The Dinah Founder and Producer Mariah Hanson Reflects on the Festival’s Cultural Impact and Meaning.
by Heather Cassell
This week thousands of queer women and gender-diverse people will take over Palm Springs for the biggest queer women’s music festival in the world: The Dinah.
Tickets and rooms are still available for 32nd annual The Dinah, officially the Club Skirts Dinah Shore Weekend, next week in Palm Springs, September 20-24.
More than 15,000 queer women and gender-diverse people slathered in sunscreen in their bikinis, sipping fruity cocktails, and rocking out to headliners: Princess Nokia and Doechii (Saturday, September 23) are expected to take over the Margaritaville Resort and Spa and The Hilton Doubletree, the festival’s official host hotels.
Rapper Doechii returns to The Dinah kicking off the weekend with 90s dance floor icon, Black Box, Friday night’s (Friday, September 22) opening party at Reforma Palm Springs. Pop star Keeana Kee will close out The Dinah (Sunday, September 24) also at Reforma Palm Springs.
Emerging artists Phem, G Flip, Xana, and Keeana Kee will keep The Dinah’s iconic pool parties entertained along with DJs Alex D, China G, Gracy D, Les Ortiz, Mo, and Tatiana.
Girls That Roam sat down with The Dinah Founder and Producer Mariah Hanson last month to talk about The Dinah. We spoke about what keeps her excited after more than 30 years producing large scale events for women, the importance of creating a gathering space for queer women, and giving queer and straight women and gender-diverse emerging artists a platform to shine.
Legacy
In 1991, Mariah saw opportunity in the Palm Springs desert. Queer women have gathered in the Coachella Valley attending house parties since 1972.
That’s the year when 1970s TV personality and avid golfer, Dinah Shore, partnered with Colgate and founded the Colgate Dinah Shore Golf Championship which was hosted at the Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage from the beginning to the end. Dinah used her Hollywood connections to boost the then-underfunded Ladies Professional Golf Association and professional women golfers. It became one of the four major golf tournaments on the LPGA tour until 2022 when the golf tournament said goodbye to Palm Springs last year, reported The Desert Sun. Through the years, it changed its name from the Colgate Dinah Shore Golf Championship to the Kraft Nabisco Championship, which dropped Dinah Shore’s name in 1994 after her death and was the main sponsor until 2014. All Nippon Airways took over sponsorship of the golf tournament renaming it ANA Inspiration in (2015). Finally, Chevron took the reigns as the championship golf tournament’s final sponsor in Palm Springs. Chevron moved the tournament to the Houston area this year.
Kraft Nabisco’s head of Hahn Communications, its public relations firm, Donna Hahn responded to Girls That Roam’s questions in 2010, stating, “We don’t have anything to do with the Dinah Shore weekend. That is a separate event.”
“We have consistently stated over the years that this is not an issue with the tournament,” she said.
“Our objective is to bring the world’s best women golfers to the desert for the pleasure of golf fans. We encourage all golf fans to attend the tournament regardless of their social lifestyle or sexual preference,” Dennis Belcastro, then vice president of industry affairs for Kraft Foods North America and executive director and chairman of the Kraft Nabisco Championship, said in 2010 denying past and at the time rumors of homophobia.
Through the decades, LPGA officials refused to respond to reporters’ questions about so quickly dropping Dinah Shore’s name from the tournament and the lesbian event that sprung up around the tournament.
Dinah never publicly stated her feelings about the lesbian event – then officially called The Dinah Shore Weekend – that hijacked her name and the tournament weekend. She wasn’t a feminist, lesbian, or known to be a community ally.
Rather she was straight and traditional, Dinah was once famously quoted by the New York Times in 1972 stating, “I owe everything, my success and the degree of happiness I’ve achieved, to men.”
She questioned why she should be ashamed of men taking the lead in her life.
“Why, as a woman, should I be ashamed to say that? Now a very special man, Burt, is making the decisions. I say to myself, Dinah, you’re very lucky,” she said.
Dinah Shore, born Frances Rose Shore on February 19, 1916, died February 24, 1994. Kraft Nabisco quickly removed her name from the championship.
More than 50 years later, lesbians and longtime golfers disagree with the tournament and its sponsors. The tournament is gone, but the lesbian event continues to bear Dinah’s name and is going strong.
Perhaps as a fair well to Palm Springs and finally an acknowledgement about the two events connection that started five decades ago the LPGA and The Dinah came together for the first time ever for The Dinah’s 30th anniversary. The former tournament sponsor The ANA Inspiration collaborated with The Dinah with Showtime to host a special event, according to a press release from the festival.
