After losing several major sponsors and struggling with funding in 2025, S.F. Pride’s finances are back on track ahead of this year’s event on Saturday and Sunday, the organization said.
In 2025, S.F. Pride lost several high-profile sponsors, including Comcast, Diageo, and Anheuser-Busch, leaving the organization scrambling to fill a $300,000 hole in its budget. San Francisco was part of a wave of corporate withdrawals from Pride organizations across the country, which S.F. Pride director Suzanne Ford said was in response to the Trump administration’s anti-DEI campaigns.
Though other Pride organizations across the country have reported financial difficulties, the group’s director of sponsorships, Nguyen Pham, called the S.F. Pride’s 2026 outreach response “better than 2024.”
While some big names like Diageo and Anheuser-Busch haven’t returned, Pham said that long-time partners Kaiser Permanente and new backers like Philz Coffee and the San Francisco Opera have stepped in to fill the gap. “It seems like these large corporations are feeling the heat from their employee base and customers,” Pham said.
For S.F. Pride, rebuilding its funding portfolio is about rebuilding connections. “Regardless of the tenor of the conversations in a prior year, we will always extend the olive branch to invite people back in,” said Pham. “Last year, we were doing quite a bit of calling out. This was the year of calling in.”
Not everyone is enthusiastic about the return in force of corporate partnerships, though. Boof Pride, an independent ticketed event, critiqued the main organization on its event invitation as a “managed cultural event now brought to you in part by your bank, your airline, your health insurance provider, or lack thereof, and our party planner in chief, Mayor Lurie.” (Mayor Lurie appeared Thursday night at the Pride House World Cup Watch Party and spoke at the Pride Human Rights Summit.)
According to Boof, “the Bureau [of Boof] is not impressed.”
Boof, which was started in 2024, organizes parties and late-night events, describing itself as a “queer-led underground brand.” This year will be its first-ever Pride Weekend party, headlined by queer artists like Brooke Candy and NENE H. Promotional videos show dark, crowded rooms of dancers punctuated by lasers and overlaid with thumping music.
Matt Greenwald, one of the event’s co-creators, said that corporate sponsors “support in a way that feels sanitized and palatable for a straight audience.” Greenwald has mixed feelings about the main event, calling it “capitalistic,” and cited the selection of several non-queer artists and performers at this upcoming event. “Really, it’s more of a feeling than anything else,” he said about his view.
S.F. Pride is aware of criticisms about the “corporatization of Pride” and the transformation of Pride and LGBTQ+ marches into marketing events, according to Pham. Corporate sponsors run themed floats in the parade, and massive banners above the main stage at the parade display the main sponsor’s logo during all performances.
Some of this, Pham says, is inevitable. “Corporatization of Pride is a perennial conversation. To put on a very expensive free event requires a lot of capital, but we do want to make sure we center our community.” (Boof tickets are listed at $92.95, though the site says that financial assistance is available.)
S.F. Pride is making some effort to expand beyond its corporate sources of funding — last year, the organization launched a philanthropy program to accept donations for individuals and foundations, though it currently accounts for less than 10 percent of the event’s budget. Pham says this helps to “diversify the funding streams” and keep the event responsive to the community.
And sponsoring Pride is not a no-strings-attached advertising opportunity. “We do require a clause that requires [sponsors to] endorse our mission, and we have commitments in writing that [they] will protect the community with things like equal benefits [for their own employees],” Pham said.
Still, smaller, independent events like Boof provide an alternative. The main event, Greenwald said, is “the socially acceptable version of Pride.”
At Boof, he said, “We are going to push the envelope and do things that make straight people uncomfortable.”
“Ours is for the queer underground. It’s for the locals, it’s for the community, it’s not a tourist event,” Greenwald added. “We will never get the same level of recognition, but you have to fight for your own recognition.”
