Netflix threatens Straight Pride parade with legal action over logo

The organizers of Boston's Straight Pride parade, an anti-LGBTQ group called Super Happy Fun America, listed Netflix on its website as a “prospective corporate sponsor” of the event, along with 24 other companies.

Netflix sent the straight pride organizers a cease-and-desist letter, ordering them to remove the company's logo from all materials associated with the event.

In the email to the parade's organizers, Netflix said: “Our legal department is here, it's queer, and it's telling you to steer clear.”

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Netflix has declined to sponsor a Straight Pride parade taking place in Boston this August, and told organizers in a scathing email that their planned event “is about hate—not pride.”

Super Happy Fun America, the anti-LGBTQ nonprofit organization behind the parade, recently posted a list of “prospective corporate sponsors” for the parade to its website. The 25 companies in the list include several tech companies, including Netflix, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, Lyft, and Yelp.

The streaming service wrote in an email to Super Happy Fun America that the organization was not allowed to use Netflix's logo in any of its materials, and that it viewed doing so as “spreading misinformation about Netflix's involvement or sponsorship” of the parade.

“You should know that we're unafraid of bullies,” Netflix wrote in the email, which parade organizers posted on its website. “Our legal department is here, it's queer, and it's telling you to steer clear.”

Netflix has confirmed to Business Insider that the email posted on the organizers' website is legitimate. In its email, Netflix threatened to take “further legal action” within 24 hours if the organizers did not stop using its trademarked logo and intellectual property “immediately.”

In its blog post, Super Happy Fun America said that “it is Netflix that is acting like a bully.”

“We have every right to inform the public about our attempts to gain sponsors for our parade and their hate will not stop us,” it said in its blog post.

News first spread at the beginning of June, also known as Pride Month, that a group of men were trying to organize a Straight Pride parade in Boston. The group has since secured a city permit to hold the event on August 31, with controversial right-wing writer Milo Yiannopoulos acting as the parade's grand marshal and mascot.

Netflix's logo in the list has been crossed out from Super Happy Fun America's list of sponsors since the e-mail was apparently sent, but nonetheless still appears on the website. At the time of publication, Tumblr was the only other other tech company whose logo has been crossed out on the list.