Pride Month is over memes send off 30 days of LGBTQ+ celebration with jokes about what happens on July 1 when the Pride merch is ripped from the store shelves. While you may be gearing up for Wrath Month next, it's valid to feel some disappointment that June 2024 is over and look to comfort yourself with memes, especially when they mock rainbow capitalism.
One of the most common variations of this meme is the "companies when Pride Month ends" joke.
Sorry, but it is technically true that as of today, it is no longer June, the period officially designated as "Pride Month" in the U.S. each year. Every June 1st is marked by social media Pride memes, and every July 1st sees another batch lamenting the end of the frivolities.
Some of these memes jokingly tell queer people to "stop being gay" or give the green light to straight people to resume existing. However, by far the most July 1 memes you'll see are in the genre of "companies when Pride Month ends."
Rainbow capitalism refers to the habit of corporations to dress up their logos, shops, and public statements in LGBTQ+ Pride colors in order to sell products or give the appearance of being queer allies, whether or not they actually put in real effort to support or hire from the community.
This inevitably leads to amusing displays every July 1st, when the same companies change their logos back to the regular colors and take down the Pride flags and merchandise displays from their stores.
These results of rainbow capitalism led to a meme pointing out the sad July 1 ritual, using reaction gifs, images, and videos showing people making rude gestures as Pride flags or real photos of people taking down Pride colors with the caption "corporations when Pride Month ends."
The subsection of the Pride Month meme first appeared in July 2019. On that particular first day of the non-Pride month, Reddit user Jaxynw posted a screenshot of the popular Vine showing two men sitting conspicuously far apart in a hot tub because they're "not gay" with the caption "Companies as soon as gay pride month ends."
The post gained over 69,000 (nice) upvotes.
Wrath Month is a joke by the queer community derived from the idea of the seven deadly sins from Christian theology. One of these sins is pride, which some followers of the faith like to point out every year to further paint LGBTQ+ people as inherently sinful.
The community, as it often does, embraced this attack and turned it around on the haters, extending the queer summer celebration into July by declaring it Wrath Month. Wrath is another one of the deadly sins, and fits well with the situation considering how much queer people have to be angry about year after year.
Naturally, this too became an annual meme.
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