- Fingers
- Posts
- Big Booze is over the rainbow
Big Booze is over the rainbow
Plus: Tracking the RNDC CA supplier exodus!
Dave Infante
June 18, 2025
For much of the past decade and a half, corporations have scheduled lavish Pride Month sponsorships, marketing campaigns, and bRaNd AcTiVaTiOnS each June in hopes of coopting the so-called “pink dollar” and showcasing supposedly progressive bona fides to their workforces, communities, et cetera. Alcohol brands in particular cozied up LGBTQ+ people in less politically fraught times, because they're solid customers and drag queens make for good ads. Maybe other reasons, too, who knows. This is called “rainbow capitalism” and critics on both the left and right deride it as a performative, cynical ploy. But Pride Parades are expensive, money is money, and checks from big brewers, winemakers, and distillers tend to clear.
There’s actually a fairly long tradition of rainbow capitalism in the American beer industry. It dates back at least to the late 20th century, when then-still independent Coors Brewing Company began throwing money at queer community groups (among others) across the country to offset the negative sales impacts of the extremist right-wing politics and oppressively anti-labor management practices of its eponymous family owners. A few years ago, I interviewed Allyson Brantley, Ph.D., associate professor of history at southern California’s University of La Verne and author of Brewing a Boycott, about Coors’ early efforts at rainbow capitalism, which ironically put it at “the forefront of corporate social responsibility” before such a thing even really had a name. Beginning in the early Eighties, Brantley said (emphasis mine):
They adapt the way they market their product. They do that both through superficial, kind of cutesy marketing campaigns, and through committing actually hundreds of millions of dollars to communities of color, to women’s organizations, even to the gay community during the AIDS crisis. So, we see a company that actually eventually pivots the way that it deals with the community boycotters. [The boycotters] mostly see that as, in their words, “bullshit,” as a mostly cosmetic shift. But Coors really leads the way in these kinds of community engagement efforts by the 1980s.
So even if one of the country’s largest brewers didn’t invent it outright, for better or worse rainbow capitalism has a fairly direct link to the corporate history of US bev-alc. Whether it has a future in those halls of power as the country convulses with bigoted spasms of violence provoked by a president intent on bending Big Business to his reactionary will is an open question. But in the present… well, it ain’t looking great.
Reply