Q Toon: This Boycott's for You

Two years ago this month, transphobes got their knickers in a knot over Budweiser for signing transgender internet personality Dylan Mulvaney on to advertise their light beer. Mulvaney, a stage actor and comedian, had documented her transition on TikTok during the COVID lockdown, gaining millions of followers.

She became enough of a celebrity to snag an interview with President Joe Biden, raising the dander of the likes of Senator Marcia Blackburn (R-I Want to See Your Manager). Then Budweiser's parent company, Anheuser-Busch, entered the picture.  

On April 1, Mulvaney shared a video promoting Bud Light as part of a partnership with the beer. She appears dressed as the “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” character, Holly Golightly, while joking about confusing the meaning of the term “March Madness.” While some people were celebrating sports that month, Mulvaney said she was celebrating a milestone with her “365 Days of Girlhood” series, the one-year mark since her transition. Bud Light gave her a custom can of their beer with her face on it to commemorate the milestone.

And the right wingnuts went, well, nuts.

Fox Noisemakers, Republican Congresskarens, and southern Governors called for a nationwide boycott of the beer. Bubbas TikTokked themselves running over cans of Bud Light with their pick-ups, and Kid Rock famously shot up three cases of the stuff with a semiautomatic rifle.

At the time, an Anheuser-Busch spokesman defended its partnership with Mulvaney, issuing a statement that the company “works with hundreds of influencers across our brands as one of many ways to authentically connect with audiences across various demographics."

Harvard Business Review reported that sales of Bud Light fell by nearly a third over the rest of 2023. The company's President of Operations loudly quit, blaming DEI for Bud's problems and joining up with anti-diversity activist Vivek Ramaswami (remember him?) to promote Conformity, Inequity, and Exclusion.

Two years on, we have a White House mandating trans-bashing, and Budweiser has hired Shane Gillis as their advertising spokesbubba. And in March, Anheuser-Busch announced that it would no longer be a sponsor of the LGBTQ+ Pride Festival in St. Louis, or anywhere else. The announcement of the end of a partnership begun in 1995 was a front page banner headline in St. Louis Post-Dispatch and has prompted a new boycott from the other side of the sociopolitical gulf. It has also left a gaping hole in Pride St. Louis finances.

"It was just interesting that the longest partner of ours for 30 years that they've been at the table with us and a true ally just decided to walk away after basically just saying that they just don't see the value in it anymore," Pride St. Louis President Marty Zuniga said Tuesday.

Now personally, I've never been a Bud Light drinker in the first place. It's yellowish water that foams a bit if you pour it enthusiastically, and I prefer something with considerably more body and flavor. Something that will satisfy my thirst after one or two mugs, say, a porter, stout, or lager. So my contribution to any boycott will be negligible.

Unless you calculate my boycott starting from my 18th birthday.

Q Toon: Sense and Sensitivity

For the sin of displaying LGBTQ+ Pride merchandise, Target Stores have become the latest casualty in the Rabid Right's Kancel Kulture Kampaign.

Target announced earlier this week that the company was removing some LGBTQ-themed items from shelves and moving displays intended to honor Pride Month to the back of the store in response to a public backlash from the right. But what happened at Target goes far beyond just some people calling for a boycott.

As Target explained in a statement, some customers had knocked down Pride displays at stores while others outraged by Pride-themed merchandise angrily approached workers as well as posted threatening videos on social media. Target has been celebrating Pride Month for more than a decade, but as the company noted, “since introducing this year’s collection, we’ve experienced threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and wellbeing while at work.”

And to think that only thirteen years ago, Target was funding those antigay ingrates!

Right-wingers, including Republican office holders and presidential candidates, are openly working to make anything LGBTQ+ "toxic," and they won't stop with books and rainbow tees. Or who appears on a beer can. 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been bogged down in a losing battle against the lawyers of Disney World, one of the largest and most prominent employers and tourist attractions in his home state, and why? Were they a menace to public health and safety? Were they sucking money out of the state treasury? No, it was because Disney Inc. dared to criticize his "Don't Say Gay" law. 

So the DeSantis and the Florida legislature went on the warpath against Disney with a single-minded fury, only to end up looking like Kendall Roy sitting at the end of the pier.

Disney, it turns out, has better lawyers than DeSantis and his entire legislature put together.

And a stiffer spine than the folks at Budweiser and Target.

 

Q Toon: Never Gonna Pump You Up

Stephen Ross, billionaire chairman of something called Related Companies, hosted a lavish fund raiser in the Hamptons last weekend for the reelection of his longtime buddy Donald Joffrey Trump as President of the United States.

Ordinarily, some billionaire throwing his lot in with the most plutocratic president this nation has ever produced wouldn't be worth rolling one's eyes over, but Related Companies happens to own a couple of fitness companies that have actively courted LGBTQ consumers, Equinox and SoulCycle. And those customers aren't happy with the prospect of their membership dues supporting the Corrupt Trump Administration and its anti-LGBTQ minions in any way.

All but five of the 91 Equinox and SoulCycle locations, moreover, are located in districts that voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton last time around. You don't find a lot of trendy fitness gyms in Boondocks Junction, Nebraska.

So anyway, Equinox and SoulCycle gay-list customers are tearing up their $3,000+ membership cards and mounting a boycott.

Management of the companies issued statements last week distancing themselves from the man at the top.

