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Target employees flag concerns over Pride merchandise decisions

Company’s 2024 collection dramatically scaled back

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Target store (Photo by Jonathan Weiss via Bigstock)

When Target Corp. was hit with an unprecedented wave of hate over its 2023 LGBTQ Pride month merchandise last summer, plans for the 2024 collection were already underway and team members were looking to leadership for guidance. 

Target employees with knowledge of the matter, who spoke with the Washington Blade on the condition of anonymity, said the process leading up to Target’s announcement a few weeks ago of plans to dramatically cut back its Pride collection was haphazard and reactive from the start. 

They said that the company’s commitment to supporting LGBTQ guests and employees feels hollow, considering leadership’s failure to move toward strategies for selling gender-affirming apparel and merchandise year-round along with decisions to curtail internal Pride month celebrations. 

First introduced in 2013, Target’s Pride collection quickly grew to become a profitable example of the company’s heritage moments offerings, collections that are sold each year to mark observances like Black History Month and National Hispanic Heritage Month.

Even as the COVID pandemic surged in the summer of 2020, demand remained high, the employees noted, “a real indication” of the sales potential for Pride apparel and merchandise irrespective of whether parades, gatherings, and in-store shopping are happening. 

However, Target planned for just $5 million in sales this year for Pride month, about a tenth of that which might be forecast based on precedent.

Amid reports last summer of an online boycott campaign and in-store incidents in which employees were allegedly made to feel unsafe by negative guest reactions to the 2023 Pride collection, Target announced it would move the merchandise to the back of some stores located in the southeastern U.S. 

The employees agreed the move “didn’t feel great,” but the team accepted the company’s decision as a temporary solution to get through the chaos — while communicating the need for “our leaders to be really clear with us [about] what we can and cannot do” in 2024 “so that we can deliver the best profitable strategy possible.” 

Around this time, they said, communication became siloed. Requests for more information about in-store confrontations were denied over privacy and safety concerns, while some employees and other social media users flagged that many of the videos purporting to show guests’ outrage over LGBTQ-themed merchandise were several years old. 

Staff asked for details in the first place, the employees said, because “We were like, ‘OK, well, let us segment around these places that are perceived as dangerous’” to make nuanced and narrowly tailored decisions about when and where to make cuts. 

Ultimately, the number of products offered for Pride in 2023 was slashed by the time the collection was launched, and then again by nearly 50 percent, they said. 

Target organized a town hall event in July. Invited to speak were Executive Vice President and Chief Growth Officer Christina Hennington and Executive Vice President and Chief Food, Essentials and Beauty Officer Rick Gomez, both of whom are LGBTQ. 

One employee said they were left with the impression that staff should make peace with the decisions to cut Pride merchandise because the meeting was led by the company’s senior LGBTQ leadership, who announced “they were going to pull back on all heritage moments.” A second employee who was not in attendance agreed this was the message relayed to them. 

Leading into next year, the employees said teams informed leadership that they would “segment the hell out of this 2024 assortment to get the right things in the right stores, if [the company is saying] that there’s a subset of stores that need to serve a different function or guest need” — just as decisions are made to, for example, feature more swimwear items in Miami than in Seattle. 

Folks were broadly in agreement over this strategy, the employees said, but “cut to 2024, we’re sending [the Pride collection] to half the stores” — a decision that was reached “a couple of months ago when product had to be committed to stores.” 

Target announced that the decision was based on historical sales, in a statement that also reaffirmed the company’s commitments to supporting the LGBTQ community year-round. 

According to the employees, however, the move did not accurately reflect “guest demand” for Pride apparel and merchandise. 

Going back to 2023, one source said, apparel and accessories leaders initially provided direction to reduce the planned sales by approximately 19 percent to reflect what was happening elsewhere in the apparel business.

The team agreed the figure was “really close to where we need to be” and sought to build a strategy to maximize sales, learning from past mistakes that were made “in all of our heritage moments — and we saw this in Black History Month last year — of spreading the goods out too equally everywhere” rather than in the stores where it was selling out.  

The employees said the team responsible for the Black History Month collection introduced the idea of segmenting product between that which is designed for the intended audience versus that which could be worn by everyone, allies included, which feels noticeably absent from the 2024 Pride collection that is available in select stores and online today. 

With respect to the in-store experience, a similar approach would apply, they said. 

For instance, the original idea for this year’s Pride collection was “a four-tier strategy,” which built upon established precedent for heritage moments merchandise. 

