Thursday, April 14, 2016

The "Really" File - (Desert "gaypocalypse"?)

For their vine is of the vine of Sodom,
and of the fields of Gomorrah:
Deuteronomy 32:32
"Every year at the end of March, 20,000 lesbians from around the world fly into the Californian desert for five days of debauchery, ...at the Dinah, also known as the largest girl festival in the
world. .... hosting the famous Dinah pool parties, and the hotel feels like a homosexual harem.
Everywhere you look, lesbians are smiling, drinking, dancing, kissing. There are a few men around – staff working the event and guys who have been dragged along by lesbian friends – but they are hard to spot. It’s basically entirely queer women in attendance.
The party is named after the Dinah Shore golf tournament, started in 1972 by the eponymous entertainer.
Today, nobody is here for the golf. No one is here for the DJs, comedians or YouTube stars performing either. They’re here for the girls. Butch, femme, old, young, gold stars, bi, black, white, hardcore, normcore – the Dinah attracts a diverse group. There’s a sense of liberation and a tacit understanding that what happens in Dinah stays in Dinah (unless it ends up on Facebook).
One year, there was a minor earthquake in Palm Springs. Debbie, a Dinah veteran who has attended every event since 1991, recalls that half the water splashed out of the pool. Most of the girls were too drunk to realize or care.
The feeling of permissiveness is compounded by the desert scenery: it looks like there has been some sort of gaypocalypse, and all the straight men and women have died out.
It’s also about scantily clad celebration. Maybe all the clothes got destroyed during the gaypocalypse, because nobody’s wearing much.
Syphilis, by the way, isn’t something most lesbians think about much as they rack up Dinah conquests (“Never settle for a girl from day one,” one girl advised me, “the day two girls are always better”). Nor are STDs in general. It’s my untested hypothesis that one of the reasons the Dinah is so debauched is that it is quite difficult to get pregnant when sleeping with other women, and there’s also a misperception among many lesbians that you’re not at risk of STDs. Certainly it’s not something you’re told about much;

From the "Really" File
Another factor feeding into the debauchery, of course, is that lesbians rarely have such a large dating pool on hand. And as any economist will tell you, you’re more likely to be an outrageous flirt when faced with a thick market.
The Dinah has also started to attract more big-name talent. Katy Perry performed at the festival. And this year, Lady Gaga popped in briefly as a guest to watch pal Katherine Moennig (known to lesbians everywhere as Shane from the L word) play a DJ set.
Today it’s estimated that almost half the population of Palm Springs are gay, and it has the highest per capita gay population in the US, if not the world. It’s also seeing a surge of interest among straight Hollywood. Leonardo DiCaprio recently bought a vacation home there: the Dinah Shore Palm Springs Estate." theGuardian

REALLY?