Decision to drop oil giants from LGBT Award sponsors is a sign of hope

The LGBT Pride Awards, which took place on Friday, June 23, removed BP and Shell as event sponsors just days before it was due to take place, as a result of pressure from activists.

Fossil Free Pride, which calls for Pride events to drop links to the fossil fuel industry and the financial institutions who fund it, began contacting nominees earlier this month to raise concerns. This prompted a range of attendees to pull out, including comedian Joe Lycett, the Queer Britain museum, and drag artist Divina de Campo.

In response, the organisers said they were “saddened” that some of the nominees and judges had “decided to distance themselves from the awards”, but agreed to drop the oil giants from their list of supporters and said they would be looking at their “long-term strategy” after the event to consider “sustainability and the ethics of who we choose to partner with”.

This is a small victory, but it’s exactly the kind of victory that will be needed if organisers are to learn that there is simply no reconciliation to be made between promoting equality or justice for LGBTQ+ people, on the one hand, whilst promoting multinationals responsible for the deeply unequal and unjust destruction of our planet, on the other.

This is a choice that has to be made – it can’t be both – and this week, queer and climate activists have joined forces to ensure the dial turns in the right direction, even if by a fraction.

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This gives me hope because it demonstrates that by working together and calling attention to the very real links between various forms of oppression and the corporate greed blighting our world, we can make a difference for all of us.

As always, there have been some voices who have been less pleased about this turn of events; those who perceive the focus on climate change as an unwelcome distraction from the issue at hand.

In an op-ed for LGBTQ+ women’s magazine, Diva, its publisher Linda Riley described the boycott as “social media virtue-signalling” and an example of an “appalling cancel culture that is plaguing our community”.

Instead, she suggested that people “devote a little more time to challenging the atrocities of the far right who are actively campaigning to destroy the LGBTQIA community”.

This viewpoint is woefully short-sighted and narrow-minded. It suggests that queer people such as myself should operate with tunnel vision, concerned only with tackling homophobia or transphobia – as if it were possible to neatly separate these elements of our existence from the wider social and political structures in which we find ourselves.

Speaking of virtue-signalling, does anyone remember that moment, right before the pandemic, when everyone was talking about the urgency of addressing the “climate emergency”? Funnily enough, the urgency hasn’t lessened, yet it’s clear that many people’s attention spans and tolerance for inconvenience have plummeted.

Meanwhile, those affected by multiple inequalities are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and much of the inequality faced by LGBTQ+ people finds its roots in the same ideologies and systems that have allowed climate denialism and apathy to thrive.

The drive towards infinite profit-making, the protection of grossly imbalanced power structures, and the control of working populations, all of which define our hyper-capitalist world, are the prime culprits behind climate change and the lack of action to stop it.

So too have these oppressive priorities been the basis for compulsory heterosexuality – the promotion of the traditional, nuclear family, in which the husband is primarily responsible for earning and the wife for childrearing – and the social punishment of anyone who disrupts those norms.

The determination of patriarchal, capitalist power to protect and reproduce itself is exactly why those who step outside of their expected sexual and gender roles have been viewed as such a threat.

We may have come a long way, in some parts of the world, with regards to where the boundaries of acceptable gendered behaviour and expression have been drawn, but make no mistake that boundaries remain.

We only need to look at the concerted, coordinated, and downright vicious backlash against the acceptance of trans people, and the way this has quickly engulfed all LGBTQ+ people, to understand just how fiercely those boundaries are still defended.

Indeed, the long tradition of radical politics amongst LGBTQ+ activists and theorists can in part be explained by the fact that, once you start to question and interrogate these particular norms, many other aspects of the social and political order we are expected to blindly adhere to will quickly start to unravel.

When we consider the increasingly right-wing, draconian policies being enacted by governments in many parts of the world, not least the UK, it should be abundantly clear that issues of racial, economic, environmental, disability and gender justice all form part of the same, tightly interwoven tapestry. Any form of meaningful queer liberation will have to confront and reckon with these power structures in all their interconnected complexity.

There are those on both the right and the left who seek to paint the struggle for LGBTQ+ equality as an individualistic and frivolous one, devoid of any relationship to wider movements for social and structural change. This is a perspective lacking in historical or present-day awareness of much of the work of queer activists, and it’s one which serves – whether intentionally or not – to undermine progress on our rights and inclusion.

However, there are and probably always will be those who do believe that the route to equality for LGBTQ+ people – or in some cases, only LGB people – is to solemnly vow to challenge nothing in the systems around us and to ask only that people simply be a bit nicer to us and maybe stick a rainbow flag on things once a year. If we ever needed proof that this kind of equality is precarious and superficial at best, recent months and years have provided it.

In some ways, the approach of many mainstream institutions to LGBTQ+ equality has a lot in common with their approach to climate change – they’re prepared to pay lip service, right up to the point where they’re expected to pay in any other way. Meanwhile, we’re expected to be just stupid enough to believe that actually counts for something, and go about our business as usual.

The phrase “you’ll have had your liberation”, comes to mind.

Let’s not kid ourselves that there is any value in the LGBTQ+ “allyship” espoused by companies like Shell, BP, and Amazon, run by billionaires who would quite literally rather burn the world and drive people from their homes than give up one penny of the resources they seek to extract from our earth and the people in it. I’m not sure who coined the phrase, but in the words of many queer climate activists: “There is no Pride on a dead planet.”

Accepting sponsorship from such blatantly unethical companies for LGBTQ+ events not only enables them to falsely present themselves as progressive, it utterly disintegrates any pretence of Pride as protest – at a time when we need to be protesting more than ever before.

It’s often said that to create real change, we need to band together and ignore our differences. Rather, I would argue that we need to band together and recognise our differences – because for as long as we look at only one aspect of the problems facing our world, we might as well be banging our heads against a brick wall, when we could be tearing down the foundations and building something better.

I began this column by saying that I felt optimistic. My hope is based not on naivety, but necessity. I believe that many more of us are quickly realising that working together to alter the destructive course of our civilisation is no longer a choice – it’s the only choice.