the worst time to sue a drag queen? Pride month
There’s a trademark lawsuit working its way through a Los Angeles federal court right now, and it has become quite an instructive PR case study. Pride month always produces a few of these, but this one is especially tricky. It’s also still developing.
There’s a trademark lawsuit working its way through a Los Angeles federal court right now, and it has become quite an instructive PR case study. Pride month always produces a few of these, but this one is especially tricky. It’s also still developing.
The Basics
Patagonia, the outdoor apparel brand built on an identity of progressive environmental activism, filed suit in January 2026 against Wyn Wiley, better known as Pattie Gonia, a drag queen and environmental activist who’s built a following around queerness and the outdoors. More on the suit later.
On May 27th, in the lead-up to Pride month, Pattie Gonia released a video accusing Patagonia of using corporate resources to erase her as a queer climate activist.
Before the announcement, according to social tracking data via Social Blade, Pattie Gonia’s Instagram account was gaining 700-1,200 followers per day. The day she went public, she gained 43,612. Then 37k, 28k, 26k, and 18k on the days after. Patagonia, meanwhile, lost about 10,000 followers total in the same span.
Right in Court, Wrong on Socials
The moment Pattie Gonia took this to Instagram, it became a crisis for Patagonia. We know that the suit happened in January, but to many, it looks like Patagonia sued a drag queen at the beginning of Pride month. Pride Month primes audiences to be protective of LGBTQ voices, and Pattie became the instant underdog.
That narrative blazed through socials, and then came the counternarrative. As is common, everybody became a law expert overnight, saying:
Companies have no choice but to defend their trademarks or risk losing them
Patagonia had a prior understanding with Wiley in 2022 that was allegedly breached when Pattie Gonia began selling merch in 2024 and filed a trademark application in 2025
The lawsuit only asks $1 in damages
Just like that, the comment sections turned. It’s lost in the shuffle that companies don’t have to sue to protect their IP, that Pattie Gonia disputes the prior understanding, and that the lawsuit is also asking for attorneys’ fees, which are expected to be substantial.
But the comments didn't turn in Patagonia's favor, either. Skeletons resurfaced: the military contracts through a subsidiary, the 2012 discovery of debt bondage in their Taiwanese supply chain, the 2015 Greenpeace criticism over toxic chemicals in their waterproofing, etc.
Did the internet represent these accurately? Of course not. Patagonia no longer has military contracts, they helped investigate and solve the labor issues, and said they’ve stopped intentionally adding PFAS to their clothes. But:
Complicated, contextual information doesn't spread as far or as fast as simple, emotionally charged information.
When Everybody Looks Wrong, Nobody Wins
This is where the story teeters on outrage fatigue. When you've been outraged about what a company did to a drag queen, then outraged that the drag queen misled you about the company, then find out again that the company actually might be what you feared, you start to disengage and dismiss everybody involved.
Regardless of how it turns out, this is a bruise for Patagonia. When the internet gets involved, it’s hard to walk out unscathed. People remember how a story made them feel long after they’ve forgotten the facts.
Both brands share a significant audience overlap (partly the basis of the suit): progressive, outdoorsy, values-driven. For values-forward brands, this is especially high-stakes because by nature of taking a stance, the expectations are higher and the threshold for offending your audience is lower.
Will Patagonia recover?
Large, established brands with deep goodwill reserves generally do recover, but because their audience overlaps so much with Pattie Gonia’s, they risk alienating their core customer. That’s harder to absorb than if this had blown up with, say, a demographic that was never going to buy their jackets anyway.
It depends on what they do next, and it’s too soon to tell—the story is still escalating. On June 2, Patagonia publicly shared on Instagram three conditions it said needed to be met to resolve the lawsuit, the third of which said, “Stop selling and promoting apparel and other products as Pattie Gonia.” Pattie Gonia agreed to all but that one, saying, “No deal, Patagonia.”
Could Patagonia Have Avoided This?
Other brands haven’t faced this kind of fallout despite having a drag queen share their name. However, those performers made different commercial choices. Trixie Mattel, for exmple, built a makeup brand as Trixie Cosmetics, which doesn’t use the Mattel name. Patagonia’s problem is that Wiley doesn’t seem to be making that same call.
If Patagonia’s goal requires Wiley to stop selling under the Pattie Gonia name entirely, there is likely no version of this where Wiley agreed behind-the-scenes without the public finding out. When you're dealing with someone who has in the millions of followers and a compelling narrative available to them, that's a trigger that’s always theirs to pull.
