Cincinnati Pride: Cowardice, Complicity, and the Fight for Liberation
Cincinnati Pride's Descent
In 2013, Cincinnati Pride became a registered nonprofit, officially entering the nonprofit-industrial complex. What followed was not a transformation into a community institution, but a corporate rebrand — the birth of an event tailored for donors, not the people.
Over the last decade, Pride has been professionalized and depoliticized: paid staff, marketing partnerships, VIP tickets, security trainings with the FBI. Pride is no longer a grassroots expression of queer struggle. It has become a PR-friendly festival designed to keep us passive and "proud," but only so long as we make no demands.
This is not unique to Cincinnati, but Cincinnati Pride represents a particularly stark case of the broader national trend: the sanitization of radical history to better accommodate cops, corporations, and already-comfortable liberals.
We must say this clearly: Pride is a riot. It is a resistance movement born from poor Black, Brown, trans, and queer people — many of them sex workers — fighting back against police terror. Today, Cincinnati Pride actively collaborates with repressive forces, participates in federal security training, and enforces non-engagement policies with protesters. The same federal agencies that surveil and infiltrate social movements — from Black liberation to Palestinian solidarity — are welcomed with open arms at an event supposedly meant to honor queer resistance.
Instead of protecting the community, Cincinnati Pride now polices it.
Complicity and Censorship: What Are You Hiding?
This is the first year Cincinnati Pride's board members and major donors are hidden from public view and completely scrubbed from their website. Their lack of transparency comes after their organization experienced public backlash in 2024 for receiving the majority of their funding from corporations that actively contribute to Palestinian genocide.
Cincinnati Pride now markets itself as opposing corporations that are rolling back DEI initiatives, but clearly they are more interested in playing respectability politics than they are in resisting DEI rollback. Keeping the names of these donors hidden is not only an attempt to shield those donors from public scrutiny, but also to protect Cincinnati Pride itself from criticism.
According to the Cincinnati Pride website:
"We ask that all prospective sponsors demonstrate transparency in their values and show their commitment to supporting LGBTQ+ rights and initiatives through both policy and action... Effective for 2025, Cincinnati Pride seeks partnerships with organizations... [that] understand the positive influence of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace and society."
Apparently, corporations that support and benefit from the genocide of Palestinians — including LGBTQ+ Palestinians — understand the "positive influence of equity in society,” as long as they keep their DEI programs intact.
The shallowness of this stance shouldn't come as a surprise; the organization has a history of accepting donations from companies with ties to Israel as recently as 2024. They draw the line at allowing sponsors who have recently halted DEI programs (which were little more than corporations paying lip service to appease liberal customers). However, no line is drawn when it comes to allowing sponsors that directly benefit from Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and/or who have actively suppressed pro-Palestinian sentiments, such as Procter & Gamble (P&G), Thermo-Fisher Scientific, Gilead Sciences, US Bank, Nestle, L'Oréal, Delta, and Starbucks.
If that wasn't enough, former and current members of the Cincinnati Pride Board have a history of smearing pro-Palestinian activists, including anti-Zionist Jewish people, by weaponizing antisemitism and furthering the harmful narrative that Zionism is equivalent to Judaism. The organization also works with Jewish Family Services which sends money to The Jewish Agency for Israel.
Who Do You Work For?
Cincinnati Pride's collaboration with law enforcement agencies is a disgrace and a betrayal of Pride's legacy. The organization uses “safety concerns” to justify the police presence at their Pride festival and parade, even though cops threatening queer safety is the very reason Pride began in the first place.
Police raiding and destroying queer safe spaces in New York City in 1969 is what led Martha P. Johnson to throw that notorious first brick. Now, Cincinnati Pride (and most other cities' Pride festivals) welcome the cops with open arms.
On their website, Cincinnati Pride is proud to admit that members of their team have “talked regularly with local, county, and federal agencies, including the Cincinnati Police Department and the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation)... [and] have attended training offered by the FBI and DHS (Department of Homeland Security).” Let this sink in: Cincinnati Pride staff have been TRAINED BY the very law enforcement agencies that proudly stand for and uphold the same capitalist systems that oppress the queer community. The tone-deafness and hypocrisy of this is astounding.
Cincinnati Pride has a non-engagement policy when it comes to protestors, requesting that attendees not engage with them at the events. This would, presumably, include people protesting for Palestine and anyone protesting against the presence of cops and corporations in Pride. Once again, this is an incredibly hypocritical stance to take, considering the very first pride WAS a protest.
