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The Dinah at 35: A New Era for the Iconic Sapphic Festival
Photo: Maxime Bhm / UnsplashLicence: Unsplash License
The Dinah at 35: A New Era for the Iconic Sapphic Festival
For five days this autumn, thousands of queer women and sapphic people once again descended on Palm Springs for pool parties, music, comedy, friendship and something increasingly difficult to find: a space built around them.
The Dinah celebrated its 35th year in 2026.
But this wasn't simply another anniversary.
It was the beginning of a new era for one of the world's longest-running and most recognisable celebrations of queer women.
🌴 From One Party to a Sapphic Institution
The story began in Palm Springs in 1991.
Entrepreneur and event producer Mariah Hanson organised the first Dinah party around the weekend of the Dinah Shore golf tournament.
Around 1,500 people attended the sold-out first event.
What began as a party grew over the following decades into something considerably larger: several days of music, pool parties, performances, comedy and social events attracting queer women from around the world.
The concept was simple but powerful.
Create a space where queer women could arrive knowing they weren't the exception in the room.
Thirty-five years later, that idea still matters.
💜 Why The Dinah Became More Than a Party
It would be easy to describe The Dinah as a giant lesbian party in the California desert.
Technically, you wouldn't be entirely wrong.
But you'd miss most of the story.
For generations of queer women, finding spaces built specifically around them has never been guaranteed.
Lesbian bars have disappeared from cities. Women's queer spaces have historically received less investment and visibility than many other parts of nightlife. And outside major cities, finding sapphic community can still require considerable effort.
The Dinah created the opposite experience.
For a few days, queer women weren't searching for the community.
They were surrounded by it.
That sense of belonging helped transform an annual party into a tradition people return to year after year.
🎶 The Dinah 2026
The 2026 edition ran from September 30 to October 4 in Palm Springs, with Hotel Zoso and Hilton Palm Springs serving as its main host hotels.
The programme once again mixed the elements The Dinah has become famous for: huge pool parties, DJs, live performances, comedy, karaoke and nighttime events.
Music was a major part of the anniversary celebration.
Hayley Kiyoko and Da Brat headlined, with The Aces and Sasha Keable among the other artists performing during the festival.
Comedy also had its place, with performers including Cameron Esposito.
But underneath the entertainment was the same idea that started the event decades ago:
queer people gathering together because sometimes simply being surrounded by your community is valuable in itself.
🏳️🌈 A Sapphic Space That Has Evolved
The language surrounding queer community has changed considerably since 1991.
So has The Dinah.
What began primarily as a lesbian event has developed into a broader sapphic celebration welcoming LGBTQ+ women alongside non-binary and trans members of the community.
That evolution reflects something happening across queer spaces more broadly.
Community doesn't stand still.
The words people use for themselves change. New generations arrive. Understandings of gender and sexuality evolve.
The challenge for long-running queer institutions is preserving the reason they were created while allowing the community itself to grow.
The Dinah has now spent 35 years navigating exactly that.
🔄 A New Era Begins
The anniversary also marked one of the biggest transitions in The Dinah's history.
After more than three decades at the helm, founder Mariah Hanson sold the event.
The new owners, Bella Barkow and Rose Garcia, were not strangers arriving from outside the community.
Both already had longstanding connections with The Dinah.
Barkow had worked as the festival's operations manager, while Garcia had attended the event for years and served as one of its familiar hosts.
The transition keeps The Dinah in queer hands while moving responsibility for its next chapter to a new generation of leadership.
For an event built so heavily around community trust, that matters.
👩❤️👩 Why Spaces for Queer Women Still Matter
Thirty-five years is a long time in queer history.
LGBTQ+ visibility has transformed since the first Dinah.
Same-sex marriage is recognised across the United States. Queer characters appear across mainstream television and film. Dating apps can connect women who might never otherwise meet.
And yet the fundamental problem The Dinah was created to address hasn't disappeared.
Finding other queer women in real life can still be surprisingly difficult.
Someone can live in a city containing thousands of lesbians, bisexual women and other sapphic people and still wonder:
Where is everyone?
Online visibility doesn't automatically create offline community.
Dating apps don't replace friendship.
A Pride parade once a year doesn't create somewhere to belong for the other 364 days.
Physical queer spaces still do something technology cannot completely reproduce: they allow people to experience what it feels like to be part of a community rather than simply know that community exists.
🌎 From Palm Springs to Queer Communities Everywhere
Most queer women will never attend The Dinah.
That doesn't make its story irrelevant to them.
The same need appears in different forms around the world.
A lesbian bar in London.
A sapphic book club in Copenhagen.
A queer women's football team in Berlin.
A film festival in Lisbon.
A community meetup in a city without a single permanent lesbian venue.
A party organised once a month because there isn't enough demand — or money — for a permanent space.
They may look completely different from a five-day festival in Palm Springs.
But the underlying purpose is remarkably similar:
helping queer people find each other.
💗 35 Years — and Still Needed
The most interesting thing about The Dinah reaching 35 isn't simply that it survived.
It's that people still need what it offers.
The venues change.
The artists change.
The language evolves.
Leadership changes.
New generations arrive.
But the desire to walk into a space and immediately know that you belong there hasn't gone anywhere.
The Dinah began in 1991 by creating that experience for queer women in Palm Springs.
The Dinah at 35: A New Era for the Iconic Sapphic Festival
The Dinah has been bringing queer women to Palm Springs for 35 years, which is pretty impressive for an event that started with around 1,500 people at a single party in 1991.
