The Nabisco Dinah Shore golf tournament is out of the closet -- and that has corporate sponsors increasingly excited about the potential of reaching a new, up-scale market.
   The annual Ladies Professional Golf Association event, to be played this weekend in Palm Springs, has over the past decade evolved into a major attraction for lesbian golf fans--and women who simply want to party.
   The result is that a growing group of companies now view the weekend as a great chance to market to a community that they haven't traditionally targeted.
   "Dinah Shore is the top lesbian event on the West Coast" says Vivien Gay, a consultant with a Napa marketing firm called Isosceles. "It attracts the starched-linen lesbians" (translation: those in higher income brackets).
   In all, party promoters expect more than 20,000 lesbians to converge on the Dinah Shore not only for the action on the links, but for four days of cocktail hours, concerts, dances, comedy shows and other such gatherings (Tournament officials expect total attendance to reach 85,000.)
   "The parties have gotten bigger than the golf," says Joani Wier, a lesbian-party promoter who is planning to throw a series of soirees at the Doubletree Resort. All the hoopla, she adds, "brings in a lot of money."
   Those listed as sponsors of Ms. Weir's party package range from the gay and lesbian newspaper The Advocate to american Airlines and Bud Light.  St. Supery, a Napa winery, also came on board as a sponsor this year.
   "We see the potential for inroads," says Sandy Handers, St. Supery's marketing director. "This is a good market."
   Ms. Gay says she expects more major corporations to get involved with the lesbian events each year. "More lesbians are out, and they have a higher proffle than they did before," she says. "As a community, we're more comfortable with who we are, and we're out there spending our dollars."

- Kathryn Krcuzhold