Looks like Corporate America is officially over the rainbow.The former editor in chief of Out published a guest essay in The New York Times Opinion column Friday, addressing the growing number of corporations that are discontinuing their Pride campaigns and withdrawing their financial support for parades and LGBTQ+ media. See on Instagram Hicklin served as Out's editor from 2006 to 2018, and in his essay, he recalls the glory days where the Pride issue was "thick with ads" and editorial offices were "cluttered with vodka bottles emblazoned in Pride flags, sneakers in rainbow hues, underwear so festively gay that it might as well have come with a parade permit.""That deployment of marketing budgets to support the gay community became known as rainbow capitalism, and for a time, it became a good business," Hicklin recounts. "The forces that once propelled corporate America into the arms of LGBTQ+ America have pivoted, retreating under the weight of political backlash and the calculus of risk aversion." The former Out editor says rainbow capitalism hasn't gone away entirely "but the Trump administrations assault on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives has turned Pride from a brightly colored bandwagon for brands to jump on into a possible liability or worse, a political statement."As Hicklin recounts, the beginning of the end began in 2023 when Bud Light partnered with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a sponsored post tied to the end of March Madness. After the partnership, the right-wing cohort took to social media to denounce the brand and call for a boycott. Singer Kid Rock took a rifle and shot up some packs of Bud Light, President Donald Trump wrote about the boycott on Truth Social saying, "Its time to beat the Radical Left at their own game. Money does talk Anheuser-Busch now understands that," and Ben Shapiro took up 12 minutes of his show to rant about the brand.Hicklin echoes the argument that other activists have yelled about every year since corporations began commodifying Pride. "This backing off underscores what some critics have long argued: that multinational brands have flattened queer identity into bland consumerism." He says that corporations ending their support at this crucial moment in history is "salt in the wound."However, Hicklin sees this moment as an opportunity to remind the community what Pride is for and a return to what he says Pride was like in the 1990s. "They felt messy and urgent and ours. Nice though it is to be courted, it felt pretty good back when Pride was more explicitly political and even radical, and when having one anothers backs was the point of it all, not flaunting our corporate bedfellows. Now theres an opportunity to reclaim that spirit."