On one end of the spectrum is a “full-blown experience, that kind of delivers and addresses all audiences.” And then a more narrowly tailored assortment would be offered for stores that may have space constraints or less foot traffic, along with another that might be “the most ally-friendly, or the most conventional,” and “versions for what we call our small-format stores.” 

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New York

Two teens shot steps from Stonewall Inn after NYC Pride parade

One of the victims remains in critical condition

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The Stonewall National Memorial in New York on June 19, 2024. (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)

On Sunday night, following the annual NYC Pride March, two girls were shot in Sheridan Square, feet away from the historic Stonewall Inn.

According to an NYPD report, the two girls, aged 16 and 17, were shot around 10:15 p.m. as Pride festivities began to wind down. The 16-year-old was struck in the head and, according to police sources, is said to be in critical condition, while the 17-year-old was said to be in stable condition.

The Washington Blade confirmed with the NYPD the details from the police reports and learned no arrests had been made as of noon Monday.

The shooting took place in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, mere feet away from the most famous gay bar in the city — if not the world — the Stonewall Inn. Earlier that day, hundreds of thousands of people marched down Christopher Street to celebrate 55 years of LGBTQ people standing up for their rights.

In June 1969, after police raided the Stonewall Inn, members of the LGBTQ community pushed back, sparking what became known as the Stonewall riots. Over the course of two days, LGBTQ New Yorkers protested the discriminatory policing of queer spaces across the city and mobilized to speak out — and throw bottles if need be — at officers attempting to suppress their existence.

The following year, LGBTQ people returned to the Stonewall Inn and marched through the same streets where queer New Yorkers had been arrested, marking the first “Gay Pride March” in history and declaring that LGBTQ people were not going anywhere.

New York State Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, whose district includes Greenwich Village, took to social media to comment on the shooting.

“After decades of peaceful Pride celebrations — this year gun fire and two people shot near the Stonewall Inn is a reminder that gun violence is everywhere,” the lesbian lawmaker said on X. “Guns are a problem despite the NRA BS.”

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New York

Zohran Mamdani participates in NYC Pride parade

Mayoral candidate has detailed LGBTQ rights platform

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NYC mayoral candidate and New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani (Screen capture: NBC News/YouTube)

Zohran Mamdani, the candidate for mayor of New York City who pulled a surprise victory in the primary contest last week, walked in the city’s Pride parade on Sunday.

The Democratic Socialist and New York State Assembly member published photos on social media with New York Attorney General Letitia James, telling followers it was “a joy to march in NYC Pride with the people’s champ” and to “see so many friends on this gorgeous day.”

“Happy Pride NYC,” he wrote, adding a rainbow emoji.

Mamdani’s platform includes a detailed plan for LGBTQ people who “across the United States are facing an increasingly hostile political environment.”

His campaign website explains: “New York City must be a refuge for LGBTQIA+ people, but private institutions in our own city have already started capitulating to Trump’s assault on trans rights.

“Meanwhile, the cost of living crisis confronting working class people across the city hits the LGBTQIA+ community particularly hard, with higher rates of unemployment and homelessness than the rest of the city.”

“The Mamdani administration will protect LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers by expanding and protecting gender-affirming care citywide, making NYC an LGBTQIA+ sanctuary city, and creating the Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs.”

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U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court upholds ACA rule that makes PrEP, other preventative care free

Liberal justices joined three conservatives in majority opinion

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The U.S. Supreme Court as composed June 30, 2022, to present. Front row, left to right: Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and Associate Justice Elena Kagan. Back row, left to right: Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Associate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. (Photo Credit: Fred Schilling, the U.S. Supreme Court)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld a portion of the Affordable Care Act requiring private health insurers to cover the cost of preventative care including PrEP, which significantly reduces the risk of transmitting HIV.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh authored the majority opinion in the case, Kennedy v. Braidwood Management. He was joined by two conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, along with the three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown-Jackson.

The court’s decision rejected the plaintiffs’ challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s reliance on the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force to “unilaterally” determine which types of care and services must be covered by payors without cost-sharing.

An independent all-volunteer panel of nationally recognized experts in prevention and primary care, the 16 task force members are selected by the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to serve four-year terms.

They are responsible for evaluating the efficacy of counseling, screenings for diseases like cancer and diabetes, and preventative medicines — like Truvada for PrEP, drugs to reduce heart disease and strokes, and eye ointment for newborns to prevent infections.

Parties bringing the challenge objected especially to the mandatory coverage of PrEP, with some arguing the drugs would “encourage and facilitate homosexual behavior” against their religious beliefs.

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