Pride began as a riot against the police and systemic oppression; now, Pride month is made up of parades and festivals that are backed by corporations and the bourgeoisie, and surveilled by the FBI and the cops. Although Cincinnati Pride claims that working with the Cincinnati Police Department (CPD) will help keep attendees safe, it is clear from CPD’s own actions — such as, quite recently, the murder of Ryan Hinton and the arrest of anti-ICE protestors — that they (like all cops) do not exist to protect community safety.
Financial Priorities
This year in particular, Cincinnati Pride is emphasizing their reliance on donations and free labor in order to ensure the major events can take place as planned. They do so while ignoring demands from queer folks in the community who call for an end to corporate Pride sponsorships, and who say that Pride should honor its revolutionary roots.
Meanwhile, in order to have access to air conditioned bathrooms, cooling zones, and seating areas during the Pride festival, attendees have to pay $100 for VIP tickets.
In 2024, Cincinnati Pride donated $17,000 in grants to organizations making an impact in the queer community which would be great if it wasn't less than 3% of their yearly budget. Almost half of Cincinnati Pride's $593,227 revenue came from corporations. 78% of Cincinnati Pride's total expense for the year went directly to the Pride parade and festival.
$94,955 or 16.2% of their revenue went to "Equipment Rental."
$70,740 or 12% went to "Police/Security/Emergency Services."
$66,097 or 14.4% went to "Entertainment."
$44,471 or 7.6% went to "Venue."
$34,385 or 5.8% went to "Advertisement."
$14,686 or 2.5% went to "VIP Expenses."
We must consider the ways in which such a hefty budget could be used to benefit the local queer community more tangibly. Such tactics could include mutual aid programs, rent assistance, gender-affirming surgery funds, community health clinics, and housing support. The money Cincinnati Pride has raised through community fundraising (which they are relying on in lieu of the dropped corporate sponsors) could have an immense impact on the lives of LGTBQ+ Cincinnatians — particularly those who are poor, disabled, or facing housing insecurity — beyond just providing a 1-day party for the community.
This is Not Liberation
Pride has become nothing more than a circus, a distraction from the dreary lives the bourgeois ruling class has created for us the rest of the year and thus is just a temporary distraction. The ruling classes of all eras have used the bait of free bread and circuses, free food and entertainment, in order to lull the poor and working classes into a false sense of security and happiness. With out any element of protest against the prevailing economic and social structures, Pride has become nothing more than another arm on the ruling class's growing leviathan.
Whether you're a cop, a corporation, or a career politician, you're welcomed and encouraged to come to Pride, but if you're a homeless person, a protestor, or just someone trying to educate on issues that are interconnected to queer issues, you're barred, banned and actively repressed by the people putting on this modern circus. Modern Pride events have no tangible, meaningful demands for liberation or community care whether for the queer community they claim to represent or for anyone else in the city who are actively crying out for some form of aid.
Cincinnati Pride is nothing more than a big party that the cops and corporations put their stamp of approval on. If Marsha P. Johnson was alive today, she would not be in the VIP area; she'd be throwing bricks. We need a Pride that fights for real change, not just for the community they claim to represent, but for every community in this city. The queer community needs more and better housing, jobs, healthcare, asylum, bodily autonomy, and safety, not just visibility alone.
Our Demands
We demand:
Immediate transparency: Full public disclosure of all sponsors, board members, and budget allocations.
Accountability: Cincinnati Pride must acknowledge its mistakes in prior years, especially 2024, and take a firm stance against Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians.
An immediate end to any an all collaboration with repressive forces such as the CPD, FBI, DHS, and IDF.
No more VIP for basic survival: use funds to support mutual aid, housing, medical care, and community defense, not misting fans for the rich.
Return Pride to the people: Community decision-making power over Pride programming, leadership, and partnerships. No more corporate control, no more elite access, no more censorship.
Queer Liberation is Revolutionary
Cincinnati Pride cannot serve two masters. You cannot claim to fight for queer liberation while bowing to capital, police, and empire.
You must choose.
Pride was never meant to be a parade of rainbow logos and controlled messaging. It was, and must be again, a site of struggle — for housing, health, equity, and collective liberation. We call on the people of Cincinnati to boycott this year's corporate pride and help build something better.
We are still here. We are still fighting, and we are not for sale.