As spring approaches, we move into music festival season, when millennials and college students across the U.S. empty out their bank accounts for Coachella. Coachella is the most widely known music festival which takes place annually in Indio, CA, where the weather is perfect, the music is loud, and the crowds are enormous. Their lineup every year consists of a wide range of artists, bands, and DJ’s; and in 2019 Childish Gambino, Tame Impala, and Ariana Grande are the headliners. In 2018, Beyonce headlined for Coachella and it was one of the most anticipated live performances of the year, bringing in an array of people hoping to see Queen B herself perform. The festival is incredibly popular, however most individuals do not know what goes on behind the scenes of this well known event.
Attendees of Coachella are known to be able to freely express themselves, wearing whatever they want and dancing under the sun for a whole three days straight. Specifically, many of the music-festival-goers are part of the LGBTQ+ community and most of the performers are publicly known to support the queer community heavily. You can say it is a safe place for anyone to express themselves, no matter what their ethnicity, race, or sexuality is. But the owner of the Coachella festival (along with other popular festivals such as Camp Flog Gnaw, FYF, and etc) is a private billionaire named Philip Anschutz, who has been controversial in the past few years for his anti-gay, pro-gun, and pro-life beliefs.
Anschutz has a net worth of about $12 billion dollars, and in past years was outed for donating to anti-LGBTQ+ organizations, hate groups, and Republican politicians. In 2016, a report was released by the queer advocacy group Freedom for All Americans with proof that the billionaire donated a total of $190,000 to organizations with anti-gay beliefs, and many of those groups are Christian right-wing extremist organizations. After being called out for supporting such groups, Anschutz cut ties with the religious hate groups, but continued to donate to Republican politicians who hold the same right-wing beliefs. Anschutz donated around $5,000 in 2017 to Colorado senator Cory Gardner who is pro-guns and believes that Barack Obama is not an American. In the same year, Anschutz also donated to pro-life politicians Scott Tiptin, Deb Fischer, and Paul Ryan.
According to Billboard, Coachella is the first annually-held music festival to bring in over $100 million dollars in one year. Anschutz did release a statement promising “to continue to withdraw further support from any organization that exhibited problematic activities,” but contradicts himself by continuing to donate to politicians who hold the same pro-life, pro-gun, and anti-gay beliefs. In 2018 just before the first weekend of Coachella, (convenient timing, his PR team did great), Anschutz donated one million dollars to the Elton John AIDS Foundation’s LGBT Fund, in efforts to strengthen his statements of supporting all humans and their human rights, despite what their sexuality may be. However, this does not erase his past offensive actions against people who belong to minorities.
The queer community are a huge chunk of consumers of the Coachella festival, and many are unaware of what their money is really going towards. Not to say that members of the LGBTQ+ community shouldn’t be supporting Coachella, but they should know who is running their favorite music festivals and what he stands for. If Anschutz continues to support LGBTQ+ organizations and puts actions where his words are, maybe then will the queer community show their full support and happily attend the annual desert festival.
