned the show of support altogether. And pride festivals that had come to rely on corporate sponsorships to fly out mid-tier musicians and secure parade permits found themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in the hole.
Military contractors are no exception. For years, companies like L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and BAE Systems have sponsored parades, bought floats, and recruited at LGBTQ+ pride festivals from coast to coast. This year, contractor Booz Allen Hamilton dropped its sponsorship of DC’s WorldPride, contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin dropped out of Dallas Pride, and in St. Louis, Boeing’s name was absent from one of the region’s largest LGBT events.
But the story’s more complicated than a simple tale of corporations cashing in on cultural conservatism. Back in 2024, a group of queer and trans St. Louisans took umbrage with Pride STL’s decision to include Boeing as the top sponsor of the festival’s hallmark parade. They blocked the parade route for about an hour over Boeing’s role in providing weapons to the Israeli military. They sat down in front of City hall, chained themselves together, and held aloft a “No Pride in Genocide” banner.
They chanted and demanded that the company — the world’s fourth-largest weapons manufacturer — be removed from the parade. Kyle Kofron, who participated in the protest, called Boeing’s parade sponsorship “classic pinkwashing,” a word used to indicate when companies use support for LGBT people to draw attention away from otherwise unsavory practices. Though Boeing doesn’t disclose its exact corporate donations, it paid at least $10,000 to help create St. Louis Pride in 2023, and likely paid more in 2024 as the top-named sponsor. Pride STL and Boeing did not respond to requests for comment.
“You know, when we talk about queer liberation, it’s not liberation if it comes at the expense of others,” Kofron said. “It’s not liberation if we’re paying for our parties with blood money. That’s just pink capitalism preying on us.”
Some protesters met with leaders of Pride STL throughout the following year. Eventually, multiple activists said, they were informed Boeing wouldn’t be sponsoring the parade in 2025. They weren’t told why. “We wanted them to make a press release saying, ‘Boeing’s not a sponsor this year, we listened to the community.’ And they were silent,” Maxi Glamour, St. Louis Ward 3 committeeperson and drag artist, told Inkstick. Pride St. Louis, Glamour suggested, might still want Boeing’s sponsorship, “whenever the political turbulence settles.”
At the end of June, Pride STL paraded once more. Though corporate sponsors (and stickers deriding the presence of corporate sponsors) were present — Bayer and McDonald’s among them — Boeing was absent.
Boeing’s absenteeism was overshadowed in the minds of St. Louisans by Anheuser-Busch, the parade’s number one sponsor, which had announced a month earlier that they’d be withdrawing funding from the festival. With other sponsors dropping out, Pride found itself about $150,000 short. In response to that announcement, some local bars announced a boycott of Anheuser-Busch products like Budweiser beer. (“Boeing can go, though, that’s fine — we don’t want them!” one bartender at a Busch-boycotting dive bar told me.) Without those sponsors’ money, Pride STL charged admission — $10 apiece — for the first time in its decades-long history.
“So the protest worked,” Kofron said. “We don’t want Boeing to sponsor pride, because Boeing makes weapons that are sent to Israel to murder Palestinians on the daily.”
But St. Louis isn’t the only place where Boeing is backing away from its previously declared diversity commitments, and it may not be in response to the protests. It disbanded its diversity department in Nov. 2024. In March, it deleted performance metrics for top executives that mentioned inclusivity and climate change. In May, it told its Employee Resource Groups — which include the all-volunteer Boeing Pride Alliance — to stop events and heritage month celebrations while the company worked to “co-create a new approach.” And by June, Boeing’s name was dropped from both the St. Louis and Seattle Pride sponsor lists.
K*, a Boeing engineer in her mid-twenties, supported last year’s protesters. “I’m pretty thoroughly anti-Boeing, on account of the war crimes,” she said. Knowing her employer was sponsoring Pride didn’t make her feel supported; it made her feel uncomfortable. “I’m like, why do I kind of dislike this?” K said.
“But if they aren’t sponsoring pride, I hope it wasn’t because they’re being cowards during the Trump administration,” she clarified. In fact, K hadn’t heard that her employer dropped their Pride sponsorship until I told her so, on the day of the parade. Employees, she said, get little information or influence at Boeing.
I’m pretty thoroughly anti-Boeing, on account of the war crimes
K*
“It would be nice to use whatever producer stake I have to maybe influence what kinds of things we’re willing to create,” she said. “But we don’t even have the power to push back on return-to-office mandates, let alone having a say in what sort of contracts the company takes on.” Sometimes, Boeing solicits feedback from its employees — but it’s rarely about anything material, like their clients or their working conditions. Instead, “it’s all process stuff.”
K has several queer and trans friends who work at Boeing — ”like a dozen,” she said. But she didn’t meet a single one of them in the workplace. “Nobody who works for Boeing is proud of it,” she said. Instead, she met them through St. Louis’ rich LGBT community, which, despite a far-right legislature at the state level, has thrived for decades. And that community, historically, has been very left-wing, often anti-war, and — given their location — specifically anti-Boeing.
The irony of Boeing’s Pride sponsorship isn’t lost on Margaret “Flowing” Johnson, a lesbian elder stateswoman of St. Louis. Johnson remembers the first St. Louis Pride festival, held in 1980 — less of a parade, more of an unauthorized march. Pride itself, back then, was less of a marketing opportunity and more of a political declaration against ubiquitous homophobic and transphobic violence. Sometimes, it also crossed over into antiwar work. In New York, activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson forged alliances with the Young Lords to oppose US imperialism in Puerto Rico in the 1970s. Militant AIDS activist group ACT UP organized against US-funded death squads in Nicaragua in the 1980s. In St. Louis at the turn of the 21st century, lesbian feminist organizers — experienced at diffusing tension while serving as patient escorts outside abortion clinics, for example — were asked to provide security at Iraq-war-era peace rallies, Johnson said. “We were called on to be peacekeepers.”
In 2018, LGBT environmentalists blockaded themselves inside of a school bus at the Boeing factory gates after the Saudi Arabian government used American bombs to blow up a school bus in Yemen, killing 40 children. And there was significant queer organizing “in anticipation of Trump’s proposed war on Iran in 2019,” said Keith Rose, a St. Louis City Democratic Party Committeeman and longtime local activist. Queer people led a protest outside of Boeing St. Charles then, too — “and even jumped over the barbed wire fence,” Rose recalled.
But queer and trans people have a long history with Boeing, too — in a state that provides no legal employment protections on the basis of sexuality or gender identity, where the LGBT poverty rates are much higher than those of the straight and cisgender population, a job is a precious commodity. At the St. Louis History Museum’s Gateway to Pride exhibit, the first mention of a trans woman a visitor might see is that of a Boeing aircraft designer, Robyn Montague, born in 1953.
And Boeing’s health insurance, employees told me, covers more gender-affirming procedures than many other plans. One Boeing employee I spoke with recently married a friend of hers. With access to Boeing health insurance, her friend — now, legally, her wife — will finally be able to afford gender-affirming surgery, she said.
