(LifeSiteNews) – Tampa and Ft. Myers won’t be holding their yearly LGBTQ “Pride” events this year due to lack of donor funding, reflecting a national trend of declining corporate support for the celebration of perversion.
The board of Tampa Pride, the LGBTQ event in the largest city on Florida’s west coast, announced in a letter to its president that it would take a yearlong “hiatus” due to a funding shortfall, and that it was unable to renew his contract.
“The current political and economic climate, including challenges with corporate sponsorships, reductions in county, state and federal grant funding, and the discontinuation of DEI programs under Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has made it increasingly difficult for our organization to sustain ongoing operations for 2026,” stated the board in the letter, posted to Facebook.
The “pause” in funding, the board said, is needed for the group to “regroup, reassess our long-term strategy, and identify additional avenues of funding to secure the future stability of Tampa Pride events.”
Tampa Pride president Carrie West told WFLA that the decisive reason for the hiatus was the reduction or complete cancellation of donations from their largest sponsors.
Some of the most sizable donations dropped from $5,000 and $10,000 down to $1,000 or $2,000, according to West.
Tampa Pride will look for different funding sources or put on lower-cost events, WFLA reported.
West said it is not guaranteed that Tampa Pride will be able to resume events in 2027.
The Pride Southwest event held in Ft. Myers will also be cancelled this year, according to Michael Hange, a board member of Pride-SWFL, NBC News reported.
This cancellation is also due to lack of sponsor funds, said Adam Larivee, the president of LGBTQ nonprofit Visuality, which has long partnered with Pride Southwest Florida. Larivee said Visuality has agreed to merge with Pride-SWFL and spearhead the Pride event planning moving forward.
“The unfortunate part was we just didn’t have enough planning time for us to be able to put it on for 2025 so with that, we are shooting for 2026,” Larivee said.
The political administrative shift under President Donald Trump as well as public pressures have contributed to corporations’ decline in funding for LGBTQ initiatives. Pride events across the country have been recently canceled or scaled down due to such funding shortfalls.
New York City’s 2025 Pride parade lost a reported $750,000 in corporate sponsors, “Austin Pride” lost funding for its festival, and Oklahoma’s “Bartlesville Equality” has been canceled entirely, as a few examples.
“The forces that once propelled corporate America into the arms of L.G.B.T.Q. America have pivoted, retreating under the weight of political backlash and the calculus of risk aversion,” lamented Aaron Hicklin, former editor in chief of Out Magazine in a recent New York Times opinion piece.
Target, Mastercard, Anheuser-Busch, PepsiCo, Comcast, Citi Bank, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and other major corporations have all “slashed their Pride commitments this year,” according to Hicklin.
Recent years have seen concerted efforts to infuse business, entertainment, academia, and more with left-wing ideological stands to an unprecedented degree, sparking political and customer backlashes that have translated to business woes for companies such as Disney and Bud Light. Over the past two years, Amazon, Walmart, Target, McDonald’s, Jack Daniel’s, John Deere, Tractor Supply, Lowe’s, Toyota, and Coors have all dropped “woke” corporate policies in response to public pressure.
