pervocracy:

Nah, fuck off.  Ace people aren’t responsible for this.

The responsibility lies with:

1. Corporations, massively.  The price for having Citibank as a sponsor of your pride parade is that things are going to happen according to Citibank’s Friendly Community Standards (whether this is an explicit demand or not).  They’re going to field a big group of marchers celebrating rainbows and the word “pride,” but no elements of sexuality or rebellion.  And they’re going to put pressure–implicit or explicit–on the other groups in the parade to not do anything too wild under Citibank’s auspices.

Or they’re just going to stuff the parade with their groups–maybe Citibank on its own can’t change the whole parade, but when you’ve got Citibank and US Bank and Staples and Target all fielding groups that make up 90% of the parade by mass, that sort of sets a tone.  And that tone is “some queer people on their Best Behavior because HR is watching, some random vaguely-liberal corporate employees who wanted to be in a parade, and the biggest and most expensive displays seem to be celebrating the meteorological phenomenon of rainbows.”

2. To a much smaller extent, well-meaning handwringing over inclusiveness, but in a way that’s mostly not perpetrated by or for ace people.  There’s a much more general problem in social justice circles where being more concerned and more aware is always better, and this can be best performed by criticizing everything to death.  Which has its role and I’m not advocating for being unconcerned and unaware, but… we’re lacking in processes for recognizing when excessive restraint is also problematic, even though it is.

The difference between “fine, be gay, but don’t shove it down my throat” and “PDA and nudity at Pride is problematic in the glorification of conventional body standards, exposure to minors, the historical association of homosexuality and predatory hypersexuality, erasure of the dangers of HIV/STIs and sexual assault, and alienation of people who are sex-repulsed or anxious about sex for various reasons” is–well, it’s a lot, but you sort of end up in the same place, don’t you?

Some of those reasons are actually very good, but sometimes good isn’t good enough.  They have to be good in a way that outweighs the harm done by desexualizing Pride, and I’m not convinced that they are.  Or at least I think people should put more thought into explicitly making compromises between competing needs, rather than always erring on the side of offending nobody by doing nothing.

(related: my frustration with Tumblr for picking queer media and creators to death while giving a free pass to much worse straight people, and maybe nothing that’s said is wrong per se, but… the overall effect is a discourse that’s mostly about how awful various queer things are, and if I wanted that I could get it from Mike Pence)

I’ve written more paragraphs on this, mostly because it’s complicated and I don’t want to totally dismiss the relevant concerns, but don’t forget it’s like 10% of the problem.  The Citibank Family Friendly Rainbow Fest is 90%.

Inclusionism/Exclusionism is largely not a thing in the community except on the internet. I volunteer at an LGBTQ+ community center and most people are simply unfamiliar with ace people and are like “oh okay” when I explain. It makes zero sense to me considering how small of a minority the ace community is that they’d have such an influence on Pride. I agree with the OP that the above mentioned factors are more prevalent. I’d include respectability politics (as in, ‘I’m LGBTQ+ but I hate x group of LGBTQ+ people at Pride becaues they take it too far") and also people who hate kink and think those who practice it should disappear from the public eye as other factors.