Melanie Whelan, CEO of SoulCycle, issued a personal, more emphatic statement later as well.
“At SoulCycle, we wake up every day committed to our community, and creating a safe space where all are welcome,” Whelan’s statement reads. “We believe in diversity, inclusion and equality."
She went on to say that she doesn't endorse the Trump fundraiser and says her company has nothing to do with it.
Her statement reiterated that Ross is a "passive investor," but that framing only created more anger in many Equinox and SoulCycle members who pointed out that passive or not, Ross still makes a profit through his stake in the brands. 

As is typical of financial dealings these days, Ross's "passive investor" relationship status is better described as "complicated."

It is true that Related is a minority investor in Equinox, which in turn owns SoulCycle. (As Dan Primack of Axios has explained, Related used to own a majority of Equinox but has sold stakes to other investors over the years, diluting its own position.) It’s also true that Ross owns just 60 percent of Related. So a majority of Equinox’s and SoulCycle’s profits are not accruing to Ross personally.
But “minority” ownership does not equal “passive” ownership, and the siting decisions for Equinox gyms and SoulCycle studios are heavily tied up in Related’s broader development strategy. Related is the landlord for many Equinox and SoulCycle locations, especially in New York, because Related seeks to place them where they will enhance the value of Related’s residential and office developments. This includes Related’s Hudson Yards megadevelopment on the West Side of Manhattan, which contains a flagship Equinox gym and the first-ever Equinox-branded hotel in addition to about a thousand apartments, millions of square feet of office space, and, of course, a SoulCycle studio.

At some point, the top 1% of the top 1% are going to figure out how to sponsor their Republican fund raisers anonymously so as not to upset the rest of the top 10%. In the meantime, those of us in the lower 90% can pat ourselves on the back for having boycotted SoulCycle and Equinox before it was cool. 

Q Toon: Borsch Belt

Researching for this week's cartoon, one of the first news accounts I read was this one from RIA Novosti. Headquartered in Moscow, РИА Новости is the Russian equivalent of the Associated Press in the U.S. or Agence Press-France in (duh) France. At the top of the story, in boldface print, RIA Novosti warns:

This article contains information not suitable for readers younger than 18 years of age, according to Russian legislation.

You will not find lurid accounts of hot and steamy sex in the РИА Новости news article. The headline, "Amid Gay Boycott, Stolichnaya Downplays Russian Identity," pretty well sums up the content of the article. But that's enough, under Russia's puritanical new antigay laws, to warrant the boldface warning.

Anyway, LGBT rights organizations have launched a boycott of Russian products in response to those repressive laws, and one of the most visible targets has been Stolichnaya Vodka. Here's what I wanted to highlight from the news article part of the RIA Novosti news article:

"Technically, to define it as a Russian vodka in the US, it needs to be produced, bottled and distilled in Russia. Yes, it’s distilled in Russia, but it becomes a vodka in Latvia," when the alcohol from Russia is added to the mixture and then bottled, said Marco Ferrari, chief marketing officer for the Luxembourg-based SPI Group, which owns the Stolichnaya brand. "Our ingredients are Russian but technically it’s not a Russian vodka."

If you go to the RIA Novosti story, you will notice that it is illustrated with a photograph of a row of Stolichnaya bottles, and right there on the bottom of every one, in print every bit as bold as the brand name, are the words "Russian Vodka." The Stranger (Seattle, WA) columnist Dan Savage notes that "On January 1, 2014, Stoli becomes a Russian vodka again. The SPI Group -- which will be distributing Stoli in the USA before the Olympic games begin this winter -- is owned by Yuri Scheffler, one of the 100 richest men in Russia."

At any rate, Stoly has gone into overdrive to salvage its image in the LGBT community, posting a banner on its Facebook page stating that "Stolichnaya Premium Vodka stands strong & proud with the global LGBT community against the actions & beliefs of the Russian government." And, sure, it does have a Stoly Pride page and a #Stoliguy hashtag teeming with hunky dudes, not to mention all those reruns of Absolutely Fabulous, to tempt the gay consumer.

We're not big vodka drinkers at our house -- we're more likely to order brandy old fashioneds, although at home, my better half has been perfecting the mint julep lately -- so our joining the vodka boycott won't make much of a difference. Instead, and in spite of my scores of Russian on-line readers, my contribution to the boycott will be not including that boldface content-not-suitable-for-under-18 warning in any more of my blog entries.

Q Toon for Chick-Fil-A Day

Obsessive readers of this feature may recognize the lady on the left from last month's cartoon about the One Million Moms' boycott of J.C. Penney over the inclusion in its Mothers' and Fathers' Day catalog of same-sex parents. She's the only one in the earlier cartoon who didn't have any dialogue, and she felt it was her turn to speak out this week.

I include her also because one of the arguments coming from Chick-Fil-A's apologists is that any sort of protest against Chick-Fil-A because its COO Dan Cathy is vocally against marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples is somehow a violation of his right to free speech. We who disagree with Mr. Cathy have the right of free speech, too -- as do J.C. Penney, Jeff Bezos, Home Depot, et al.

And by the way, before all the comic nerds get on my case, I'm fully aware that Green Lantern is not the only gay comic book character out there. I just didn't have room to include Marvel and Archie comics in that panel. My apologies to Northstar fans.