As corporate support retreats and LGBTQ funding contracts, I have spent the weeks before Global Black Pride confronting a difficult question about our movements: what happens when the institutions we built to liberate us begin reproducing the systems of power and exclusion we set out to dismantle?
In a few days, I will travel to Paris to host Global Black Pride. I should be thinking about the extraordinary privilege of welcoming Black LGBTQ people from different parts of the world to a city that has played such an important role in Black intellectual, cultural and political history. I should be thinking about the march, the conversations that will take place, the friendships that will be formed, and the simple significance of Black queer people occupying public space together.
I am thinking about all of those things. But if I am truthful, I am also exhausted.
Over the past several weeks, I have found myself asking a question I never expected to ask after so many years in movement work: What is all of this for?
For the first time since we began building Global Black Pride, we are approaching our gathering without a headline sponsor. This is not occurring because the need for Black LGBTQ organizing has diminished. If anything, the opposite is true. Around the world, LGBTQ communities are confronting political backlash, shrinking civic space and enormous financial uncertainty. Global LGBTI funding declined by 5 percent in 2023–24, the first decrease recorded in the twelve years covered by the Global Philanthropy Project’s reporting. The $861.5 million documented across those two years may sound substantial until placed in context: worldwide LGBTI foundation funding amounted to less than 33 cents of every $100 in overall foundation funding, while donor-government support for LGBTI issues represented approximately four cents of every $100 in international development assistance. (Global Resources Report)
The picture in the United States is similarly troubling. Funders for LGBTQ Issues found that U.S. foundation grantmaking for LGBTQ communities declined from $209.4 million in 2023 to $178.2 million in 2024, a 15 percent nominal decline and 17 percent after adjusting for inflation. Funding specifically benefiting LGBTQ communities of color declined by 12 percent. The researchers appropriately caution that some grantmaking data was unavailable, but even their adjusted estimate does not suggest a funding ecosystem keeping pace with the challenges LGBTQ organizations are being asked to confront. (Funders for LGBTQ Issues)
I experience these numbers not simply as statistics but as the context in which I am expected to lead.
Alongside Global Black Pride, I lead an international organization working to advance the health and rights of Black gay men and other key populations around the world. That work is facing its own extraordinary financial crisis. Donor-government funding for HIV in low- and middle-income countries fell by $2.1 billion in 2025, a 25 percent decline in a single year. Total disbursements fell from $8.3 billion to $6.2 billion, the largest annual decline since the international HIV funding scale-up began and the lowest level since 2007. (KFF)
I therefore move between two worlds that increasingly feel like the same one. In one, I am trying to build an institution capable of bringing Black LGBTQ people together across borders. In the other, I am helping lead work intended to protect access to HIV prevention, treatment, advocacy and community infrastructure for populations that have historically been pushed to the margins of public-health systems. Both worlds are being told to become more resilient while the resources available to them become less reliable.
Meanwhile, the people responsible for holding these institutions together are expected to absorb the difference.
Over these past few weeks, I have discovered what that can cost.
When my Blackness became something to litigate
Of everything I have experienced while building Global Black Pride, perhaps the most disorienting has been watching my Blackness become something other people apparently believe they are entitled to adjudicate.
I am African. I was born in Nigeria. That fact has sometimes been invoked not as another dimension of the global Black experience, but as evidence that I am somehow less qualified to lead a Black Pride organization. I have encountered arguments, both explicit and coded, that position Black Pride as something essentially American and therefore treat an African leader as an outsider to a movement whose very name claims to be global.
There is something extraordinary about having one’s Blackness questioned while helping to build an institution intended to connect Black LGBTQ people across borders.
Blackness is shaped by the histories of slavery, colonialism, migration, resistance and cultural exchange across continents. It is American and African, Caribbean and European, Latin American and diasporic. It contains countless languages, political traditions and relationships to sexuality, gender, family, religion and state power.
