I've spent more than three decades building Eaton Fine Art alongside my husband, Robert. In that time, I've watched the hospitality industry's relationship with Pride evolve from something rarely discussed publicly into a moment that nearly every brand now recognizes in some form, which is real progress and not something I take for granted. As an openly gay business owner, leading a nationally recognized art consultancy firm with my husband has shown us firsthand that LGBTQ+-owned businesses can not only succeed but thrive within major hospitality networks, and that it's possible to build, scale and lead a company on your own terms while staying true to who you are.
At the same time, I've noticed a pattern that comes along with that progress. Every June, logos shift to rainbow palettes and social calendars fill with celebratory content, and then July arrives, and the messaging quietly returns to business as usual, which I don't think comes from a lack of care, since most of the people I've collaborated alongside in the hotel industry genuinely mean it. But rather from the fact that a marketing campaign is seasonal by design, built to spike and recede on a calendar. Genuine inclusion isn't a gesture at all, but something woven into procurement strategies, partnership decisions and the long-term values a business chooses to operate by.
That's what makes procurement one of the more overlooked levers for turning a stated value into a lived practice, because unlike a Pride campaign or Pride press release, a purchase order leaves a paper trail that gets reported, tracked quarter over quarter, and benchmarked. When I think about where inclusion actually gets tested, it not only has to do with what a company says in June but more importantly who that company chooses to do business with in October and all months of the year.
Verifying Support
This isn't only about LGBTQ+-owned firms, though that's the lens I know best, having built and certified one myself, since the same principle applies to any underrepresented supplier category a company genuinely wants to support, and in my experience, the most credible way to verify that support is through third-party certification. For LGBTQ+-owned businesses, that certification comes through the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce, the country's certifying body for Certified LGBT Business Enterprises. It requires documented proof of majority LGBTQ+ ownership, operational control and management, verified by a chamber affiliate, which, for a hotel brand or ownership group, answers a question that travelers and employees are asking with growing skepticism every year: Is this supplier actually what you say you're supporting, or is this just a label? More than a third of Fortune 500 companies already build NGLCC certification into their own supply chains, so hospitality doesn't have to invent this template from scratch; it simply hasn't been widely adopted in our corner of the industry yet. Other underrepresented suppliers have a different certifying body.
There's also a scale to this that I think gets under appreciated, since NGLCC estimates that the roughly 1.4 million LGBTQ-owned businesses in the U.S. contribute more than $1.7 trillion to the economy each year, and for a hotel company sourcing art, furniture, textiles, food and beverage, or professional services, that represents a large and largely untapped pool of collaborators who, in my experience, bring a different perspective and lived experience to the collaboration in ways that show up in the final product even when a guest can't quite name why.
None of this requires reinventing how procurement works so much as treating supplier diversity the way a company already treats cost, quality, and reliability as a criterion built into the process rather than a value stated apart from it. That can look as simple as asking bidders about certification status on requests for proposals and vendor forms the same way insurance coverage already gets asked about, or tracking what percentage of category spend—whether that's art; furniture, fixtures and equipment; catering; or marketing services—actually goes to certified suppliers rather than just counting how many diverse collaborators a company can name. It can also mean reviewing that spend on a quarterly or annual cadence outside of June, so the conversation doesn't reset every Pride Month and disappear for the other 11 months. And, maybe most importantly, letting those collaborations extend well past a single transaction, since the strongest programs I've seen are the ones where a diverse vendor becomes a recurring collaborator across multiple properties rather than a name brought in for a one-off tied to a cultural moment.
Building Trust
Much of what I've learned about building trust in this industry has come through being present for it, through walking a property, sitting down with designers and owners and spending time with the artists and suppliers we collaborate with. Those in-person moments create a level of understanding and alignment that's difficult to replicate from a distance, and the same holds here. A hotel company and a brand that shows up for its certified suppliers consistently, not just during Pride Month, builds the kind of trust that a campaign alone never can.
A campaign ends in 30 days, but the collaboration and the accountability that comes with choosing who you build it with doesn't have to. That is the real difference between celebrating Pride and building a business that reflects it every other month of the year, too.
Terry Eaton is president and chief curator of Eaton Fine Art.