President Donald Trump’s first few weeks in office have included an aggressive push to erase diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the federal government, a movement that has swiftly been adopted by some businesses as well. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, scrubbed language about DEI initiatives from various reports. At the same time, some Google Calendar users noticed that cultural observances like Pride Month and Black History Month no longer appeared as defaults events on the app.
This observation led to a surge in backlash from users decrying what seemed to be another capitulation to Trump. But Google clarified it actually removed these types of default observances back in mid-2024, because “maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable.” Whether causality or correlation, Google’s decision to remove Pride Month from its calendar application does not mean that Pride is dead.
A digital application is not reality. It does not dictate our time — how we, as a community, choose to celebrate who we are and our history.
A digital application is not reality. It does not dictate our time — how we, as a community, choose to celebrate who we are and our history. A cultural-observation tab is not a public space — that tab does not control our social interactions, or where or why or how we come together. And certainly, Pride Month’s former “inclusion” did not realize the political and social belonging — which I define not as a static feeling but as an intentional practice that creates a space of mutual respect — that the LGBT community needs and demands, now more than ever.
Let us remember: The first Pride parade was a commemoration of the human dignity and the communal power found in the resistance to police brutality and intimidation at not just Stonewall in 1969 but also Compton’s Cafeteria in 1966 and Dewey’s restaurant in 1965. The first media mention of “Pride Month,” according to research conducted by journalists Brooke Sopelsa and Isabela Espadas Barros Leal, was in a June 5, 1972, issue of Pennsylvania’s Delaware County Daily Times. The New York Times reported in a June 2, 1989, article that “Mayor Edward I. Koch proclaimed the month of June as Lesbian and Gay Pride and History Month.”
But pride is not just an event. As I wrote for the Women’s Media Center, “pride is a personal and social feeling. According to Merriam-Webster, it is both self-respect — ‘confidence and satisfaction in oneself’ — and the ‘pleasure that comes from some relationship, association, achievement, or possession that is seen as a source of honor, respect, etc.’ In a way, pride is the dignity each person finds in our creative self-determination and the pleasure and joy in sharing in the self-expression of authenticity with others.”
No company or CEO or president, for that matter, determines our pride.
For years, the mainstream gay community has sated itself on rainbow beads thrown from corporate Pride floats and other empty, performative gestures suggestive of some kind of real, consequential corporate accountability to the LGBTQ+ community at large. That we now look to corporations for this dignity and care also signifies a broader societal shift of relying on other sectors, including corporations, for the services — the housing, the health care, the education — that our government has the responsibility to provide to its citizens through public goods and infrastructure. (A responsibility it more egregiously shirked after the Civil Rights Movement fought, and won, to expand post-World-War-II public investments, specifically in education and housing, to include Black Americans.) That we, in America, pay taxes yet have to rely on the charity of our employers for health insurance is a disgrace and an injustice. In this reliance on the for-profit sector, we have confused the modus operandi of business — profit — for that of government.
As unfortunate as it is, I have lived in the heart of Silicon Valley for more than eight years, and it was no surprise to me that many of the tech bros who own these companies — including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman — donated millions of dollars to an authoritarian’s inauguration fund and are already looking for ways to show their fealty. (Google, for the record, also donated $1 million to the fund.) These actions epitomize what M. Gessen brilliantly outlined as the five types of anticipatory obedience that build autocratic power.
A digital calendar application tab, a rainbow profile pic frame for your social media accounts — these are virtual ephemera.
Complicity is the cornerstone of Silicon Valley’s liberal corporate ethos. And the much-lauded archetype known as the “disruptor” is not the person who disrupts systems and institutions in the name of justice. The disruptor does not disrupt hierarchies or cultural norms. No. This person is a disruptor because this person circumvents ethical and organizational rules and regulations in the name of profit.
A digital calendar application tab, a rainbow profile pic frame for your social media accounts — these are virtual ephemera, neither effective nor significant as forms of representation. They do not transform institutions or eradicate the many forms of historical discrimination that plague our society.
The American government is attacking its citizens, especially LGBTQ Americans and anyone else it can “other.” Trump is signing executive order after executive order to dehumanize the trans community and strip trans Americans of their freedom to secure the health care they need. We need to focus our energy and our efforts on real harms, not virtual nothings.
If anything, the significance of this calendar application’s removal is that it should make us re-examine how we, as members of the LGBTQ+ community, understand our political and social power as part of a larger strategic vision to build a more free and just society.
And if it’s remembering holidays you’re worried about, might I suggest a different calendar. I have my 2025 Astro Planner from Chani Nicholas right here as proof. “Pride Month begins,” it reads, right on June 1. We’ll be just fine.
