Pride - Trying To Be Principled While Being For-Profit

Surrounding the well-wishes and displays of allyship in Pride month, some criticisms come as a response that questions the validity, intentions and mechanisms behind these displays. When we see companies that are otherwise silent in social discourse suddenly promoting their allyship with the LGBTQ+ community during June, it's easy to feel a knee-jerk cynicism, eye-rolling at capitalism commodifying yet another noble action. On the other hand, it does a legitimate good in ally visibility so the net-positive might ultimately outweigh the negative, though that remains to be seen.

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Without trumpeting our virtue, we as a company try to be conscientious not only about what we support but the how and the why of our support as well. If you follow us on other social media platforms you’ll see that we shared a post supporting LGBTQ+ Pride; a post vulnerable to the same criticisms regarding intention and capitalist mechanisms.?

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Honestly, our support is authentic and synonymous with our mission values - but it is also a piece of marketing that serves our capitalist interests. If an alternative world meant being a visible LGBTQ+ ally was suddenly not commercially rewarding, we sincerely believe that we would still be a visible ally. Yet the market risks would also provoke internal conversations about that visibility and the extent to which we are visible. This is the undeniable reality of principles within capitalism.?

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But why the pontificating? Even as a start-up, we have a strong sense of who we are and the principles that guide us. But our morals can conflict with our for-profit nature. When we post about supporting Pride we also have to question the means with which we support it and what it means for a capitalist company to be a legitimate ally. And does that change when members of the LGBTQ+ community are among our primary market demographics? What if one of our most profitable products could put members of said community at risk??

Tourism is one of our primary sources of revenue; the LGBTQ+ community is one of our primary target markets; we have tourism packages in locations that, while not entirely defined by their pasts, have histories of being hostile towards the LGBTQ+ community. So what is our approach in these situations? How does intersectionality play a role in our approach? Can we do something to minimise risk? Do we even entertain compromise and push the sale to begin with??

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We’ll never push that kind of sale, and while that acknowledgement might be the closest this post will come to the virtue signalling it's trying to avoid, we wanted to be honest about the duality of trying to be principled while being for-profit. We’re trying to be transparent in our approach to not only allyship but being a for-profit entity in general, being capitalist in a world that needs more decency than it does capitalist mechanisms. And yes, acknowledging that this post could be seen as one such capitalist mechanism, as a posturing self-aware thinkpiece that is more about seeming virtuous and deep than trying to break out of commodifying patterns. And even that acknowledgement could be interpreted the same way, and on and on.?

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Ultimately, you can only do what you think is right and do your best to be detached from the interpretations of others, which you have little control over to begin with and is beside the point. Because this month is about Pride and allyship and visibility and while we want to be nuanced in how we approach that allyship, we don’t want to detract from it.?

So we would like to wish everyone, regardless of their journey, a Happy Pride.

In the spirit of conversation we’d like to prompt you with the scenario: if you, a for-profit company, knew for certain that being publicly pro-LGBTQ+ would hurt your bottom line, would you

1) only be internally/privately pro-LGBTQ+ but not publicly?

2) do nothing, privately or publicly? or

3) be publicly pro-LGBTQ+, regardless of the financial impact??

Even if you don’t have an answer we’d encourage you to think out loud in the comments.