Hundreds marched through downtown Santa Rosa on Sunday for the first-ever Sonoma County Dyke March — a deliberately standalone event, held 15 days after official Pride, organized by women who felt lesbian visibility eroding in the county for years.

Hundreds of people gathered at the Santa Rosa City Hall parking lot Sunday morning, stepped off at 11 a.m., and marched more than a mile through downtown — up E Street and along Fourth Street — to Old Courthouse Square, in the first-ever Sonoma County Dyke March. Organizers had projected 500 to 700 participants; no official count has been released.

The march was followed at Old Courthouse Square by Lez-A-Palooza, a free street fair that ran until 2 p.m., with games, face painting, hula hooping, and vendor booths. The event was free, with the entire route on sidewalks and accessible to wheelchairs and walkers.

The organizing committee is 15 people, all volunteers. Co-founder Pam Adinoff, 72, a Petaluma resident who has been out as a lesbian in Sonoma County for 53 years, said she started feeling invisible in recent years — a feeling she connected to the slow disappearance of LGBTQ+-owned and -friendly spaces in the county: the bookstores, the coffee shops, the bars. She felt the gap even at Sonoma County Pride, which drew around 20,000 attendees at its own June festival. This march was explicitly separate, held 15 days after the 41st annual Sonoma County Pride Parade & Festival and outside Pride's organizational structure (though the Sonoma County Pride Committee was named as a major donor).

Co-organizer Nancy Kelly, 68, framed the distinction plainly in advance coverage: "It's not a parade. It is unapologetically a march." The committee's mission covers the full LGBTQIA2S+ spectrum — "all identities, all orientations, one march" — while centering lesbian visibility. Chants of "We're here. We're queer. Get used to it!" ran through the streets.

Attendee Mo Morrison of Rohnert Park summed it up for ABC7: "By showing up, I think we're hungry to be in community right now. There's a renewal of that."

More: socodykemarch.org / Instagram: @socodykemarch