What Brands Can Take From This
The lesson here isn't "settle all IP disputes quietly," which would've obviously been Patagonia's and Wyn Wiley’s preference. Legal commentators are split on the strength of Patagonia’s case, but many think it’s strong. The problem is, a win in a court of law doesn't always translate in the court of public opinion.
The real advice is understanding what you're stepping into when your legal dispute involves someone with a sympathetic narrative, especially if your values align with theirs—doubly so if they have a large, loyal following. The underdog story is one of the most powerful forces in public opinion, and it's hard to beat once it takes hold, especially when the opponent can frame the story in a single punchy sentence. "Megacorp sues drag queen using punny name during Pride month" is easy to get behind. The complicated, boring bits (to the average person) about trademark law, licensing agreements, and prior negotiations will always be harder to follow.
Top takeaway: Being legally right doesn't make you reputationally safe, and when you're a values-forward brand especially, the emotional framing of a story will always go farther than the facts of it.
— Britta
LAHO is a PR and marketing agency for professional service firms, emerging brands, and public figures. Think PR with punch, marketing with mood, and the strategy a vision board would hire. We pride ourselves on having creative ideas and being strategy-first, so all the stand-out things we do to build visibility and growth are also backed by experience & data. Need help building trust and authenticity with your audience? Reach out here.
how to rainbow market if you don’t support lgbtqia+ rights, in 2 easy steps
In the spirit of public service, here is a practical guide to rainbow marketing if your company does not support LGBTQ rights. Follow these steps and you will achieve the full effect: alienating the community you're targeting and setting your brand equity on fire before July.
June arrives and something remarkable happens. Logos turn rainbow, limited-edition merchandise appears, brands that spent the previous eleven months donating to anti-LGBTQ politicians suddenly discover their deep and abiding love for the community. It is a reliable cycle, and audiences (particularly the queer audiences these brands are courting) have gotten very good at clocking it.
So in the spirit of public service, here is a practical guide to rainbow marketing if your company does not support LGBTQ rights. Follow these steps and you will achieve the full effect: alienating the community you're targeting and setting your brand equity on fire before July.
Step One: Don't Do Anything the Other Eleven Months
The most straightforward on the list. And we get it! No photo opportunities, no LGBTQ support. A Pride campaign out of nowhere is a transaction: their attention for your revenue, no values exchange required. At least you’re up front about it. Bonus points if you, like a number of Fortune 500 companies, run Pride campaigns while your political action committees fund lawmakers who sponsored or voted for anti-LGBTQ legislation. (P.S., The Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index tracks this.)
Jokes aside, when a company runs a Pride campaign, it is asking queer people and their allies to trust it with their sense of being seen. That is a significant ask. This is a community that has been demonstrably harmed by institutions—including corporations—performing support and then disappearing when push comes to shove.
Subaru understood this, which is why their relationship with LGBTQ consumers is a 30-year case study rather than a cautionary tale. In the mid-1990s, Subaru's marketing team discovered that lesbians and gay men over-indexed in their customer base alongside skiers, teachers, and nurses. Rather than pivot away from that finding, they committed to it, incrementally at first, then more openly as the years went on. Their early ads featured same-sex couples before doing so was mainstream or commercially safe.
They built a relationship before they built a campaign.
Step Two: Fold the Moment Anyone Complains
Target spent years building a Pride collection. In 2023, under a wave of threats and pressure, they pulled products and moved displays to the back of stores. Bud Light partnered with trans creator Dylan Mulvaney on a small campaign that same year, and when backlash hit, company executives publicly distanced themselves from their own marketing decision, leaving Mulvaney without support while the campaign was still live.
In the mid-to-late 1990s when Subaru’s ads started running, The American Family Association called for boycotts. Subaru didn't pull campaigns or issue apologies, and their sales grew anyway.
Now, the people most likely to boycott Subaru over LGBTQ content have already self-selected out of being Subaru customers, or who understand that’s just who Subaru is—like the (promise to come back here after you click) “hungry first, gay second” Chick-fil-A meme. Chick-fil-A never lied about who they were. The brand has been building this association long enough that its customer base organically became people who were fine with it or actively drawn to it. There was no silent majority of Subaru buyers who were surprised and offended. The surprise had already happened years earlier, and those people bought Toyotas instead.
You Can, In Fact, Make Everyone Mad
We’ve been taught since grade school that you can’t please everyone. But, if you rainbow wash during Pride month, you can, in fact, please no one.
Take Target for example. Target is a mass-market retailer whose value proposition is that everyone shops there. When they introduced Pride merchandise, they were introducing it to a customer base that included a significant slice of people who had never associated Target with any particular values stance because Target had never really taken one. That offended people who thought Target shouldn’t support LGBTQ rights and also people who thought Target hadn’t earned the right to take their money for LGBTQ products.