The Dinah and golf fans were able to mingle openly with current LPGA tour golfers Mel Reid, Cheyenne Knight, and Alena Sharp who made a special appearance at a VIP cocktail party at The Dinah’s Black and White Ball to “celebrate women’s mastery in sports.” Something that couldn’t have been dreamed of happening 50 years ago or even a decade ago.
Caroline “Lina” Haines, founder of the Lina Shore Golf Classic, a charity golf event for 30 years until 2017, which appears to have been the last event, according to its website, in Palm Springs was familiar with the scene. She recalled speaking with Girls That Roam in 2010 that for about a decade there was a great deal of tension between the golf tournament organizers and Dinah Shore becoming synonymous with the lesbian parties.
Lina explained, golf is a conservative game with conservative players and audiences. She didn’t completely blame the golf tournament from disassociating itself from the lesbian fans and party goers at the time. She recalled lesbian golf fans inappropriate attire and public displays of affection on the golf course while cameras were rolling. Rumored lesbian professional players attracting lesbian fans. Pro golfer Muffin Spencer Devlin’s public coming out in 1996. Then the media attention with Sports Illustrated’s 1998 spread devoted to the lesbian parties surrounding the golf tournament.
Lesbians partying with lady golfers gained momentum in the early to mid-1980s when corporate event producer Kathy Miller and Los Angeles-based lesbian club promoter Caroline Clone, took the parties out of private homes into warehouses. The parties remained private to protect the professional women and golfers from being “outted” and losing careers and sponsorships, Kathy said. Her parties attracted upward of about 3,000 women.
Caroline Clone left California’s lesbian party scene and moved her party to New York and Miami in the 1990s. Caroline Clone could not be found for comment.
A new generation of lesbian promoters, San Francisco’s Club Skirt’s Mariah and Los Angele’s Girl Bar duo Robin Gans and Sandy Sachs stepped in and blew Dinah Shore Weekend up. First individually and then as a team before their differing visions for the event sent them in different directions in 2006.
Robin and Sandy moved their Dinah Shore event to Las Vegas in 2012. It appears on the Dinah Shore Weekend Las Vegas website and Facebook page that the party has been on hold since the pandemic hit and it hasn’t returned.
Leaving Mariah queen of the desert.
Birth of a Lesbian Paradise
In 1990, Mariah attended one of the women’s parties during the golf tournament in Palm Springs.
She returned in 1991. This time, not as a guest of a party, but as the producer of a party. She took the name Dinah Shore for the event, her event company, Club Skirts, was her own first corporate sponsor; and she hosted her first one-night all-girl party at the Palm Springs Museum of Art. She realized she had something, and that the museum wasn’t the right venue for her parties. Some artwork was damaged. She never hosted another party at the museum again.
Instead, she expanded the party from one night to an extended weekend partnering with the Hilton. She booked DJs for pool parties and dance parties that went late into the night and lesbian comedians and performers for concerts. The weekend was dubbed “lesbian spring break.”
In 2004, Showtime’s “The L Word” premiered. The show’s producers came knocking on The Dinah Shore Weekend’s door in 2003 to film at the event. Being featured in an episode the first season, The Dinah exploded again growing to an estimated 20,000 attendees and putting “lesbian chic” on the map around the world. At the same time, attitudes and hearts and minds about queer people and the community were changing. Mariah wanted more for queer women and gender-diverse people. She set her eyes on becoming a premiere women’s music festival.
In 2006, she booked The Pussycat Dolls as headliners. After that she booked then-emerging artists who are all big names today Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, Meghan Trainor, Christina Perri, Eve, Iggy Azalea, Tegan and Sara, Mary Lambert, and the list goes on for the top of the marquee. She demonstrated her eye for record breaking female artists. Putting The Dinah on record labels and artists’ list as a must-book event and queer audiences as serious fans.
Sign of the Times
Mariah reflected on the difference nearly two decades make to become a must perform at event for emerging women – queer and straight – and gender-diverse musicians. She marvelled at the performers from record companies who didn’t flinch at performing for a queer women and gender-diverse audience and the quality of submissions she received for The Dinah’s “Emerging Artists Contest.”
It wasn’t always this way. When Mariah transformed The Dinah from a lesbian oasis in the California desert into a premiere women’s music festival in 2006.
In 1991, she wanted a place where queer women and their transgender and nonbinary partners could safely be themselves and have fun at pool parties and enjoy queer entertainers.
At one point, she recalled attempting to book Melissa Etheridge to headline The Dinah, but the closest she got was the Academy-Award winning lesbian musician performing at a nearby venue the same weekend as The Dinah, Mariah said.
“That doesn’t happen anymore,” she said. “Now they can outwardly promote and support such an important event for our community.”
