As more and more people celebrate and recognize June as Pride Month, LGBTQ+ people and allies are in a complicated position. The visibility, awareness, and normalization are fantastic. The access, too, makes a huge difference, especially for young people or folks in rural or isolated areas. The flip side, unfortunately, is the concept of “pinkwashing,” which is when corporations essentially slap a rainbow logo or fly a Pride flag in order to gain dollars (or social media points) but don’t actively help queer folks. You might be wondering: okay, but what would actually help LGBTQ+ people, in this case? To start with, not donating to anti-LGBTQ causes and elected officials.This should be the obvious baseline requirement.

A new investigation released by Popular Information, however, discovered that 25 companies quick to honor Pride have donated more than $10 million to anti-LGBTQ+ politicians at both the state and federal levels. That money, by the way, is totaled from the last two years alone.

  CVS, AT&T, Comcast, UnitedHealth Group, Walgreens, Wells Fargo, Walmart, Exxon Mobile, and Google, are some companies Popular Information found in its investigation. To really get into the meat of the issue, it’s important to go over some background context. You may be familiar with work done by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) that includes “rating” corporations in terms of equity work. The HRC’s index lets people know how a corporation (say, Comcast or CVS) ranks in terms of how safe and affirming it is for an LBGTQ+ person to work there, as well as how the company shows up for the queer community in general. That’s obviously great and important work. Interestingly, however, the HRC’s Corporate Equity Index does not factor in political donations.

So, we end up in a place where a company like UnitedHealth, as found by Popular Information, both received a perfect score from the HRC and donated close to $500,000 to anti-LGBTQ federal lawmakers since 2019. On the state level, the company reportedly donated more than $45,000 to legislators pushing anti-trans views, including in Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas. Mind you, some of these states have either pushed anti-trans bills or seen such legislation signed into law already. 

Another example is Walmart. Walmart is also a great case study of the way this issue plays out even beyond HRC’s rankings, which, to be fair, the average person likely isn’t going to look up before deciding where to put their dollars. As of now, Walmart has an online section with a number of Pride Month-themed items available. In terms of access and normalization, that’s perfectly fine. As Popular Information reports, however, Walmart also donated $43,000 to state lawmakers in Texas, North Carolina, and Arkansas. Specifically, $30,000 of that went to lawmakers in Arkansas who worked to push the bill then signed into law that bars gender-affirming health care for trans youth.

At the time of writing, neither UnitedHealth nor Walmart replied to Popular Information’s request for comment.

So, what can the average person do? Support small, local businesses when you can, even if you can’t always know their values. But when you can confirm, do! Go out of your way to search for Black-owned businesses, for example, or restaurants owned by openly LGBTQ+ folks. You look up artists on websites like Etsy for home or office decor, and so on. 

And if you can’t spend your dollars at marginalized-owned or operated places? That’s okay, too. Showing support with our dollars is a great mindset, but it’s also a privileged one. Not everyone can afford to shop small, and not everyone has geographic or literal access to do so, especially as the pandemic continues. If you can spend with your ethics in mind, do. If you can’t, remember to mobilize for structural, big-picture change when you can.