On June 27th Bonald joked in Don’t want to be the first one to stop clapping:
A second day of the mandatory rainbow flag on my WordPress editor. At first, the status signaling was mildly amusing; the longer it lasts, the more awkward and funny it will get. Lots of companies are showing their gay pride, and no doubt feeling warmly sanctimonious about it. But life goes on. Still, you know the old joke about nobody wanting to be the first one to stop applauding at the end of one of Stalin’s speeches?
Listen up, WordPress. If you really care about gay rights, I’d better see that rainbow flag tomorrow. I mean, of course everybody expected it yesterday. If you’d just had it for one day, people might have thought you were just doing the bare minimum to keep the SJWs off your back…
…Most important of all, though, you’d better keep an eye on other companies’ websites and keep rainbowing at least as long as they do, because if you don’t, we’ll know that you don’t really care about gay rights as much as those other companies do, and you’ll be scheduled to be eaten.
Two days later, Wired wrote more seriously about this same problem in How Long Should Brands Keep Their Rainbow Logos?
“There’s a danger of jumping on the bandwagon,” says Allen Adamson, North American chairman of the brand consulting agency Landor. Removing the rainbow too soon might seem insensitive to the long fight leading to this moment.
Shortly thereafter Sam Biddle* at Gawker picked up on this and started keeping track of which companies were the gayest, and who stopped clapping first:
To help consumers educate themselves about their choices, we’ll be keeping tabs on the following brave brands as they see out a game of solidarity chicken. Who will be crowned champion of human dignity? What we have here is nothing less than an objective ranking of Who Cares Most.
*When I googled Biddle the first article I found is from Mike Cernovich of Danger and Play: How I Played the Pathetic Gawker Bully Sam Biddle
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