Today, artists like ally Jessie Reyez to openly queer emerging artists Xana, Doechii, and G Flip aren’t afraid to fully express themselves, seek queer fans, and stand up for the LGBTQ community.
Canadian contemporary R&B artist Jessie performed at The Dinah in 2018.
“Jessie Reyez is really just so politically correct, it’s amazing,” Mariah said. Artists like Jessie “they help the stature of the event so that it becomes an even more powerful platform. It really shines a light on our community as a force to be reckoned with in the music industry.”
In recent years Mariah said the submissions she’s received from emerging artists have been agency quality. Some of the submissions were so good that she pulled some of the artists from the contest and booked them for the next The Dinah festival, she said.
“We can help emerging artists get exposure. That means a lot to me,” Mariah said. “I can’t tell you just the history I have with booking artists – especially LGBTQA artists –how difficult it’s been. It’s so much easier now.”
“I’m really excited about that because it’s a give-back to the community and it’s using the event as the platform that is even more powerful,” she added stating that this year’s emerging artists on the roster are Xana and Keeana Kee.
All of the artists get excellent exposure to The Dinah community and the community gets to see artists as they rise to stardom.
Queer Utopia
The Dinah is a queer utopia hosted in Palm Springs because of its LGBTQ-friendly city council in a progressive community that supports LGBTQ events. She said the city has designated The Dinah as a legacy event and the festival is serviced by the Palm Springs Convention Visitors Bureau.
“I applaud Palm Springs for their role in making sure that we have a home and that we’re supported by the city,” Mariah said.
Mariah cautions about becoming complacent and believing queer people have won their rights now.
“Look how quickly they can get taken away from us,” Mariah said pointing to the United States Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade, which granted women the right to a safe and legal abortion. “I think we all need to stay on high alert right now because as women and as queer people, we are under assault.”
That’s why large events like The Dinah are needed. They provide a refuge for queer and gender-diverse people who might not live in a state or country where public displays of affection between two people of the same sex are as acceptable as they are in Palm Springs.
“We need large events like this to come together and realize that our strength is in numbers,” she said when asked about the importance of The Dinah, especially when the community is under attack and under 30 lesbian bars exist across the US, according to The Lesbian Bar Project. “We need to get past our ‘isms’ and embrace the connectivity and the commonalities that are inherent in our experience as queer people.”
Mariah steered The Dinah through major global events and economic downturns: the dot com bust of the late 1990s, 9/11 in 2001, the Great Recession in 2008, and the pandemic in 2020. The Dinah returned to Palm Springs after a Covid hiatus in 2021, reported the Times.
She’s now guiding the event through a severe anti-LGBTQ backlash where there are nearly 500 proposed anti-LGBTQ bills in legislatures across the country attacking the queer community, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. According to the Human Rights Campaign 220 of those bills target the transgender community.
Mariah attributes her longevity through the twist and turns of the changes in the LGBTQ movement and US and global crisis through the decades to “heart.”
“Heart directly relates to relationship building,” Mariah said. “I think that relationships grow from heart-based mission statements and a heart-based objective in the work that you do.”
She said one of the most important lessons she learned is “every moment is a new moment to be the best person and the highest being that you can be. It’s a choice. Choices are the highest spiritual act.”
Mariah said that she’s constantly stepping back and saying, “I can do better.”
“‘I choose to right now’ … that’s a pivotal moment in anyone’s life,” she added.
“I think I was more consumed with the fact that I had the coolest job in the world and couldn’t believe it,” she said about the beginning of her career and being focused on the glitz and glamour of her job. As she matured, “I realized the platform that I had and how important it was. I became much more deliberate about an underlying mission that we have with The Dinah.”
She said The Dinah isn’t about partying. While there’s plenty of that happening, the festival is about inclusivity, connectivity, inspiration, telling stories, and “showcasing women artists and letting all women know that there’s a place for them,” Mariah said.
Mariah attributes the seed of activism instilled in her by her mother when she was growing up.
“We were spoon-fed activism when I grew up,” Mariah said talking about her activist mother who was involved in the Civil Rights Movement and advocated for Marin County’s homeless population. Marin is a county on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.
This year, The Dinah is keeping the support local donating a percentage of its proceeds from the festival to The L Fund in Palm Springs. The organization helps the city’s local queer women and gender-diverse community in need. In previous years, The Dinah has given to Equality California, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the Los Angeles LGBT Center, and other organizations.
Tickets are still available starting at $350 for a general festival pass and day passes starting at $40 and up for premium and bottle service (taxes and fees not included). Rooms are still available at The Dinah’s second hotel, The Hilton Doubletree.
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