Whatever happened to the rainbow logo? I asked my friend Eliza this on Tuesday, over a piece of branzino that had been described to us, with some ceremony, as “line-caught.” Eliza runs brand strategy for two banks, a streaming service, and a regional grocery chain you have heard of. She put down her fork the way people do when they are about to lie carefully.
“The team felt,” she said, “that the moment had matured.”
The moment had matured. I wrote that down later, on the back of a parking validation, because it is the kind of sentence that explains an entire decade if you let it sit. The moment had matured. Not retreated. Not been quietly walked back the second a few angry men with podcasts started threatening boycotts. Matured. Like a cheese. Like a 401(k). Like an idea that has gracefully outgrown the need to be expressed in public.
I have spent the past week looking, with the dim curiosity of someone checking whether the porch light is out, for the rainbow logos that used to bloom across the internet on the first of June. The bank app where the little chip icon used to go iridescent: beige. The brewery whose summer can used to be a Pride can: a perfectly nice illustration of a heron. The streaming service whose home page used to wave a flag at me before showing me a procedural about a forensic accountant: a procedural about a forensic accountant. Nobody made an announcement. They simply did not place the order.
This is, I am told, the sophisticated move. Across the table from Eliza was a man I have known for fifteen years and will describe only as bipartisan, in that he lobbies for whoever is in the room. He examined his cufflink — he is always examining his cufflink, the way other men check their phones — and offered that the smart shops had quote-unquote rotated their values calendar. They had not abandoned anything. They had rotated. He said this the way a man says he is between jobs.
My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and therefore has the unfortunate habit of remembering things, pointed out that Pride Month was officially proclaimed, in writing, on White House letterhead, by presidents of both parties within recent memory. Not as a brave gesture. As a Tuesday. The kind of thing a chief of staff initialed between a trade letter and a condolence card. Judy said this and then, because she has been to enough of these dinners, took a long sip of wine and changed the subject to her dog.
I am not interested, here, in the chest-beating version of this column, the one that demands every regional credit union take a stand on every question of human dignity by Friday. I am asking a smaller and meaner question, which is what we believed when we believed it. Because the rainbow on the bank app was never courage. Everyone understood that. It was a low-cost gesture in a season when the gesture was free. The interesting test was always going to be the season when the gesture cost something, even a little, even just an angry email from a man named Chad in Boca. And now we know.
The bipartisan lobbyist, warming up, said the word “restraint” about the new approach. He said companies were exercising restraint. He said it twice. Eliza, who I love, nodded. Restraint, in this usage, means doing in June what you would not have hesitated to do in May of last year, and charging extra for the wisdom. Restraint means discovering a principled objection to a logo color exactly when the wind shifts. Restraint is what cowardice calls itself once it has hired a consultant.
I will tell you what I keep thinking about. Civic courage, whatever it is, has always been a question of what you will continue doing when no one is forcing you to. Not the parade. The Tuesday after the parade. The June when nobody is watching and somebody has emailed your CEO. By that standard a great many lobbies in this country are, this month, demonstrating something, and it is not maturity, and it is not restraint, and we all know what it is, and we will not say it out loud, because we are, after all, eating.
The branzino, for the record, was excellent. Eliza asked the waiter for the recipe. We agreed it was the best thing on the table. It was, in the end, the only subject of the evening on which everyone present was prepared to take a public position.