The Role of Big Business in LGBTQ+ Politics, Pt. 1: Gathering Tools from Our History

This summer, I had the joy of reading The Queering of Corporate America by Carlos A. Ball. In a time when it seems more and more American businesses are turning their backs on us, it was refreshing to learn just how instrumental the world of big business was in promoting and forwarding the LGBTQ+ rights movement. Throughout these two posts, I’d like to explore some of my key takeaways from the reading, what it could mean for our current movements, and hesitations and fears I have. 

Importantly, Ball’s book is thorough. I will not be touching on even half of the points he made. That’s why he wrote a full book on it! If you’d like to learn more about anything I mention here, I strongly recommend taking a look at his book.

Intro: Big business and LGBTQ+ equality  

Given how many current LGBTQ+ activists tend to view corporations as enemies, I was surprised to learn about the many ways businesses have been at the forefront of fights for queer/trans equality. Indeed, it’s practically undeniable that our movement wouldn’t be where it is today without the actions of corporations. 

On one hand, this shouldn’t be surprising. Corporations have for a long time been hugely influential in American politics (more on why later), so it makes sense that they would have been involved in such huge political shifts. On the other hand, corporations are usually seen as a conservative force stifling change, not beckoning it in. Reading this book complicated my understanding of the role businesses have historically played in fights for equality. 

Side note: I wanted to call this section “big business and LGBTQ+ liberation”. But, for all the work they’ve done, I don’t believe corporations have been promoting liberation, for us or for other folks. The fight for equality is not the same as the fight for liberation. More on this will be in the second part to this post. 

The book makes it abundantly clear that, without the support and pressure of corporations, key advancements like domestic partnership benefits, anti-discrimination protections, and marriage equality would not have happened as early as they did. It’s also clear that in many cases, corporations actually adopted these policies before they were legally obligated to do so. Often, it was their pressure that led to the creation and modification of those laws. 

Does this mean we should all be expressing our infinite gratitudes to these heavenly corporations? Absolutely not. As I mentioned earlier this year, we’ve seen that corporations are less reliable friends than we’d like them to be. But understanding how they helped us get where we are is important as we consider the tools we have in our continued fight. 

I’ve tried to choose a variety of examples here, but I want to note that Minnesota came up a lot in the book. As explained on page 178, they were the first state to prohibit gender-based employment discrimination, in 1993. It has also been the location of a lot of great social change and LGBTQ+ movements. 

The people behind the movements 

As significant as corporations have been for us, it’s equally vital to note that none of this change came out of the blue. CEOs didn’t wake up one day and go, “you know what, maybe LGBTQ+ people are… people?” Except for a few outliers (looking fondly at you, Ben & Jerry’s), this change always came out of extensive social pressure from both inside and outside organizations. 

Sometimes this pressure came from people involved with, but not empowered to make decisions for, organizations. One such example is Jack Baker, a gay law student at the University of Minnesota. In 1969, he pushed the school’s administration to form a committee which would draft policies governing corporate recruiters on campus, and made sure he was a member. 

Baker knew that explicitly pushing for anti-discrimination protection for LGBTQ+ folks wouldn’t go over well. But an indirect policy, such as the one the school adopted requiring that recruiters only hire based on factors directly related to job performance, could have a similar impact. At least one employer (Honeywell) changed their hiring criteria to be allowed to still recruit on campus. (pp. 33-34)

One could look at this outcome and say, “Honeywell made a good choice, we should praise them.” But that ignores all the steps it took to pressure them into that choice. It started with Baker—himself undoubtedly upheld by his own social network—forming a committee, then the people on that committee drafting a policy, then the policy getting approved… Like all things in the world of corporations, the process was drawn out and painfully bureaucratic. 

Another example: the first publicly-traded company in the US to offer domestic partnership benefits (DPBs) to their employees was the Lotus Development Corporation, in 1991. This program was started in 1989 when three lesbian Lotus employees formed the Lotus Extended Benefits Group, tirelessly pushing their employer for the same rights their heterosexual coworkers had. (pp. 105-108) 

Throughout the ‘90s, more and more companies would follow suit. As Ball says on page 101: 

“The adoption of DPBs by large corporations constituted the most important formal recognition of same-sex relationships and families in American society through the 1990s.” 

At the end of the day, these are both massive wins. So why does it matter who went into making them happen? 

Because when we see a change made by a corporation, we see a massive entity that seems untouchable to us. But both of these changes, and dozens more, started with just a few people—sometimes as little as one! Thanks to their efforts, the change spread outward, rippling through their department, then their organization, the employee handbook, the municipality, the state legislature, sometimes all the way up to the federal government. 

As much as it doesn’t feel like it right now, small pressures add up. Looking at the people behind the movements reminds us that we have more power than some would like us to think we do. 

Why target corporations? 

Corporations made (and continue to make) excellent targets for LGBTQ+ activists primarily for two reasons. First, they have massive amounts of wealth which they can use, and withhold, to affect local economies. Second, in order to maintain that wealth, they need to keep having customers, making them especially sensitive to bad press, boycotts, and other tools of change. 

