Why 2023 is the summer of anti-LGBTQ panic

Target has a well-established tendency toward prematurely embracing holidays. Eager to get a jump on holiday sales, they’ll often start displaying Christmas items in, say, October. Eager more recently to get a jump on selling items for Pride Month, they put up displays in stores well in advance of June 1.

This year, that turned out to be a problem.

It started with March Madness. Bud Light, eager to offset years of declining sales by appealing to new markets, sent novelty cans of beer to influencer Dylan Mulvaney as part of a promotion. Mulvaney did what influencers do and made a video about it, which she posted on Instagram.

The catch, as you probably know, is that Mulvaney is a trans woman. Bud Light’s inclusion of her in its promotion, however modest in scale, quickly became an element of the right’s recent outrage at the presence and recognition of trans people in American society. Instead of quietly expanding its customer base, Bud Light ended up as a right-wing punching bag. Brand executives had fretted about the beer being associated with a sort of out-of-vogue machismo — an association that amplified the backlash.

There was a rush of performative demonstrations of hostility to Bud Light, a new contest on the political right to show just how opposed you were to the brand sending those cans to Mulvaney. Anti-Bud Light content got a ton of attention in right-wing media.

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