There was a time when the Gay Pride parade was an outlandish, outsider affair. The participants often tried to shock the crowds, their way of telling people they were here, they were queer, and they were going to stick some part of their anatomy in your face whether you liked it or not. It must have been fabulous to watch the shocked expressions of school marms and polite society, as they clutched their pearls while some mostly naked guy on a float clutched his.

But now that LGBT+++ has gone legit, and the back of some transvestite’s g-string has the Amazon logo on it, it’s not the same.

Pride is clearly also for corporations who want to milk as much money as possible from a previously ignored demographic. In the past decade or so, companies have scrambled to prove how O.K. they are with L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ folks, and well, it’s embarrassing how transparent the scramble for our money is.

How to know when you’ve made it as a demographic? Somebody targets you for money.

I’m not immune. The first time I walked into a Target and saw a whole gay pride display with T-shirts, hats and other rainbow stuff, I got tears in my eyes and just stood there, blocking the aisle, while people pushed their carts around me. I cried in a Target, y’all.

But that was years ago. Now it feels like Pride is one long advertisement for which company is the most woke, and this blatant “We, too, are so accepting, give us your dollars” messaging is off-putting.

We see you, Miller Lite, with your oddly wholesome, rainbow-spattered ads. Where were you before it was in your best financial interest to be accepting of queers?

There’s a bit of the purist in there, that they’re not loved for who they are but what’s in their pocket. If normalization is the goal, then being acknowledged, manipulated and abused makes you as normal as anyone else in America. This is a capitalist society, and there is nothing more normal than big corporations taking advantage of you.

But there’s one glaring error in Krista Burton’s gripe: they don’t want your money, per se, because there just aren’t enough LGBT+++ folks to make a dent in the EBITDA. Target wasn’t denying you rainbow latte mugs because it hated gays, but because they couldn’t sell enough to make production pay off.

What generates this sudden influx of corporate interest isn’t your look or sex partner, your intersectionalist view of the world, the wrongfulness of people treating you any different than anyone else because of something you feel or do that’s no one’s business but your own. It’s your allies, your fans, your social justice supporters. You are hot as hell right now, and they are playing your 15 minutes for every dime they can squeeze out of it.

When the ACLU glommed $87 million out of the fools because they managed the marketing better than Trump managed his Muslim Ban Executive Order, corporate America got hard as a rock. All that loot suddenly found its way to the front burner, and they wanted it. Somebody figured out that all they need to do is shamelessly pander to whatever feelz prevailed at the moment and the teary-eyed kids would throw money at them.

So commercialization and faux-corporate concern sucked the fun out of your Pride gig? Welcome to normalization. It’s pretty much like the joke that followed Obergefell; why shouldn’t gays be allowed to marry and be just as miserable as the rest of us?