Subaru's LGBTQ customers and allies are loyal, repeat buyers who feel personal ownership over the brand. When the AFA came for Subaru, those customers actively defended them. When Chick-fil-A went viral for not supporting LGBTQ rights, its customers lined up in record numbers.
Rainbow washing brands don't have that. They get the backlash with none of the loyal constituency to absorb it.
With that said, a company can run a meaningful Pride campaign without Subaru's 30-year track record. The companies that get destroyed are the ones whose Pride presence is out of proportion with what is true inside, whose campaigns imply a depth of commitment that evaporates when the month is over.
There Are No Shortcuts to Building Trust
This is, at its core, a messaging problem and it obeys the same rules as every other messaging problem. Authenticity is not a creative brief. Authenticity predates the creative brief, earned before the campaign. An audience with genuine stakes in whether you mean what you say will figure out whether you mean what you say.
There are no shortcuts to building trust with the LGBTQ community. There are plenty of shortcuts to destroying it. Asking for someone's loyalty and money without having earned either is one of the fastest.
— Britta
LAHO is a PR and marketing agency for professional service firms, emerging brands, and public figures. Think PR with punch, marketing with mood, and the strategy a vision board would hire. We pride ourselves on having creative ideas and being strategy-first, so all the stand-out things we do to build visibility and growth are also backed by experience & data. Need help building trust and authenticity with your audience? Reach out here.
social media content isn't marketing
I’m going to hold your hand super tight when I say this: If you’re posting on social media and telling yourself you’re marketing your product/brand… you’re not.
I see a lot of people who are extremely active on social media and they’re telling me (the viewer) that marketing is exhausting and they’re so tired of constantly promoting their product or their brand. And their content looks great, but then I’ll hop over to their profile and find myself at a dead end. No website link in bio, or there’s a link tree but it’s driving me to the third-party product page.
I’m going to hold your hand super tight when I say this: If you’re posting on social media and telling yourself you’re marketing your product/brand… you’re not.
Social media isn’t marketing. On its own. It exists as a facet of marketing, something that you leverage during a specific phase in your traffic funnel. When you’re posting your meticulously curated and on-trend content, what you’re doing is building awareness. You’re putting the product or your brand or whatever you’re wanting to convert out into the world and you’re saying “hey, look at this super cool thing!” And maybe you’ll reach a smaller percentage of your audience that sees that and wants to know more about your product, your brand, and then what?
Then what?
If you don’t have a link to your website or any place for them to do anything with their curiosity, you’ve missed a potential opportunity. They’ve scrolled on. They’re lost to the algorithm, and you can only hope that by the grace of that same algorithm you’ll be granted a second chance with them (and hopefully have a clearer funnel for them to follow).
I’m passionate about having a marketing funnel and being intentional about it. Do you have one? If you’re trying to sell something, you should. If you’re posting trendy videos and calling it marketing, you should definitely have a funnel.
What does a funnel look like?
You need to start at your product or the action you’d like your desired audience to take and work backwards from there. Maybe it’s, purchase a book from your website because you have a higher profit margin there as opposed to Amazon.
Purchased book on website →
Landed on landing page with a clear CTA (call to action) →
Clicked the top link on your LinkTree from your TikTok bio →
Viewed your profile after a specific piece of content where you mentioned (in the caption or the endcard) the CTA (find it at the link in my bio!)
And this works for literally everything.
Don’t have a website store? Drive them to Amazon instead. Make the funnel path intentional and clear in its steps.
CTAs are your friend, people like being told what to do next, especially when the purchase intent is already there.
I can count the number of times on two hands that I’ve tried to make a purchase somewhere and the process was too hard or the steps were muddled and I just gave up. You have a narrow window of time to capture that purchase intent, so use it wisely.
Want to grow your newsletter list instead? Change the funnel steps. The conversion action is now signing up for your newsletter. Work backwards from there.
Do a pulse check on your marketing today. Do you have a funnel? How easily can you remedy that? Maybe it’s just adding a link to your bio for today. Need more help figuring out how exactly you want your funnel to work? Book a strategy session with us and we’ll happily build the plan with you.
— Natalie
LAHO is a marketing and communications agency helping founders, businesses, and creators grow relevance and revenue. Think PR with punch, marketing with mood, and the strategy a vision board would hire. We execute cohesive strategies across earned, owned, and paid media to build influence with intention through senior-led storytelling and smart distribution. Need strategy, content, PR, or ads? Reach out here.