Global Black Pride was created precisely because Black LGBTQ experience is plural. Lagos belongs in that conversation alongside Atlanta. Kingston belongs alongside London. Johannesburg belongs alongside New York. Accra, Salvador, Port-au-Prince, Toronto and Paris belong there too. “Global” cannot mean exporting one country’s interpretation of Blackness to everyone else and calling the result internationalism.
Yet the attacks I have experienced have gone beyond questions about whether an African can legitimately lead a global Black institution. They have crossed a line that I am no longer willing to pretend has not affected me.
My husband has been attacked. My daughter has been brought into attacks directed at me. People I love, who did not choose to become participants in disputes about Pride politics, have been made collateral damage in conflicts supposedly occurring within a community organized around dignity, safety and inclusion.
It has affected my mental health.
I do not say that casually. Nor do I say it to insulate myself from criticism. Leadership requires accountability, and anyone entrusted with institutions, money or power should expect their decisions to be questioned. I have made mistakes in my career, and I will undoubtedly make others. Disagreement is not abuse, criticism is not persecution, and leadership does not entitle anyone to universal approval.
But criticizing a leader’s decisions is different from questioning whether he is authentically Black. It is different from treating his African identity as a disqualification. It is different from targeting his spouse, and it is profoundly different from bringing his child into a conflict she had no role in creating.
There is a particular psychological disorientation in experiencing this from people within spaces that publicly define themselves through inclusion. Movement leaders are often expected to absorb extraordinary hostility without acknowledging what it does to us. We continue the meeting, answer the email, reassure staff, make another fundraising call and show up for the next event because there is always a community need that appears more urgent than our own wellbeing. Eventually, however, the mind and body register what the professional calendar does not.
The experience has forced me to confront a contradiction that extends far beyond my own circumstances. Marginalization does not make us incapable of marginalizing other people. Black people can police other Black people’s identities. Queer people can gatekeep. People who have experienced exclusion can exclude others. Organizations devoted to liberation can become territorial about power. People fluent in the language of harm remain capable of causing it.
Acknowledging that does not betray a movement. Refusing to acknowledge it does.
The radical Pride we asked for
These experiences have also coincided with a profound shift in the economics of Pride.
For years, many of us criticized the corporatization of Pride, and much of that criticism was justified. Companies discovered rainbow logos every June while LGBTQ organizations struggled for resources throughout the rest of the year. Pride celebrations became increasingly valuable marketing opportunities, and legitimate questions emerged about whether corporations were supporting queer liberation or simply purchasing proximity to a demographic that had become commercially attractive.
Many of us wanted something more radical. We wanted Pride to return to community, protest and liberation. We wanted less corporate control and more community ownership.
Then the political environment changed, and some corporations actually began leaving.
San Francisco Pride entered 2025 facing a roughly $300,000 sponsorship hole after several major sponsors withdrew. By 2026, the organization had recovered financially, an important reminder that corporate retreat is not uniform or necessarily permanent, but the sponsors it lost the previous year had not returned. (Mission Local)
The broader retreat from corporate diversity commitments has forced LGBTQ institutions to confront a question that was easier to avoid when rainbow capitalism was flourishing. If we want Pride to become less dependent on corporations, what financial infrastructure have we created to replace corporate money?
Criticizing a funding model is considerably easier than replacing one.
A Pride gathering may be rooted in protest, but producing one at scale involves an enormous commercial ecosystem. Stages, sound systems, venues, insurance, security, sanitation, transportation, hotels, artists, food, communications, accessibility, interpretation and technical production all have market prices. The company building a stage does not reduce its invoice because the event is radical. An airline does not care that the passenger trying to reach Paris is an activist. A hotel does not waive its rates because the person needing a room comes from a country where being queer is dangerous.
This is where I have become increasingly skeptical about the economic mythology surrounding nonprofit Pride.
Pride may be produced by nonprofit organizations, but Pride operates within an industry. There are promoters, tourism authorities, nightlife businesses, hospitality companies, production firms, artists, consultants, media companies, ticketing companies, sponsors and vendors who participate in the economy Pride creates. Many of them appropriately make money from it.