Few examples demonstrate this more clearly than the Coors boycott, detailed on pages 50-57 of Ball’s book. I will spare you from my retelling of the entire story here, but the short version is as follows: 

In 1967, Latine activists started a boycott of Coors due to their horrible track record in hiring of racial minorities. In 1973, Coors refused to agree to a contract with Teamsters Local, leading many other groups to join the boycott—including LGBTTQ+ ones. Among other things, their policy of subjecting job candidates to a polygraph test wherein they asked about sexual orientation made them a juicy target. 

In 1978, Coors stopped this polygraph question. They also added sexual orientation to their nondiscrimination policy, and started hiring more Latine employees. In 1979, they became the first major American corporation to advertise in a gay magazine (the Advocate). 

Basically, the continued public pressure on Coors, coupled with their reduction in profit due to the boycott, led to substantial change. And once a company was won over as an LGBTQ+ ally, it was more likely they could be roped in to influence future fights. 
The Coors boycott is a great example not only because of its outcome, but because of its constituents: started by Latine activists, it ended up being supported by LGBTQ+ activists, labor groups, and more. Cross-movement solidarity enabled change in a large American corporation. We’d do well to remember this—we gain less by fighting alone than we do by fighting together.

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Corporations weren’t only good targets for change; they became good proponents of it as well. In the hugely influential Obergefell v. Hodges case, nearly 400 companies joined an amicus brief in support of striking down state laws prohibiting same-sex marriage. They used their social sway to encourage the courts to make the right call. 

Do you know how many for-profit corporations joined a brief on the opposing side? Precisely zero. (pp. 147-148). 

Their spending power, of course, is also what made them such effective allies. This became painfully clear in 2016, when North Carolina enacted a law that would, among other things, prohibit public agencies from allowing individuals to use bathrooms that did not align with their sex assigned at birth. Civil rights groups protested, and they called on their corporate allies to help. Nearly overnight, many came forward: 

• PayPal announced it was canceling a planned $3.6 million investment in a new center in Charlotte 
• CoStar backed out of an agreement to bring 700 jobs to the area 
• Deutsche Bank, Adidas, and Voxpro also took jobs elsewhere 
• More than 20 conventions in the state were canceled, for about $2.5 million in lost revenue 
• The NCAA relocated championship games 
• The NAACP called for an economic boycott of the state 

The result? In 2017, the law was repealed. (pp. 182-184) 

This was less than a decade ago. As they have for over a century, American corporations can have larger impacts on elections and politics than any individual can. 

But how is that knowledge helpful when it seems like corporations are moving against us? 

Because, as the last section showed, these changes aren’t made in unreachable vacuums. They are the result of lobbying by employees, activists, consumers, and more. 

At the end of the day, most corporations make decisions to protect and increase their bottom line. Right now, it might seem to them like there’s more profit to be had in abandoning us. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, activists showed them how wrong that assumption was. If we did it before, we can do it again. And this time, we already have some of them on our side. 

Food for thought

As I wrap up this part of the post, I want to reiterate some important points to take away, chew on, and consider how they may fit within your own activism. 

First, and perhaps most importantly, remember that individual voices still matter. It seems too easy to get drowned out in the tide of content and outcries washing over us every day. And the internet has changed how these movements network and make change. As with Jack Baker, though, sometimes it only takes one person to start a snowball that affects thousands. 

Even if you are not contributing to change on a national scale: influencing one person’s life is a monumental thing. We don’t give ourselves enough credit for helping on a small scale. Large-scale change is only possible through the combined efforts of loads of small-scale work. 

Secondly, we’ve changed the minds of corporations before. Hopefully you can see how powerful they are in political arenas, and the ways they’ve helped us make massive strides toward our own rights. They wouldn’t be my first choice of friend, but they are potentially useful tools in our kit. 

Third, remember that you’re not making the wheel from scratch. Books like Ball’s are only one part of a vast wealth of knowledge that our forebears hold from their own activism and experiences. Connecting with elders, learning from how things have passed before, is vital to our own wellbeing. 

Lastly, to pre-empt the second part of this post that will come later, I want to remind you that corporations are not always our friends. If we want to make truly long-lasting change—to pursue liberation instead of equal footing under an oppressive system—we will one day have to abandon them. But there are arguments to be made about working with them while we get on our feet. 

As I’ll discuss more next time, many corporations who were involved in public debates against anti-LGBTQ+ bills had financed the campaigns of the very politicians they were opposing. For now, I’ll leave you with this quote from Ball, page 185: 

“The continued corporate funding of anti-LGBTQ politicians exposes some of the important limits of corporate support for queer equality. It is essential, going forward, that LGBTQ activists pressure companies not only to oppose anti-LGBTQ bills after they are proposed, but also to cease giving money to politicians who sponsor and endorse these measures.”

Stay tuned for part two of this post, where I’ll connect these ideas to the work of Audre Lord and examine a jostling of my own anticapitalist politics. Have more thoughts or questions about the involvement of corporations in LGBTQ+ politics? I’d love to hear from you! Let me know in the comments on this post if you’re so inclined.

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