| Pride Month wraps up in New York City today with one of the world’s largest marches for L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights. In recent years, as support for gay equality has become mainstream, some activists and comedians have turned a skeptical eye on corporate participation, skewering companies whose solidarity seems pandering, profit-minded, or—given their other political affiliations—hypocritical. The debate has inspired everything from alternative marches to parody Pride events, but the conversation is itself a form of progress. It wasn’t long ago, after all, that many of the same companies wouldn’t even associate with the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, much less celebrate gay people’s basic rights. In 1997, The New Yorker’s James B. Stewart profiled Ron Woods, an employee at Chrysler who had been assaulted by a co-worker. A thirty-seven-year-old electrician, Woods had been an exemplary worker, receiving admiring reviews from superiors and bringing doughnuts to endear himself to colleagues. But as his fellow-employees began to suspect that he was gay, the atmosphere changed, and other attacks, acts of intimidation, and harassment followed. In their aftermath, Stewart wrote, Woods transformed from “passive conformist to determined reformer to angry activist,” insisting that Chrysler protect him and other gay workers from violence and discrimination. Chrysler provided a steady stream of reasons for despair—the company, a manufacturing behemoth and the fourth-largest advertiser in America at the time, famously joined other major corporations by withdrawing its ads from the coming-out episode of “Ellen,” Ellen DeGeneres’s groundbreaking sitcom on ABC. (The show was cancelled the following year.) But, here and there, Woods could also find causes for hope. When every other Chrysler employee refused to work with him, an amateur bodybuilder named Terry Kremkow became his professional partner and defended him against bullying. Woods’s sexual orientation “doesn’t matter,” Kremkow reminded co-workers. “We’re here to build cars.” | 
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