Corporate participation in LGBTQ+ inclusion dropped sharply this year while the people actually spending money moved the opposite direction. That gap is the whole story, and it's why we wrote down exactly where we stand instead of leaving it implied.
The numbers don’t agree with the retreat
In February, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation released its 2026 Corporate Equality Index. Fortune 500 participation fell 65 percent year over year, from 377 companies in 2025 down to 131 in 2026. Total participation across all companies still landed at 1,450, and 534 of them earned a perfect score, representing roughly six million U.S. employees. So the floor didn’t collapse. But thousands of companies that used to raise their hand to be measured on LGBTQ+ workplace policy quietly stopped raising it.
"Our research shows the strength and the strain of this moment on LGBTQ+ workers, consumers, and the companies that count on us," said Kelley Robinson, President of the Human Rights Campaign.
Here’s the part that should give every one of those companies pause. GLAAD’s 2026 Pride Poll, a nationally representative survey of just over five thousand U.S. adults conducted by MRI-Simmons this spring, found that 68 percent of Americans agree brands should show support for the LGBTQ community during Pride. Seventy-six percent said they trust brands more when those brands stick to their values, even when a stance is controversial. Seventy-three percent think CEOs should speak up on issues that affect their customers and shareholders.
Companies read the political weather and pulled back. The people who buy their products read the same weather and want the opposite.
What "optional" actually costs
This isn’t a values argument dressed up as a business argument. It’s a business argument on its own terms. LGBTQ+ consumers hold an estimated $1.4 trillion in spending power in the United States and $3.9 trillion globally, according to Human Rights Campaign Foundation research. And that spending power moves in a direction: 71.5 percent of LGBTQ+ consumers say they reduce spending at companies they perceive as scaling back inclusion commitments, and 69.5 percent say they increase spending with companies they see as maintaining or strengthening them. LGBTQ+ consumers were roughly twice as likely as non-LGBTQ+ consumers to refuse a purchase from a company retreating on inclusion, and nearly twice as likely to increase spending with one that isn’t.
“Authenticity and consistency build community trust with brands. Companies that embrace that playbook earn lasting loyalty, stronger reputations, and better long”
term business results." — Kelley Robinson, President, Human Rights Campaign
That word, consistency, is the whole problem with how most brands still approach this. A campaign built for one month of visibility and then quietly retired isn’t a stance. It’s a costume.
The rainbow logo problem, still
We wrote about this in 2023, when it was already a cliché to point out. It’s 2026, and the same critique still lands, which tells you how little actually changed underneath the surface. A brand that changes its logo colors every June and changes nothing else, not hiring practices, not vendor relationships, not what it’s willing to say in a boardroom, isn’t participating in Pride. It’s borrowing the aesthetics of a community it hasn’t done anything to earn trust with.
GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis put it plainly when the 2026 poll results came out: "These results confirm what most Americans already believe: we are at our best when we treat our friends, family, and neighbors with basic dignity and respect." That’s not a marketing insight. It’s the baseline. The marketing insight is that treating people with basic dignity and respect, consistently, is also what builds the kind of brand trust that survives a bad news cycle.
Our standard
We don’t get to lecture other brands on this without holding ourselves to something specific. So here’s what we actually commit to, and what we’d tell any client building a campaign that touches LGBTQ+ audiences.
Show up in July too. If the only month your brand mentions LGBTQ+ people is the one with a parade in it, that’s a media buy, not a value. The work should be visible in the other eleven months, even if it’s quieter.
Put queer people in the work, not just the caption. Casting, crew, and creative leadership on a campaign that claims to represent a community are part of whether that representation is real. A campaign about a community, made entirely by people outside it, reads exactly like what it is.
Fund it past the logo. A rainbow filter costs nothing and commits to nothing. Real commitment shows up as hiring practices, vendor and partner relationships, and where the company’s money actually goes, not just where its Instagram grid points for four weeks.
If it’s not safe to say twice, don’t say it once. A stance you’ll quietly drop the moment it gets uncomfortable was never a stance. It was a bet that nobody would notice when you walked it back. People notice.
What this looks like inside HAUS
I lead people and culture here, which means I’m the one who has to make sure what we say publicly matches what happens internally, not just for clients but for our own team. That’s a harder standard to meet than a well-written paragraph. We don’t always get it perfect. But the test we hold ourselves to is simple: would someone who works here, or whose community we’re representing in a campaign, look at the finished work and feel like we actually saw them, not just their market segment.
“A campaign built for one month and retired the next isn’t a stance. It’s a costume, and people can tell the difference now more than they ever could before.”
Camille Fontaine, Director of People & Culture, HAUS XXIV