The nonprofit organization at the center of that ecosystem, however, is expected to perform an extraordinary balancing act. We want Pride to be professionally produced without becoming commercial. We want it to remain accessible while questioning corporate underwriting. We want international participation without adequately confronting the cost of international participation. We want organizers and artists compensated fairly while relying heavily on volunteer and underpaid labor. We want independent organizations but often provide them neither unrestricted capital nor sufficient reserves to become genuinely independent.
None of this means Pride should simply become a commercial enterprise. It means that calling something a nonprofit does not exempt it from economics.
Pride is a movement, but Pride is also a machine. Machines require fuel.
What happens when the movement becomes the gatekeeper?
Money, however, is only part of what I have learned.
From the outside, Pride presents itself as one of the world’s great experiments in inclusion. Its language is expansive. Everyone belongs. Come as you are. There is room for all of us.
My experience building Global Black Pride has exposed me to another side of the ecosystem, one that can be considerably more protected than its public image suggests.
There are established organizations, funders, corporations, political relationships, promoters and individuals who have worked together for years. There is nothing inherently improper about that; every mature sector develops networks, trust and institutional relationships. The problem begins when access to those networks becomes a mechanism for determining which organizations are legitimate enough to survive.
Over the course of building Global Black Pride, prospective partners and people within the ecosystem have told us that others discouraged organizations from funding or partnering with us. I want to be precise because allegations about interference deserve precision. I cannot testify to every private conversation that has occurred, and I will not attribute motives I cannot establish. I can speak to what has been communicated to us and what I have experienced while trying to finance this institution.
Those experiences have fundamentally changed how I understand power within Pride.
We recognize gatekeeping easily when the gatekeeper is a government, corporation or historically exclusionary institution. We seem considerably less comfortable acknowledging it when the person controlling access speaks the language of liberation.
Yet relationships are a form of power. The ability to introduce an organization to a sponsor is power. The ability to discourage that sponsor from engaging is also power. Access to philanthropy, government, media and corporate decision-makers confers power regardless of whether the person possessing that access works in the private sector or for a nonprofit.
This matters especially for newer organizations and organizations led by people who did not emerge from established American or European LGBTQ institutional networks. If legitimacy depends partly on being vouched for by people already inside the circle, an ecosystem created to challenge exclusion can quietly reproduce it.
That is the contradiction I think Pride must become brave enough to discuss.
Is it really global if everyone cannot get there?
There is another criticism I expect Global Black Pride to face, and unlike attacks on my family or arguments about whether I am Black enough, I think this one deserves serious consideration.
How global can a Global Black Pride really be when many Black LGBTQ people around the world cannot afford to come to Paris?
We have not been able to provide the kind of broad travel-scholarship program I would have wanted. That troubles me because welcome is not the same thing as access.
A Black queer activist living in a country where homosexuality is criminalized may have considerably more at stake in an international Black LGBTQ gathering than someone who can comfortably purchase a flight from New York or London. Yet income inequality, currency disparities, visa regimes and geography may make it virtually impossible for that activist to participate.
That is not a theoretical flaw in global movements. It is one of their defining inequalities.
I could respond defensively by listing the countries represented in Paris, pointing to our international partnerships or explaining how difficult it has been to finance the gathering. Those things provide context, but they do not resolve the underlying contradiction.
Instead, I think we should confront it.
When people hear the word “sponsorship,” they often imagine corporate logos, elaborate activations, VIP receptions and branding on stages. When I think about what more funding could make possible for Global Black Pride, I think about plane tickets. I think about hotel rooms, interpretation, accessibility and the activist whose experience belongs in an international conversation but whose bank balance determines whether they can physically enter the room.
We could not do everything I wanted to do in Paris. There are people I wish we could have brought whom we could not afford to bring. There is support I wish we could have provided that our resources simply did not allow.
I am not proud of that reality, but I am also not ashamed to admit it.
The answer to imperfect representation cannot be abandoning the attempt to build global institutions. It has to be building institutions capable of doing better. If anything, our inability to provide the level of travel support I wanted demonstrates precisely why sustainable funding matters.
