Happy LGBTQ+ History month. Chances are you didn’t know it was LGBTQ+ History Month. And that’s ok neither did I, a massive gay.

Hardly surprising when you consider it’s competing against monthly awareness campaign behemoths like Movember and Dry Jan.

So, unlike Pride, when brands might feel compelled to mark the occasion with some form of campaign, or at least a social post, LGBTQ+ History month goes largely unrecognised.

So, why do brands only care about LGBTQ awareness once a year? Does equality matter more in July than in February?

Well, I think blaming the brands may be too easy, when it’s very possible the call might be coming from inside the house.

Part of the problem is that, particularly in some of the bigger agencies, creative departments have traditionally veered towards the laddy.

I certainly have some horror stories from the bad old days of agency culture (the 2010s).

There was the time I was making an animatic for one of the largest and most recognised condom brands. The concept involved couples kissing. I suggested throwing in a same sex couple or two (after all, they made up way more than half the customers of this brand at the time). I leave the animators for a couple of hours only to return to find they have indeed included a same sex couple kissing. ‘Great!’ you might think. Except that the couple added were two women, who presumably didn’t have much use for a condom.

Then there was a time I was working on a pitch for the Army. We were given the task of finding some real inspirational stories to feature. I found one of a trans woman who’d risen to the rank of Captain, overseeing a company of 100 soldiers. A slam dunk, surely? I was expecting to be carried around on everyone’s shoulders for single handedly winning the business. The response? ‘That’s a bit weird’. If it had been ‘That’s maybe too divisive for a pitch’ or ‘Let’s keep that in the back pocket and see if the client seems open’, it would have at least been more understandable, but ‘weird’, nah. The unfortunate takeaway was that the literal army was less open and tolerant than an East London creative agency.

Thankfully, I now work in an environment that feels a million miles from this kind of behaviour. And part of the reason we started our agency initiative ‘Joint Projects’, was to create ideas that challenge behaviour and how people think, even if just a tiny amount.

It’s how our ‘Have I Got Phobia for You’ project came about last year - a playful way of exposing transphobia in the press by parodying BBC’s ‘Have I Got News For You’ - challenging players to guess whether redacted headlines come from 80s homophobia or today’s transphobia. It was not only a creative and entertaining way to call out behaviour that had long been unchallenged, but it was also championed internally and signalled real progress from the 2010’s.

(You can play the game here.)

So what can we take away from all this? It’s fair to say that LGBTQ+ awareness could benefit from more of an ‘always on’ approach. We’ve seen brands activate brilliantly around Pride month in the past - think Starbuck’s’ #Whatsyourname campaign or LEGO’s Everyone is awesome - but scepticism around the intention of these isolated campaigns will ease if incorporated into a year-long strategy.

But more importantly, no matter how toxic advertising can sometimes be, we can take quiet comfort in knowing that tabloid journalism will always be worse.