Pride Month is just around the corner, and a somewhat surprising contender has entered the race for pink dollars — Target.
Many LGBTQ+ people have wondered what the retail giant might do to acknowledge Pride this year, or if they would at all. The company has been sliding into the past in recent years after first bowing to bigots who spent the summer of 2023 threatening employees and toppling over displays until Target abruptly took down a lot of its Pride merch across U.S. stores.
In 2024, the store followed up its cowardly decision with even more cowardice, only stocking Pride merch in about half its U.S. locations. When it became one of the first companies to announce a rollback of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives after Donald Trump’s January inauguration, it became clear that any previous claims to support the LGBTQ+ community had been empty.
Of course, that decision had consequences. Target has been struggling in recent months, with a May report from Fortune noting the company has not only had 11 weeks straight of declining traffic in stores, but also fell short of its earning predictions this past quarter by almost half a billion dollars.
Perhaps that’s why Target decided a Pride collection was a good idea after all. While we don’t have any insider information regarding whether this was always part of the plan (as it admittedly has been in the past), it certainly feels rushed. Viral videos and images taken by in-store shoppers show multiple Pride items with tags featuring placeholder text.
Some folks have also pointed out that the online listings for Target's Pride collection are explicitly marketed towards adults. Every single piece of clothing is marked for "Adults," without a single item made for kids. Even the accessories, which could easily be more broadly inclusive of all ages, have "Adult" written into the listings.
This shouldn't come as a surprise, considering that homophobes have previously thrown viral temper tantrums about anything kid-related at Target that had even a whiff of rainbow to it — regardless of whether it had anything to do with Pride or not. God forbid children wear anything colorful, lest someone think they’re, you know.
We have to wonder whether this conservative backlash also played a role in the way Target is approaching rainbows in general with this year’s collection. There’s usually something fun about taking some creative licensing with rainbow merch, but Target seems largely determined to push things just far enough that most people may not even recognize the color scheme as rainbow at all.
Some of their items use too many colors, like this "All Are Welcome Here" welcome mat that technically features some ROY G. BIV while still managing to not look rainbow-adjacent whatsoever. Others just conceal the rainbow really, really well, like this confusing black top with a teen tiny bit of color at the very bottom that could easily be mistaken for an image glitch.
Most of Target’s Pride collection, though, just goes extremely hard on beige.
Some of these items — including the beige sandals and beige bag — look like they could be sold at any point in the year without any sort of Pride bent.
The beige dishes, at least, feature a rainbow theme that actually manages to look like rainbow coloring. But there's something about them that still screams "we really, really hope the wrong people aren't going to notice this!"
Then there's the issue of what's actually present in stores vs online. On TikTok, @underthedesknews pointed out that a number of the more blatantly Pride-themed items appear to only be sold online. And an in-store display shared by one X user offers a glimpse into the blink-and-you'll-miss-it reality of what Pride Month may look like in some Targets across the country this year.
The whole collection is about as underwhelming as one might expect, considering Target's actions over the past few years. But that doesn't make it any less disappointing — or any less pathetic. As much as many LGBTQ+ folks have scoffed at corporations for pulling out the rainbow merch during June as a cash grab, it still meant something to see those bold displays in parts of the country where such a thing would have been unfathomable even five to ten years earlier.
If Target wants to try to both appease the bigots while cashing in on Pride, based on what they've got going on here, it doesn't seem likely to be much of a success. But if literally nothing else, I guess at least they gave us these weird gay birds.
