Comcast, Anheuser-Busch, and booze conglomerate Diageo are among the corporations that are backing away from supporting San Francisco's LGBTQ Pride celebrations this year, marking some shameful fair-weather-friend behavior in a time of frightening fascist action.

Corporate sponsorship, and the concept of "pink-washing" during Pride season, have become increasingly controversial in recent years. Social media posts often remind the community that "Pride was a riot" originally, and an angry political protest, decades before it became the rainbow-filled, sanitized parade with scantily clad gay men on floats, and corporations showing their ally-ship with big contingents of employees.

Still, the Pride Parade and Civic Center celebration cost money to produce, and can't happen without those sponsorships, and some companies are turning tail this year.

SF Pride Executive Director Suzanne Ford said in an interview with KTVU over the weekend that the loss of sponsor money from Comcast, Anheuser-Busch, and Diageo, along with local wine brand La Crema — which is own by Jackson Family Wines — adds up to around $300,000. This is one-quarter of the $1.2 million that SF Pride still needs to raise to put on this year's celebration, and for which her fundraising team will need to be more creative, and seek out new donors.

"The tone has changed in this country. Businesses already hedge their bets, and I think people who, this isn't their hard core value of their corporation, maybe they're rethinking their investment," Ford tells KTVU.

One culprit, Ford says, is likely Trump's war on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs — and of course there's also the administration's all-out war to erase the existence of trans people.

News of these sponsor losses comes a week after Ford announced that SF Pride continues to have no relationship with Meta — a split that began in 2024, and seemed to be instigated by SF Pride, amid Mark Zuckerberg's ongoing shift rightward.

"I’m both proud and sad that we don’t have a relationship with Meta," Ford told ABC 7 two weeks ago. "That was discontinued last year. So, at this moment, and I don't see it being rectified, Meta will not be included."

Ford earlier said that, at Meta, "Most or all of our internal contacts, queer employees, are gone."

Ford further explained that most corporate sponsors had been relegated to the rear of the parade, and sponsors like Google, who will still be involved this year, will have a smaller presence than before.

"Only our... top sponsors are in the first third of the parade," Ford told the station "In the front of the parade, we feature our nonprofits here in San Francisco, especially the queer nonprofits."

The change came after a couple of pre-pandemic years in which enormous contingents of Apple and Google employees would occupy so much space in the parade that they alone would take an hour to pass by.

The theme of this year's Pride celebration is "Queer Joy Is Resistence," and Ford told ABC 7 of the theme, "We're not saying 'just have a good time and forget [what is happening].'"

This year's Pride Parade will happen on Sunday, June 29, with the Civic Center celebration kicking off the previous day. The SF Trans March, which has grown every year since it began, is scheduled for Friday, June 27.

And this year's parade and other events will be coming with added security costs, as Ford told the media last month. Last year's Pride cost $3.2 million to produce, over $600,000 of which was security costs, which are expected to go up this year amide rising hate speech and tensions about LGBTQ rights.

Previously: SF Pride Looking to Bolster Security for 2025 Celebration, Anticipating ‘More Threats’ as Hate Speech Rises