This is a questionable assertion at best. As I've written about in the past, LGBTQ advocates have encouraged Budweiser boycotts for a long time, on the grounds that Budweiser doesn't have any morals it's sticking to.
A rather huge boycott controversy flared up during the Moscow Fifa World Cup 4 years ago when Budweiser poured money into Russia for the tournament while Russia was actively cooperating with their semi-autonomous Chechen client state to torture and kill gay people for being gay. (Russian police even delivered some Chechen gay people who had fled to Leningrad and Moscow back to Chechnya where they were tortured and killed.)
Ironically, Budweiser was sponsoring official New York City Pride events at the same time they were supporting a regime that was committing atrocities against queer people.
Activists like me raised absolute bloody murder over it. We exposed Budweiser's immoral and hypocritical behavior as we demanded that they stop supporting the games in Russia.
They didn't stop supporting the games and making money from the games, but their social media campaigns mentioning the games went silent.
Fast forward to one year ago when the owners of the celebrated Stonewall Inn in New York City dumped out kegs of Budweiser products into the street, participating in a more general queer boycott of Budweiser over their contributions to U.S. state and federal political leaders working to pass anti-LGBTQ laws.
Why focus on Budweiser?
Budweiser is famous for sponsoring Pride events. They were one of the first corporate sponsors for Pride events.
They've been working hard for a very long time to make Budweiser fashionable among queer people. That's a profitable thing for them to do, and quite a marketing challenge considering that the beer is of extraordinarily low quality and poor taste.
But let's not confuse that with Budweiser corporate leaders having some kind of sense of morality. They clearly do not. They fund anti-LGBTQ politicians to rather enormous sums, they sponsor all sorts of events like the Moscow games without respect to atrocities against queer people.
That's not morality, it's opportunism.
That's not to say that I don't recognize that some sort of good can come from corporations marketing to us. That sort of thing can tend to normalize acceptance.
But we need to be very clear-eyed about why corporations market to us. And I don't think the morality of their leaders often has much or anything to do with it. I'm sure some of Budweiser's corporate leadership is composed of good, decent people. But, fundamentally, they are a corporation doing what corporations do, making money. The corporation as a whole does not let morality interfere with that central goal.
We should not let ourselves be fooled into believing otherwise.
