Pride began as a protest, but decades of growth have transformed many events into large festivals involving major stages, corporate sponsors, security operations and hundreds of thousands of visitors. Now, Pride organisers in Great Britain and elsewhere are facing a difficult question: how can they remain community-led and politically relevant while finding enough money to survive?
This August 2026 BBC article, ‘Why Pride is facing a backlash – from inside and outside the LGBT community‘, was showed to me on Facebook.
The debate is particularly visible in the United Kingdom, where some councils have withdrawn financial or symbolic support, companies have become more cautious about associating themselves with Pride, and LGBTQIA+ campaigners have criticised the growing commercialisation of major events. At the same time, disagreements over trans rights and concerns about security have added to the pressure.
The financial problems can be seen most clearly in Manchester. What began as a small community event in 1985 eventually became a four-day city-centre festival featuring international stars. Its expansion attracted criticism over ticket prices and the withdrawal of funding for some charities. The company behind Manchester Pride went into voluntary liquidation in 2025, owing more than £1 million to suppliers and performers. A new not-for-profit organisation, Manchester Village Pride, has since emerged with a smaller, more community-focused festival.
Other British Prides face similar pressures. London has been criticised for becoming overcrowded and overly corporate, while Brighton has struggled with the cost of concerts, security and the impact of the festival on local residents. At the same time, corporate support is weakening. Analysis cited by the BBC found that mentions of Pride by Britain’s ten biggest listed or headquartered companies on social media fell by 92% between 2023 and 2025.
The retreat of corporate sponsors creates a paradox. Companies were once criticised for rainbow-washing, using Pride imagery primarily as a marketing tool — but their withdrawal can leave organisers with a substantial financial hole. LGBT Foundation chief executive Paul Martin said the global retreat from corporate diversity initiatives was making it increasingly difficult for Pride organisers to balance their books.
Antwerp faces the same tension
Antwerp Pride illustrates the dilemma particularly clearly. The Belgian event has grown into one of the region’s largest public events, attracting an estimated 170,000 people in 2026. Yet its organisers say its finances remain fragile.
Antwerp Pride needs close to €1 million to stage the event. According to figures reported by De Tijd, expenditure rose from about €330,000 in 2022 to more than €924,000 in 2026. The organisation has only one employee and depends heavily on volunteers, while public subsidies cover only a relatively small part of its costs.
The Flemish government contributes €25,000 annually, the City of Antwerp €30,000, the federal government €5,000 and the National Lottery €25,000. Individual donations contribute roughly €50,000, while merchandise generates only around €5,000. The bulk of the money therefore has to come from the Pride event itself, particularly tickets, food and drinks.
That makes Antwerp‘s situation remarkably similar to Manchester’s. A large Pride requires substantial infrastructure and security, but its scale also creates financial dependence on the very commercial activity that can prompt accusations that Pride has become too commercial.
Antwerp Pride chair Geert Van Praet rejects that criticism. He argues that the event remains a protest as well as a celebration, and that commercial income is not an end in itself but a means of paying for the event and building reserves for difficult years.
There is also an important difference from the British examples: in Antwerp, the enclosed festival site at Cockerillkaai has become central not only to the event’s finances but also to its security strategy. The site hosts the Love United Festival after the parade and the Closing Festival on Sunday. Because much of the event takes place outdoors, bad weather can sharply reduce revenue while many costs remain.
For Van Praet, the enclosed site therefore serves a dual purpose. It generates income while providing what Antwerp Pride considers a controlled and safer environment for visitors. Without sufficient resources, he warned, that safe zone could disappear, leaving people more dispersed across the city.
From protest to festival… and back again?
The tension is not new. Pride’s origins lie in protest, including the Stonewall Inn Riots in New York in 1969 and Britain’s first official Pride march in London in 1972. Early events were closely linked to campaigns against discrimination, police harassment and the marginalisation of LGBTQIA+ people.
As equality improved in many Western countries, Pride became both a political demonstration and a celebration of LGBTQIA+ visibility. Large events brought economic benefits, tourism and mainstream recognition, but also higher costs and commercial pressures.
The British experience suggests that scale can eventually become a liability. Manchester’s collapse demonstrates how a festival can become financially exposed when its ambitions, infrastructure and costs grow faster than sustainable income. Antwerp has so far avoided such a crisis, but its organisers openly acknowledge the same vulnerability.
