A Conversation on Queerness – and Queering Our Work

For Pride Month, our managing director, Dr Matilda Andersson, and behaviour and culture consultant Osman Jalloh reflected on a conversation they’ve been having for some time. It’s a dialogue about queerness, culture, and why brands need to rethink how they listen and represent people if they want to create better products, services, marketing and communications.

This isn’t just about inclusive language or seasonal campaigns. It’s about how we research, how we frame identity, and how we move beyond the safety of categories to engage with the richness – and resistance – of queer experience. And how it’s important for everyone not just for those who are identify as queer.

Here’s what surfaced.

The First Pride Was a Riot

Every June, the rainbow shows up. Logos get a seasonal shimmer. Pride Month becomes a moment of visibility – but too often, it’s visibility within limits. Pride becomes a symbol of inclusion: aesthetically loud, but culturally cautious. Safe. Sanitised. As Osman points out, Pride was never about seasonal logos or sanitised slogans. It was – and remains – a radical act of resistance against oppression. And resistance, like identity, is messy. Identity is not fixed. It is entangled, reframed and intersectional. It resists neat categorisation.

Somewhere in recent Pride campaigns, queerness has been reduced to a marketing trend – bright colours without depth. But queerness is more than a look. It’s a way of seeing, questioning and reshaping the world. In the process of presenting the safe and familiar, dressed up in a rainbow, the real stories – the complex, unruly, deeply human stories – get edited out. For advertisers and researchers alike, it’s time to stop filtering people through ideas of what’s “normal”. To commit not only to studying culture, but to challenging it. To stop following industry norms – and start questioning why they exist in the first place.

What Does It Mean to “Queer” Something?

Matilda notes that traditional market research still clings to its boxes. Too quickly, clients reach for demographics: age, gender, life stage. But identity doesn’t behave like that. It’s fluid. Shifting. Constructed in context, not categories. As Stuart Hall reminded us: identity is never finished, never fixed.

Boxes Don’t Hold Real People

Queering means rethinking the categories we’ve inherited. It means recognising that gender, age, race and identity are constantly evolving – shaped by technology, power and lived experience. For researchers and strategists, it means honouring difference, disruption and voices that aren’t always heard.

Yet too often, brands are still speaking to a version of people that’s already out of date.

When we flatten people into static demographics, rigid psychographics and reductive audience segments, we lose something vital. These neat partitions don’t reflect the lived messiness of identity – and we miss the chance to understand what’s really happening in culture. We stop listening. We start assuming. And we end up with boring sameness at best, harmful stereotypes at worst.

Queerness Is a Question – Not Just an Answer

To be queer is not just a matter of identity – it’s a challenge to the idea that identity needs explaining. Queerness asks why some ways of being are accepted and others are not. It pokes at the structures. It sees the gaps.

In that sense, queerness isn’t niche. It’s a worldview that resists simplicity and instead chooses an expansive view of what it means to be human. It invites us to look again: at power, at norms, at pleasure, love, family, at how stories are told – and who gets to tell them.

Imagine if we looked beyond boxes the way Alok Vaid-Menon – American writer and performance artist – invites us to:

“One of the lessons of straightness is that you can only belong if you’re understood. To be understood you have to say: I'm a man, I'm a woman, I'm this, I'm that. That's not love – that's control. Love is a commitment to someone's perennial mystery. Love says: I will never understand you. I will never get you, but I don't need to get or understand you – because I'm here to be alongside you.”

Not Just Inclusion – Systemic Rethink

“This isn’t just about including people. It’s about rethinking the system that excluded them to begin with.” – Matilda

Representation matters. But representation without responsibility is tokenistic. A rainbow ad with diverse casting doesn’t fix the deeper issue: that much of marketing still runs on unspoken rules – assumptions about gender, family, desire, belonging. Assumptions that leave people out. We see the consequences in subtle glitches and major gaps: misgendered users, ignored relationship structures, flattened identities. And in the creative process too – the quiet cues to “tone it down”, to make the work more palatable. That voids creativity. It dilutes difference and create less successful work.

One of the DISRUPTIONS we’re observing at Truth Consulting and have written reports about, is the return of Mono-Culture. In this environment, we see a push towards a world that does not tolerate difference – a movement to malign and minimise cultural difference itself, insisting that a single perspective represents the objective norm. This shift is designed to retain dominance, guard power and maintain control. It’s part of the “go woke, go broke” anxiety – which offers public cover for the marginalisation of anyone outside the mono-culture.

This has real consequences. In 2024/2025, more than 20,000 LGBTQI+ people are reported to have left the US for Portugal (a 300% increase year on year) – in search for the protection of their human rights. Their migration is driven by fear of oppression in their home country. When movement across borders is shaped by exclusion, brands face a critical question: will you support diversity and inclusion – or uphold the safety of monoculture?

It’s Personal. And It’s the Future.

Queering is also personal. Osman recalls Matilda once saying: “Thanks for sharing such an interesting element of what makes you you.” That sentiment reflects the heart of queerness. A commitment to a shared journey through queerness, culture and creativity – and a wish to root insights in care, curiosity and a deep belief in co-creation. In work that is brave enough to ask the hard questions.

“That’s part of what makes Truth Consulting ethos important to me. Our agency is not called Truth because it has all the answers – but because we’re committed to asking better questions. In a world full of noise, we listen for the signals of change and believe anger can be powerful. That resistance can be creative.” (Osman)

We also believe and observe all the time that queer lives often show us the future before the world is ready to see it. The signs that the rule needs rewriting – the question is just if we act on the signs and anyone who does will lead positive change

Let’s Brief for Tension

So how do we queer the brief and our work in practice?

We believe it starts by asking questions that make us uncomfortable. By inviting contradiction. By looking for stories that don’t resolve neatly. By making space for complexity – even when it doesn’t fit the format.

Let’s approach queerness not as a trend or target – but as a lens: one that helps challenge outdated frameworks and expand how we understand culture and commerce.

Because culture doesn’t live in the centre. It grows in resistance.

This Pride Month – and every month – let’s aim for work that’s real, nuanced, a bit angry, and rooted in care. Not just work that performs inclusion – but work built through co-creation, curiosity and a genuine belief in change.

And yes – that work will be more creative, more joyful, and more human too.