This year, thousands returned to Palm Springs for five days of pool parties, live music, comedy, dancing and probably very little sleep.
Hayley Kiyoko and Da Brat headlined, with The Aces and Sasha Keable among the other performers. But 2026 wasn't only another edition of The Dinah. The festival celebrated its 35th anniversary and entered a completely new chapter after founder Mariah Hanson sold it to new owners Bella Barkow and Rose Garcia.
So this feels like a pretty good moment to look back at how one party in Palm Springs became one of the best-known events for queer women in the world.
🌴 It started with one party
The first Dinah took place in Palm Springs in 1991.
Mariah Hanson organised a party around the Dinah Shore golf tournament weekend, when plenty of queer women were already travelling to the area. Around 1,500 people showed up.
It worked.
Over the following years, that one party grew into a multi-day event with pool parties, concerts, DJs, comedy and nightlife.
Eventually, The Dinah became a destination in itself.
People weren't just happening to be in Palm Springs and going to a party anymore. They were travelling there specifically for The Dinah, sometimes from the other side of the world.
💜 Why did The Dinah get so big?
Part of the answer is probably quite simple.
There aren't that many huge events built specifically around queer women.
Even today, finding sapphic spaces can be surprisingly difficult. Dedicated lesbian bars have disappeared from many cities, and a lot of queer women's nightlife now happens through occasional parties, pop-ups and collectives rather than permanent venues.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Some brilliant communities have grown that way.
But it does mean that being somewhere with thousands of other queer women feels unusual.
The Dinah offered exactly that.
You could arrive in Palm Springs knowing that for the next few days you wouldn't have to wonder where the queer women were.
They were everywhere.
🎶 The Dinah 2026
This year's festival took place from September 30 to October 4, with Hotel Zoso and Hilton Palm Springs among its main locations.
The programme was very Dinah: pool parties, DJs, live music, comedy, karaoke and late nights.
Hayley Kiyoko and Da Brat were the 2026 headliners. The Aces and Sasha Keable also performed, while Cameron Esposito was among the comedy lineup.
It's easy to look at all of that and see The Dinah mainly as a massive party.
And yes, obviously, there is a lot of partying.
But people also come because it's one of those rare occasions when queer women and sapphic people make up the crowd rather than being a small part of it.
For someone coming from a place without much of a visible queer community, that can be a completely different experience.
🏳️🌈 The Dinah has changed too
A queer event lasting 35 years was never going to look exactly the same in 2026 as it did in 1991.
The language we use has changed. The community has changed. Our understanding of gender and sexuality has changed.
The Dinah started primarily as a lesbian event, but today its community is broader and includes LGBTQ+ women, trans people and non-binary people.
New generations have also brought different expectations of what queer spaces should look like and who should feel welcome in them.
That's part of what makes The Dinah interesting.
It isn't a museum piece from lesbian history. It's still happening, which means it has had to evolve alongside the people attending it.
🔄 A new chapter after 35 years
The biggest change this year actually happened behind the scenes.
After more than three decades running The Dinah, founder Mariah Hanson sold the festival to Bella Barkow and Rose Garcia.
Neither is completely new to the event.
Barkow previously worked as The Dinah's operations manager, while Garcia had been part of the festival community for years and was one of its hosts.
That makes 2026 the beginning of a new era for The Dinah.
For an event that has been so closely associated with one founder for more than three decades, that's a big transition.
But The Dinah isn't disappearing.
Someone else is taking it forward.
👩❤️👩 Do we still need sapphic spaces?
Probably one of the more interesting questions around The Dinah's 35th anniversary is why something created in 1991 still attracts thousands of people.
Queer visibility is completely different now.
We have dating apps. Social media. Queer characters in mainstream film and television. Online communities where you can find other LGBTQ+ people without leaving your bedroom.
And somehow we still regularly see queer women online asking the same question:
Where do I actually meet other queer women?
Technology made finding each other easier, but it didn't automatically give us community.
You can have thousands of queer people living in the same city and still have people there feeling like they're the only lesbian around.
Dating apps don't really solve that either, especially when what you're looking for is friendship, community or simply somewhere you can go without the expectation of dating anyone.
That's where physical queer spaces still matter.
🌍 It doesn't have to be a festival in Palm Springs
Obviously, most queer women aren't going to fly to California for five days of pool parties.
The Dinah is one version of queer community, and a particularly big one.
But the same thing happens on much smaller scales everywhere.
It can be a lesbian bar.
A sapphic book club.
A queer football team.
A film night.
A monthly party.
A community organisation.
Or six people meeting for coffee because someone finally decided to create the group they couldn't find.
The scale isn't really the important part.
What matters is having ways to find each other.
💗 35 years later
The Dinah started in 1991 with around 1,500 people.
Thirty-five years later, queer women are still travelling to Palm Springs to be part of it.
The music has changed. The crowd has changed. The language has changed. And now the ownership has changed too.
But the basic reason people go probably isn't that different.
Sometimes you just want to be somewhere where finding your community isn't difficult.
For a few days every year, The Dinah gives thousands of queer women exactly that.
💜 Find your community with SAFO
You shouldn't need to already know the right Instagram account, bar, organiser or local group to find queer community.
SAFO brings LGBTQ+ events, queer-friendly places, culture and community together in one place, whether you're looking for a huge sapphic festival or something happening around the corner.