At this year’s iconic sapphic celebration, attendees began to crave more than just partying
BY STEPHANIE THEOBALD, IMAGES BY RADSKILLZ
I’m in Palm Springs at the final day of the Dinah, the jamboree billed as the biggest lesbian party in the world. Judging from the excited roars of the scantily-clad women in the pool, the spontaneous twerking and the groups of women snogging under palm trees, it’s clear that it’s another “mission accomplished” year.
This is the 33rd iteration of the mega weekend of Sapphic debauchery named after the Dinah Shore golf tournament of the 1970s and made internationally famous by being featured in Season One of The L Word. This year’s vibrant musical lineup boasts King Mala, Lauren Sanderson, Lauren Jauregui, emerging hip-hop dynamo Show Relle and rising Native American artist Chloe Star. And yet Kate, 55, from Seattle would have come to the Dinah for a line-up of unknowns banging cardboard boxes with wooden spoons. She’s basically here to meet women. But she has the no-hook-up blues. She says she wishes there was an event specific for singles. There are about 2,000 women here this weekend, but what happens is that you spend the first two days reeling in the joy of living in a parallel universe of friendly gay women wherever you look. You feel safe and you love the camaraderie, but by day three you realise you haven’t got laid yet. And you feel even more of a loser when you find out that some women have.
The gossip this morning surrounds the woman who apparently spent the previous night at the after-party of the after-party and woke up in a bed of naked women, one of whom was racking ketamine off her breast. It can feel like a lot of pressure being at the Dinah.
I don’t tell Kate about this. She’s talking about her regrets about not having created an Instagram account. “Nobody seems to swap phone numbers these days,” she tells me. And she’s kicking herself for not being more proactive on the dodgeball court. “A woman knocked me over and then came up to apologise. She goes, ‘Can I do anything for you?’ And of course, I only thought afterwards that I should have said, ‘Yes, you can kiss me!’”
I sympathise with Kate. I tell her I didn’t get laid either. The truth is I spent all day Saturday launching the American edition of my book on female masturbation, Sex Drive. I’d like to have launched it at the Dinah but was told that “anything related to the sex industry (sex toys/books etc) is against hotel policy as well as our corporate sponsors.” Which was a shame. I’ve always thought of books as educational. But I did manage to lure some Dinah revellers over to the Palm Springs LGBT Center, a short walk from the hotel where the Dinah was happening. We had a lively discussion about the American sex-positive feminists of the 1960s and ‘70s who dedicated their lives to helping women be shame-free about their bodies.
Kate gestures to a confident-looking woman nearby wearing a baseball cap saying “No Hetero”.
“Check her out,” she says with a sigh. “She’s like a chick magnet.”
But No Hetero, the big stud of the party, turns out not to be a cocky nightmare at all. She admits that “last year I was single and some things… happened in the bathroom.” But now she has a girlfriend back east and she’s doing monogamy.
“I was nervous coming here solo this year. But this weekend has shown me I can be in this environment and stay true to my values. I didn’t kiss anyone. And dancing’s a good form of….”
There’s a sudden eruption from the pool as Chloe Star, the dazzling Persian/Native American alt-pop rock star struts onto the stage and starts belting out her vulnerable hit anthem, Wasted Youth, about an extreme rehab in the wilderness she was forced to attend at the age of 16.
Far from chasing after sex, No Hetero surprises me by saying that she’d like to see “more depth” at the Dinah.
When Star’s set ends, she says, “A panel with Chloe Star on drug treatment programs would be great right now. There’s a lot of sober people at the Dinah.” Another panel idea is “something for recently divorced women” and I’m flattered when she says she’d like to have come to my masturbation talk.
It seems that the Dinah has reached a tipping point. Alongside the frolicking in the pools, there is a thirst for substance. Information. History even. Maybe it’s the violent times we’re living in, maybe it’s because the Dinah mix felt way more queer this year, i.e. there were more trans men and women and non-binary people alongside the traditional lesbian-identified clientele than there were last year. Of course, the Dinah is a big party weekend, but it feels as though it’s time to talk a little too.
Events director, Mona Elyafi admits she’s noticed that many of the women present don’t seem to understand that lesbians haven’t always been swinging from the chandeliers. In 1991, when Mariah Hanson launched the first Dinah by inviting some lesbians to the Palm Springs Art Museum, it was nearly impossible to get decent spaces for gay women. Around 1,750 excited women showed up on the night. The event was such a success, that the women got thrown out of the museum for being too rowdy.
Then I spot Darlene. She has an enigmatic smile on her face – like Zoltar, the fortune teller at the end of Santa Monica pier. You can tell that she’s seen all, and suffered all.
“Most of these women don’t know how lucky they are,” the 78-year-old tells me.
When I’d asked Lauren Sanderson about her goals as a musician the previous night, she said they were about, “empowering women and letting them know it’s OK to be who they are.” But being who you are was just a dream in Darlene’s day. Born in 1946 in a small town in Michigan, Her heyday was in the late 1960s, a time when if you were dancing with another woman you had to keep several inches apart. And butches could be dragged out of a bar (and often suffer sexual violence) for not adhering to the “three article rule” meaning that if you wore more than three items of clothes associated with men, you could be arrested.
Darlene tells me some women have come up to her over the weekend to ask how things used to be. She thinks that a little history could be introduced to the Dinah.
“Of course, you can’t shove it down people’s throats,” she cautions. “You got to bring it in very slowly. Like, ‘Hey guys, do you want to hear some stories?’”
She’s been shot at twice, once with a paint gun.
“I came out of the gay bar and there’s a barrel of a gun staring at me. Bang! The sound of a gunshot and it hit me. I went back to the bar and said, Call the police! But they said, I’m sorry we can’t do that. They’ll close us down if we call too many times.”
Keeana Kee, the vivacious singer-songwriter from Latvia walks past at this point. She can relate to the North American lesbian scene back in the 60s because the lesbian scene in Eastern Europe has some similarities in 2024. “Americans do not understand what they have,” she says, surveying this weekend’s Sapphic Barbie Land paradise.
“We need more information about the history of gay women because unless you read how are you going to learn?”
So, there you go: killer weekend, Dinah 2024 but more sex and more history please in 2025. Things are looking promising on the first front. Before I leave, Mona tells me she’s thinking of introducing speed dating next year to help shy solo women like Kate. Darlene, meanwhile, has put thoughts of history away for the moment. “I like to just watch,” she says, focusing on a couple of baby dykes throwing each other in and out of the pool.
“The world sucks right now,” Darlene adds. “We’re so lucky to have this.”
Sex Drive: On The Road To A Pleasure Revolution by Stephanie Theobald is out now in paperback (Unbound.)
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