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Woolworths Pride and why the US war on LGBTQ rights should matter to all of us

Andy Carolin and Reinhardt Fourie
By Andy Carolin and Reinhardt Fourie
21 Jun 2023
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The language of the attacks on Woolworths because of its ‘Be an Ally’ campaign seems to have been taken directly from the well-worn homophobic and transphobic playbook of the American right.

The Woolworths campaign to celebrate Pride Month should not have been remarkable. It is, after all, simply a large corporate that determined that its profit-making agenda aligned, in this case, with advancing the visibility of an often-maligned group.

Accusations of pinkwashing aside – in which corporates use a commitment to LGBTQ rights to distract from possible ethical lapses and gaps in their labour practices – the Woolworths Pride campaign is encouraging.

The broader response to the campaign, however, has been noteworthy. Calls to boycott Woolworths flooded social media. Twitter was littered with exhortations to “protect the children” and “end grooming”. The accusation of being “woke” was thrown at Woolworths with abandon.  

The war on LGBTQ rights


After first seeing the rather bland, rainbow-hued call to “Be an Ally” in the campaign’s early days, we were not expecting much of a response. But perhaps we should have.

The language of the attacks on Woolworths seems to have been taken directly from the well-worn playbook of the American right. There has, in recent years, been a rising tide of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric and legislation in the US.

The right wing has been emboldened to legislate bigotry, and to use its media platforms to export these ideas around the world. The state of Florida enacted its infamous Don’t Say Gay law, which prohibits discussions of sexuality and gender identity at all levels in schools.

Tennessee, Georgia, Arizona, Alabama, Idaho and more than 10 other states have enacted laws that prohibit gender-affirming care to transgender minors. Tennessee and Idaho have banned drag performances in public places (with draft bills progressing in several other states), while draft bills in Arizona and a number of other states would criminalise (and even declare as sex offenders) any drag artist who performs in front of children or adolescents.

On a federal level, one of the lesser-known aspects of the Supreme Court’s decision to eviscerate abortion rights was one of the justices opening the door on possibly undoing marriage equality. Astoundingly, more than a third of the members of the legislative House of Representatives voted against the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022, a law which codified same-sex and interracial marriage.    

An insidious influence


The US has a disproportionate impact globally, with the cultural politics of that country influencing people around the world. The US is, for many, a moral placeholder that has the power to legitimise what can be said.

What has happened in the US has emboldened some South Africans to express their prejudice more freely, because they seem to believe that their bigotry implicitly has the protection of powerful people in the US (such as Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson).
The US has exported its hate-filled homophobia and transphobia to South African shores, and it is this that has recently been redirected towards Woolworths.

This bigotry often moves under the guise of rejecting “political correctness”. The US war on LGBTQ rights affects what many South Africans choose to say and how they choose to say it.

It is for this reason that the social media backlash against Woolworths has been cast in the language of being “woke”. This term has become the touchstone for the cultural wars in the US, where anything that challenges cisgender, heterosexual, white male dominance is dismissed as being “woke”.

The US has exported its hate-filled homophobia and transphobia to South African shores, and it is this that has recently been redirected towards Woolworths.

There is also a long history in the US of using the supposedly vulnerable child as a scapegoat for homophobic hatemongering. Some of the tweets and memes that parroted these American talking points are as absurd as they are dangerous:

  • “Wokeworths CEO says if you want to brainwash children on a national scale to groom them you must first brainwash yourself”;

  • “You support LGBTQ and Father’s Day? How ironic”;

  • “One reason to boycott: There are only 2 genders”; and

  • “Woolworths changes Youth Month to Pride Month: Woolworths is going woke by buying into the LGGBT [sic] agenda ignorer [sic] to appease the public in the name of inclusivity”.


In their attacks on Woolworths, some tweets appropriated the self-righteousness of US campaigns that boycotted American retailers:

  • “Target has lost $9 billion since we all called for a boycott against them for pushing LGBTQ+ clothing and products on children”;

  • “Woolworths soon to follow Target Coke Budweiser and others. Share price going to drop like a brick. Sales going to take a hammering. Woolworths & other corporations never learn from others”; and

  • “@Woolworths SA why don’t you have a private party for the people you are so proud of? Just remember what happened to bud beer and Dischem where unacceptable behaviour was punished by normal people. Now block me as you do to people who do not share your woke ideas.”


Maybe this is the point. In times where these tweeps feel threatened by the loss of their status as custodians of who is “normal” and who is worthy of inclusion, they draw strength from a growing chorus of seemingly legitimate US voices who advance hate with impunity.

Of course, the US right has grown the popularity of this kind of hatred as electorally relevant because they convince the public that more people feel that way than is actually the case.

Homegrown homophobias


We are not suggesting that there are not homegrown homophobes who encourage these bigots. Who could forget Al Jama-ah’s recent insistence that queer people should be excluded from public debate because of our apparent inability to be loving parents and our responsibility for society’s high levels of rape, murder and a generally apocalyptic Sodom and Gomorrah?

The Christian organisation Family Action South Africa seems to share these sentiments and has argued that “June has been hijacked by those advocating lifestyles opposed to traditional marriage, and ‘pride’ in such lifestyles is trumpeted all over”.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Queer folk, we are the ones we have been waiting for, the hour to save ourselves has come

They write further that “Woolworths has decided to climb on this band wagon and join the shrill voices of prominent woke corporates, pandering to the ‘LGBT’ lifestyle”.

Even here, the sentiments of a fundamentalist Christian nationalism ring out in ways that have uncomfortable echoes with legislators and Fox News hosts in the US. 

While South Africans should be wary of these partisan battlelines, we should also remember that South Africa is very different from the US. We should be vigilant about allowing such culture wars to start clouding our politics.

The South African Constitution, unlike its American counterpart, explicitly protects the rights of the LGBTQ community. Unlike the US, for the most part, LGBTQ issues have not been weaponised, nor have they held any serious sway in our politics.

We need to fight not only against bigotry, but also against those who invoke US culture wars to create the impression that these views are actively held by a larger part of the population in South Africa than they actually are. DM

Andy Carolin is an associate professor at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of the book Post-Apartheid Same-Sex Sexualities: Restless Identities in Literary and Visual Culture (Routledge 2021).

Dr Reinhardt Fourie is a senior lecturer in the Department of Afrikaans and Theory of Literature at the University of South Africa.

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