Google Scraps Pride, History Months, Claims Calendar Efforts Couldn't be 'Sustained'

As once-reliable corporate allies have folded to the demands of anti-LGBTQ+ activists, Google has quietly stepped away from celebrating calendar events like Pride and history months.

Pride isn't the only casualty. "Black History Month, Indigenous People Month, Jewish Heritage, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage have also been removed, according to a Google product expert," noted The Verge.

Spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld offered the explanation that "maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn't scalable or sustainable," The Verge relayed.

"For over a decade we've worked with timeanddate.com to show public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar," Veld said. "Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world."

Starting down that path naturally led to more and more additions as the Google team became aware of calendar items to note.

"We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing," Veld recounted, "and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn't scalable or sustainable."

"So in mid-2024 we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments."

The explanation has a ring of plausibility to it, but the timing – ironically – invites skepticism. Intense right-wing pressure on corporations to abandon LGBTQ+ consumers and partnerships, like two years ago when a wide-ranging boycott by conservatives against Bud Light erupted in the wake of the brand's partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

Other companies were soon in the crosshairs, and their marketing around Pride was one of the first things to fade. Faced with violence by some homophobic customers, certain Target stores began to remove Pride merchandise from sale and to move rainbow-themed displays to the backs of stores.

With new attacks focused on DEI initiatives, companies more recently started to set aside programs and practices that had involved diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Companies such as Lowe's, Ford, and Harley-Davidson stopped being part of the Human Rights Campaign's Equality Index, a report card on LGBTQ+ inclusivity among major companies in the United States.

Donald Trump's 2024 election campaign demonized transgender Americans and painted supportive companies and institutions as "woke." It wasn't long after the Nov. 2 elections that more major businesses like social media giant Meta began to seemingly cater to right-wing wishes, including discarding some of its content moderation guardrails.

The right's war on "wokeness" has accelerated in the weeks since Trump's inauguration, with the president using that term to rationalize purging the boards of visitors of military academies and even eject board members of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and assume leadership of that institute's board personally, supposedly because the Kennedy Center permitted drag shows "specifically targeting our youth..."

The characterization was a wild exaggeration. As EDGE previously reported, "NPR's Bob Mondello did a deep dive of drag events at the center."

What other major cultural institutions – or small, but meaningful, gestures of acknowledgement – will vanish next? Will Google Doodles no longer offer users a smile for Pride or celebrate groundbreaking LGBTQ+ heroes like Stonewall veteran Marsha P. Johnson, equality advocate Frank Kameny, and astronaut Sally Ride?