The absence of money does not simply determine how impressive a Pride celebration looks. It determines who gets to participate in global civil society.
We cannot philanthropize our way out of this
One response to the retreat of corporations might be to argue that LGBTQ institutions should depend instead on philanthropy. The numbers make that proposition difficult to sustain.
The Global Philanthropy Project documented $861.5 million in government and philanthropic support for LGBTI communities worldwide during 2023 and 2024. While overall funding declined by 5 percent, there was important progress outside the United States: funding focused on the Global South and East increased by 21 percent. That achievement should be recognized. At the same time, the distribution of resources remains highly concentrated. The top 20 funders focused on the Global South and East accounted for 45 percent of all LGBTI funding directed there. (Global Resources Report)
This creates its own structural vulnerability. If a relatively small group of institutions controls a significant share of available funding, relationships with those institutions become extraordinarily consequential. Organizations are told to be independent while operating within a financing system in which access remains concentrated.
The post-2020 racial-justice moment offers another cautionary lesson. After George Floyd’s murder, corporate America made extraordinary public commitments to racial justice. A Washington Post analysis found that America’s 50 largest public companies and their foundations had pledged at least $49.5 billion. Yet more than 90 percent of that amount was allocated as loans or investments from which companies could potentially profit, rather than straightforward charitable support. (The Washington Post)
The point is not that every corporate racial-justice commitment was meaningless. It is that public declarations of solidarity should never be confused with transferring durable power.
I think LGBTQ movements made a similar mistake at times. We interpreted corporate enthusiasm during a relatively favorable political period as evidence that the culture had permanently changed. We treated acceptance as infrastructure.
They are not the same thing.
Acceptance can disappear when politics changes. Infrastructure remains because you own it.
That distinction has changed the way I think about liberation. I still believe institutions should be challenged. I still believe corporations should be held accountable and that Pride should never become merely a marketing opportunity. What I no longer believe is that distance from mainstream power is, by itself, a strategy for freedom.
Marginalized communities need power of our own. That means capital, institutions, businesses, property, political relationships, media, professional expertise and organizations capable of surviving changes in government, philanthropy and corporate fashion. We have become very good at critiquing institutions. We must become equally serious about building and owning them.
The hidden subsidy of our movements
When institutions do not have sufficient resources, the deficit does not disappear. Someone absorbs it.
Increasingly, I believe movement leaders themselves have become the hidden subsidy.
The missing money becomes additional hours. The lost sponsor becomes another series of telephone calls. The staff position an organization cannot afford becomes another responsibility absorbed by someone already carrying too much. The gap between what a community deserves and what an organization can provide becomes a private source of guilt for the person expected to close it.
There is evidence that this is not merely an individual leadership problem. The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s 2026 research found that 46 percent of nonprofit CEOs said their own burnout was “very much” a concern, up from just under 30 percent the previous year. A quarter said burnout was significantly affecting their staff. CEP also found that organizations led by LGBTQ CEOs and CEOs of color, as well as social-justice organizations, were experiencing more pronounced threats than their peers. (The Center for Effective Philanthropy)
Those numbers land differently for me now.
During these past weeks, there have been moments when the accumulation of attacks, financial pressure, responsibility and fear for an institution I helped build has overwhelmed my ability to compartmentalize it. I have had to confront what it means for movement work to follow me into my home and touch my husband and my daughter. I have had to acknowledge that this has affected my mental health while simultaneously knowing that the next morning will bring another meeting, another decision and another group of people legitimately expecting leadership from me.
At the same time, I have another institution to lead and another crisis demanding attention. Black gay men and other key populations around the world do not stop needing access to HIV prevention and treatment because I am exhausted. Staff do not stop needing leadership because someone attacked me online. Funders do not suspend deadlines because a movement leader is struggling. My daughter does not stop needing her father because Pride has become overwhelming.
This is where our celebration of resilience becomes dangerous.
