By Michele Kort

The golf tournament—now a major stop on the women's professional golf tour—was launched in 1972 with popular TV personality Dinah Shore as its public face. The girls started coming not long after. At first it was just a trickle, but by the mid 1980s lesbian club promoters discovered they could corral the women who were already coming—and encourage others to join them—by offering a series of parties and events over the course of the weekend. That party scene has now become enormous, drawing thousands of women each year, filling up three hotels (and countless motels and other rentals), and bringing hundreds of thousands of dollars of business to the Palm Springs community. The Ladies Professional Golf Association, meanwhile, has always done its best to pretend that the lesbian frolic isn't happening; they even changed the name of the tournament to the Kraft Nabisco Championship, supposedly because few people remember Dinah Shore—a legendary entertainer with a career spanning 50 years in radio, recording, film, TV, and cookbook writing.

But a mere name change didn't end the lesbian identification of the Dinah Shore Weekend—which it always and forever will be.