Security has meanwhile become an increasingly important part of the equation. Pride organisers have had to consider additional measures following attacks and threats, while some public-sector organisations in Britain have withdrawn from parades over concerns about political impartiality.
And Pride’s internal debates have become more complicated. Some gay and lesbian people who describe themselves as gender-critical say they no longer feel represented by events increasingly associated with trans rights, while some trans people say they feel unsafe attending them.
Yet the continued popularity of smaller, community-focused Prides suggests that the movement is not disappearing. A 2024 YouGov survey found that 90% of LGBTQIA+ people aged 16 to 24 considered Pride month very or fairly important.
Frenemies, foreign and domestic
The pressures facing Pride come both from outside and within the LGBTQIA+ community.
Externally, the broader climate has become less favourable. Pride events and other LGBTQIA+ initiatives face renewed homophobia and transphobia, declining public subsidies and more hesitant corporate support. Gentrification adds another, less discussed pressure: traditional gaybourhoods are disappearing in many cities, taking with them some of the physical spaces in which LGBTQIA+ communities historically organised and socialised.
But there are also what might be called frenemies – friends and enemies at the same time – within the community itself.
The issues and priorities of LGBTQIA+ activism have rightly evolved. Greater attention to the rights, experiences and position of transgender people is an important part of that evolution. But the shift has also pushed some gay, lesbian and bisexual people away from queer activism.
That process has not always been helped by the sometimes orthodox tone adopted by parts of the movement. Slogans such as “educate yourself” could come across less as an invitation to engage than as a dismissal. Some cisgender lesbian, gay and bisexual people were made to feel that they were themselves part of the problem.
That is rarely an effective way to build a movement. Advocacy inevitably involves explaining, persuading and convincing; and doing so repeatedly. People who feel talked down to or pushed out are unlikely to return.
The consequences can be seen at both ends of the spectrum. Some people who felt excluded from queer activism have become increasingly vocal in opposing trans rights, sometimes embracing outright transphobia. Others have simply disengaged. They may not be particularly transphobic at all; they have simply found other ways to spend their time and energy.
In both cases, alliances that might once have strengthened the broader LGBTQIA+ movement have been weakened. Creating unnecessary divisions within a relatively small community is ultimately a strategic mistake.
The funding paradox
The same dilemma applies to money.
Public subsidies are difficult to secure. Corporate sponsorship, once much more readily available, is becoming harder to obtain. And private donations are not a particularly strong part of the fundraising culture in Belgium.
At the same time, LGBTQIA+ organisations and their audiences can be reluctant to pay for the events and services they expect. When an organisation needs hundreds of thousands of euros – or, in Antwerp Pride’s case, close to €1 million – that equation simply does not add up.
This leaves Pride organisers with few easy choices. They can reduce the scale of their events, seek more commercial income, raise ticket prices, attract more sponsors, increase donations or ask governments for greater support. Every option comes with its own problems.
The lesson from Manchester is that uncontrolled growth can be dangerous. Antwerp demonstrates the other side of the equation: commercial revenue may be precisely what makes a large Pride financially and operationally possible.
The challenge is therefore not to eliminate commerce from Pride, but to ensure that commercialisation remains a means rather than becoming the purpose.
Building bridges rather than burning them
The future of Pride may ultimately depend as much on rebuilding internal alliances as on finding new sources of money.
Pride organisers and LGBTQIA+ initiatives need to listen to grievances, including criticism from people within their own communities. That does not mean accepting every criticism as valid, nor abandoning support for transgender people or other groups. It means recognising that advocacy cannot succeed by assuming that everyone already agrees.
There is also a responsibility on the more orthodox activist wing of the movement to engage in some soul-searching. People with different priorities or perspectives are not necessarily enemies, and disagreement does not have to end in exclusion.
Pride began as a movement that needed solidarity to survive. Its future may depend on rediscovering some of that ability to build broad alliances: listening more, explaining more and, above all, building bridges rather than burning them.
For Antwerp Pride, that challenge is particularly tangible. It needs the money generated by a large festival to maintain the event, provide security and create a safe space. But it also needs to ensure that the festival remains sufficiently connected to the community to justify that scale.
The central question for Pride may therefore no longer be simply whether it has become too commercial. It is whether it can remain a movement, rather than merely an event, while finding a sustainable way to pay for itself.