There is something deeply wrong with a system that repeatedly congratulates marginalized people for surviving conditions it has failed to change. Black leaders are routinely praised for doing extraordinary things with insufficient resources, but every miraculous delivery risks reinforcing the assumption that we never needed adequate resources in the first place.
Global Black Pride is going forward in Paris without a headline sponsor. There will be a temptation, including within me, to look at what happens and declare that we did it anyway.
I want to resist turning that into the lesson.
Our ability to survive abandonment should never become the justification for abandoning us.
What is all of this for?
I have not lost faith in Pride. These experiences have instead forced me to become more precise about what I believe Pride, and movement work more broadly, should accomplish.
I believe there is political power in Black LGBTQ people gathering across national boundaries. I believe a Black queer activist from Africa should be able to encounter a Black trans organizer from America, a Caribbean advocate, a European activist and people from across our diaspora and recognize that their struggles are different without being entirely separate. I believe joy matters, not as a substitute for politics but as one expression of freedom. I believe movements need institutions because hashtags fade, political moments pass and personalities eventually disappear.
What has changed is my understanding of what liberation requires.
I am less interested today in whether our institutions appear sufficiently radical and more interested in whether they can endure. I want Black queer people to build businesses, own property, control media, accumulate capital and create institutions. I want us to negotiate with corporations from a position in which their departure cannot determine whether our movements survive. I want philanthropy to understand Black LGBTQ organizations as infrastructure rather than temporary vehicles for whatever happens to fit a funding strategy that year.
I also want us to become more honest about the economics of Pride. Pride can be protest and still require professional production. It can challenge corporate power while recognizing that workers must be paid. It can reject corporate control without pretending independence costs nothing. Money is already everywhere in Pride; the more important questions are who controls it, who benefits from it, who has access to it and whose labor quietly compensates when there is not enough.
Paris will not answer those questions, and Global Black Pride itself is not exempt from them. We have not solved global access. We have not achieved the financial independence I want for this institution. We have not been able to bring everyone whose voice deserves to be present. There are choices we have had to make because the resources simply were not there.
But perhaps maturity in movement leadership begins when we stop confusing admitting imperfection with admitting defeat.
I will arrive in Paris knowing what this gathering has cost, including costs that will never appear in an audited financial statement. I will arrive knowing that I have had my Blackness questioned because I am African, that people I love have been dragged into attacks against me, that my mental health has suffered, and that people within the ecosystem have told us that others discouraged potential partners from supporting Global Black Pride.
I will also arrive knowing that Global Black Pride is still happening.
I do not want that to be a story about proving our critics wrong. They are not important enough to be the reason this institution exists. Nor do I want our ability to proceed without a headline sponsor to become evidence that funding was unnecessary. If anything, this experience has demonstrated the opposite.
What I want after Paris is a more difficult conversation about power within our own movements. We need to examine who gets funded and who gets introduced to funders; who gets to define Blackness and who is treated as an outsider; why movements devoted to inclusion can develop such protected circles of influence; why we celebrate independence while failing to provide the capital required to achieve it; and why we remain so comfortable allowing movement leaders and their families to absorb costs that institutions cannot.
Those questions require us to examine not only governments, corporations and conservative movements, but ourselves. An institution does not become equitable merely because the people running it are marginalized. A gatekeeper does not cease being a gatekeeper because they know the language of liberation.
For generations, marginalized people have fought for a place at institutions other people built. Perhaps the next phase of liberation requires something more ambitious than simply winning better seats within them. We need institutions we own, capital we control and movements capable of surviving without asking permission from a small circle of people who can decide whether we deserve access.
That requires money. It requires governance and accountability. It requires professional institutions and long-term thinking. It also requires enough humility to recognize when our movements begin reproducing the very hierarchies we were created to challenge.
Most of all, it requires us to reject the idea that sacrifice is an endlessly renewable resource. No movement should need to consume the people building it in order to prove that it deserves to exist.
Perhaps that is finally my answer to the question I have been asking myself.
The work is still worth doing. The people are still worth fighting for. But if the price of liberation is the destruction of the people trying to build it, then we have not yet built liberation at all.
