Pride Beyond The Headlines. Allyship Isn't Measured in July

I've been asked the same question countless times over the years: Why isn't there a Straight Pride?

Sometimes it comes up in workshops, sometimes in conversations with managers, and sometimes in organisations that genuinely want to understand why celebrating one sexual identity seems fair while another does not. I have never minded the question because, more often than not, it comes from curiosity rather than hostility. For years, my answer hardly changed. I talked about history, about Stonewall, about visibility and about rights. I explained that Pride was never created to celebrate being queer. It emerged because being queer came with consequences that being straight simply did not.

Why Pride Still Matters Beyond Celebration

Last week, after the attack at Berlin Pride, I realised that I wanted to answer differently because the events of that day reminded me that history is not something we leave behind. It continues to shape the present in ways that are sometimes painfully obvious. There is no Straight Pride because no one drives a car into a crowd because the people in it are straight. As devastating as that sentence is, I found myself thinking that it captures something I had struggled to explain for years: Pride has never been about celebrating difference for its own sake. It has always been about insisting that some people have needed extraordinary courage simply to exist openly.

A representative survey by the German Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency found that between 28% and 38% of respondents feel uncomfortable with same-sex couples kissing in public, showing that acceptance often ends where visibility begins.

I am disgusted and worried. I am disgusted by the attack itself, by the fact that people gathering to celebrate visibility and community once again became the target of violence. But I am equally worried by how quickly the conversation shifted afterwards. Within hours, we were debating ideologies, radicalisation, security failures and political responses. Those conversations matter, and there will be time for all of them. Yet while reading the headlines and the statements that followed, I kept returning to a much quieter observation. A person had died. Dozens of others had been injured while attending a demonstration that exists because queer people have never been able to take their safety for granted.

Allyship Isn't Measured in July: Organisational Solidarity Put to the Test

At the same time, social media filled with messages of solidarity, companies published statements of support and politicians reaffirmed their commitment to protecting queer communities. Those gestures mattered. They still do. But they also made me wonder why solidarity becomes most visible after tragedy, while much less attention is paid to the quieter decisions that determine whether people feel safe long before something terrible happens.

Allyship Isn't Measured in July. Many of the institutions and individuals expressing solidarity this weekend have, over the past two years, quietly reduced or cancelled the very programmes that created space for queer people long before Pride became a branding opportunity. Diversity budgets disappeared. Employee resource groups lost support. Pride campaigns suddenly became "too political". Inclusion was reframed as a distraction from more pressing business priorities. I don't mention this because I believe today's solidarity is insincere. People can genuinely grieve while also recognising that previous decisions may have weakened the very structures that help people feel safe and included. What interests me is a different question altogether: what does solidarity actually mean if it only becomes visible once harm has already occurred? For organisations, this may be one of the most uncomfortable questions Pride asks. Because solidarity is not measured by a logo in July or a statement after a crisis. It is measured by what survives when budgets become tight, when public opinion shifts, when political pressure increases or when inclusion is no longer the easiest decision to defend in the boardroom.

Allyship at Work: What Responsibility Really Looks Like

Over the past few months, while writing our forthcoming book on feminist workplace culture, I found myself returning to this idea again and again. The organisations making the greatest progress are rarely those with the most impressive Pride campaigns. They are the ones that understand inclusion as an organisational responsibility rather than a communications strategy. They continue investing in employee networks when nobody is celebrating them for it. They equip managers to respond to discrimination before it escalates. They make space for uncomfortable conversations long before a crisis forces them into one. In other words, they understand that belonging is not created by exceptional gestures but by ordinary decisions that are repeated consistently over time. Perhaps this is also why I have become increasingly interested in allyship—not as another DEI buzzword, but as a way of describing what solidarity looks like once the headlines have disappeared.

When we recently developed our new workshop on allyship, one of the conversations that stayed with me most was with my colleague Luka Özyürek. Luka kept returning to a simple observation: Many people still assume that diversity belongs to those who experience discrimination, while everyone else simply watches from the sidelines. Yet organisations do not change because the people affected by exclusion keep asking for change. They change when responsibility becomes shared. Allyship, in that sense, is not about extraordinary courage or perfectly knowing what to say. It is about checking in with a colleague after a difficult week, challenging a dismissive remark in a meeting, making sure an employee network survives the next budget discussion or asking whether someone needs support instead of assuming someone else will provide it. These moments rarely make the news, but together they determine whether people experience inclusion as something real or as something organisations merely talk about.

What Pride Asks of Organisations

Perhaps that is the answer I would give today to everyone who has ever asked me why there isn't a Straight Pride. The question is no longer simply about history. It is about responsibility. Pride has never asked for special treatment; it has asked us to recognise that equality cannot be taken for granted simply because some people experience it that way. The attack in Berlin was a devastating reminder of why that insistence is still necessary. But it also reminded me that the most meaningful forms of solidarity are rarely the most visible ones. They are found in the decisions organisations make when nobody is asking them to make a statement, in the budgets they continue to protect when inclusion becomes inconvenient, in the conversations managers are willing to have when no crisis demands them, and in the colleagues who quietly choose to stand beside someone else without expecting recognition for doing so. Perhaps that is what allyship has always been: not a performance for moments of public attention, but the everyday practice of making sure people do not have to stand alone once the headlines have moved on.