For more than three decades, The Dinah has been one of the largest and most well-known lesbian events in the U.S. What started in 1991 as a wild one-day party at an art museum evolved into a five-day annual festival that brings thousands of queer women from across the country to Southern California’s Sonoran Desert.
This year’s Dinah celebration, which concluded Sunday, marked the end of an era for what many attendees have affectionately dubbed “lesbian spring break.” The event’s founder, Mariah Hanson, announced in June that she would be stepping down after 34 years at the helm, making the 2025 celebration her last. The future of the party is unclear, but Hanson has made a promise: “The Dinah will go on.”
“I don’t have second thoughts at all. I’m doing the right thing, but I do feel super mixed about it, because it’s just been this beautiful experience,” Hanson, now in her 60s, said in an interview before the event. “I know that someone’s going to do a better job in the changing climate of our community. … It’s time for someone to step in that is more dialed in to that than I am.”
Hanson was “just a little young pup promoter” in San Francisco when she got the idea to start a new lesbian party in Palm Springs, coinciding with a major women’s golf event that was then known as the Colgate Dinah Shore Golf Tournament.
The idea became a reality in April 1991, when Hanson produced her first Dinah Shore Weekend party at the Palm Springs Art Museum.
“It was a crazy night. There were girls climbing up onto the roof of this prestigious museum and then pulling up their tops and running in circles around the uplights, and then there were 70-year-olds, like septuagenarian security guards, that were climbing up and chasing them,” she recalled with a laugh. “It was so great, but I was also horrified, and that was my beginning.”
Needless to say, the party was not invited back to the museum after that first sold-out event. Over the years, however, it has shedded its “bacchanalian” reputation, Hanson said.
The Dinah eventually evolved into a multiday event, and the most recent iterations have included live music, pool parties and celebrity guests like Pat Benatar, Chaka Khan, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and the stars of “The L Word.”
One thing that hasn’t evolved much is the event’s name. It was named after a nearby women’s golf tournament, which in turn was named after the American actor and singer Dinah Shore. Hanson said Shore, who died in 1994 at age 77, seemed fine with the event using her name.
“I don’t think she was bothered by it at all and never sent us a cease and desist, because she was just such a pioneer for women. … She was not queer, but she was all about women doing it for themselves,” Hanson said. “So I’ll always give her a lot of credit, because I just feel like she’s one of our unsung heroes.”
When asked if most of the party attendees know who Dinah Shore is, Hanson said “not anymore.”
“They think it’s a beach in Florida,” she added.
Hanson has accumulated many fond memories over her 34 years at the helm of The Dinah, but when asked about her favorites, one in particular came to mind: being serenaded by singer Macy Gray. When Gray performed at the event in 2021, she invited Hanson onstage and then encouraged the crowd to join her in singing “Thank You for Being a Friend” to the party’s founder.
“I walked off the stage thinking, ‘I can quit now. It will not get better than that,’” Hanson said.
Her other top memories include having cast members from the popular lesbian series “The L Word” attend the event and introducing her late mother to singer-songwriter Chaka Khan in 2012.
Hanson isn’t the only one who has accumulated fond memories of The Dinah over the years.
Darlene Bjork, 79, first started going to the event in the 1990s with her longtime partner, and she estimates she’s been to a total of 15 to 20. Over the years, she said, she’s met friends from around the world, including several from Europe and at least one from Australia.
Bjork, who has lived in Palm Springs for the past several decades, said she’s in awe of how freely lesbians and other queer women can enjoy themselves at events like The Dinah, something that was not possible when she was a young woman living in Los Angeles.
“When I finally was able to go to a bar, at 21, the police would come in with their guns, and they’d say, if we were dancing slow, ‘You know you can’t dance. You got to either stop or get a foot between each other,’ and that was what we had out in the public, but at The Dinah, everything is protected and cherished,” she said. “I love just sitting there watching the girls and women enjoy themselves so freely. We never had that, and to me it just opens up my heart.”
This year’s multiday event, held at the Riviera Resort in Palm Springs, ended Sunday, with several thousand attendees joining from across the country and around the world. Princess Nokia and “The L Word” stars Kate Moennig and Leisha Hailey were among the performers, and special guests included cast members from Netflix’s “The Ultimatum: Queer Love.”
Hanson said she has “two strong candidates” interested in buying The Dinah event from her, but as of last week, it was not yet known to whom she will be passing the torch. And if no one buys it, she said she has “a plan B.”
“The Dinah will go on. … It’s too beautiful and important an event not to,” she said. “If I have to produce it myself, I would. There will be another Dinah.”
Regardless of who’s at the helm, she added, there won’t be an event in 2026. Hanson said The Dinah, which has been held in September post-Covid, will return to its original April date — though not until 2027.
As for Hanson — who lives in a ranch house on 15 acres in Northern California with five horses and four dogs — she’s uncertain where she’ll be in April 2027, but she knows it’s the right time for her to step down from The Dinah.
“I think it’s really important to know when there’s something else for you to do, and there’s something else for me to do,” she said. “I don’t know what it is. It could just be me deepening my spiritual practice. It could be me doing pickleball tournaments.”
