When Katrina Vinson rides out in front of the pack, she feels like a rockstar — wind through her cropped, brown hair, a pride flag billowing off her bike, and dozens of queer motorcycle riders following her down Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.
Leading pride parades are some of her favorite experiences every year.
“You’re on your bike, waving back at the little kids. They think you’re the coolest thing on earth,” she said in a recent interview, moments before roaring out front of West Hollywood’s 2025 Dyke March.
Vinson and her crew, called Pride Riders LA, are a collective of queer, mostly women motorists who help lead off pride parades across Southern California.
They’re part of a time-honored tradition, dating back to 1967 when the earliest iterations of a group calling themselves Dykes on Bikes led that year’s San Francisco Parade. Today, the group has official chapters all around the world, in cities like Seattle, Minneapolis, and London.
But not here in LA. That’s because the Pride Riders are not affiliated with Dykes on Bikes.
“It's frustrating because I want to call us ‘dykes on bikes,’ because that's literally what we are,” Vinson explains. “Most of us identify as dykes, but I have to be careful with my wording, and what I say, and how I put it out there because it is trademarked.”
That’s right. The U.S. government is involved in protecting the term “dykes on bikes” from inappropriate use.
In fact, the group spent more than a decade in court fighting to trademark the term, a protracted legal battle that went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. It took that long because of arguments over the word “dyke” — a term the U.S. Copyright Office described as disparaging.
The term “dyke” has a long history, not only as a slur, but as a word that’s undergone a form of reclamation.
“So many lesbians have taken those words — ‘lesbian’ and ‘dyke’ — and made them not derogatory at all, but really powerful,” explains Angela Brinskele, with the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives. “It's a really much better way to go through your life, being very proud of those words that you feel describe you, [rather] than hanging your head in shame your whole life.”
And so it’s with pride that VInson applied to establish an official Dykes on Bikes chapter in LA.
“Knowing I have all these women at my side and have my back, it's an incredible moment. It's awesome. And just showing up for each other and just being part of that community is quite incredible,” Vinson says.