As part of our extended coverage of Pride Week events, LBREPORT.com will webcast the event LIVE with VIDEO on-demand of this event thereafter -- as LBREPORT.com did last year -- making the Long Beach event accessible throughout California and beyond.

On its Facebook page, organizers say:

[organizers' text] The Long Beach Dyke March is an Annual Rally and March that empowers women in the LGBTQ community and their supporters in Long Beach, California. Last year over 400 women marched. This year the rally and march will be held on Friday May 16th, 2014 at 6:30 p.m. Please bring your signs and banners...

Since 1993 self identifying dykes have come out to demonstrate lesbian visibility and activism and they have grown to be more inclusive of all women-loving-women regardless of labels, including bisexual, intersex and transgender women.

Today's event starts with a rally at Bixby Park (Broadway at Junipero Ave.) at 6:30 p.m. Rally participants will then march west along the Broadway corridor through the gay business district of the Alamitos Beach neighborhood, ending at the corner of Broadway and Alamitos Ave.

Last year, participants marched down the middle of the street.

This year's rally keynote speaker will be long-time LGBT rights activist, author and columnist Jeanne Cordova.

An early organizer of national lesbian conferences, in 1971 Cordova also opened the first lesbian center in Los Angeles. Her extensive resume of activism also includes: Southern California Media Director in the campaign against the 1978 Briggs Initiative that targeted gay teachers and Media Director for the campaign against the 1986 Proposition 64 La Rouche AIDS Quarantine Initiative; a founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Caucus of the Democratic Party.

In addition, Cordova was the publisher of what would become the largest LGBT business directory The Community Yellow Pages and was the first open lesbian to appear in Who's Who in America in 1978.

Cordova has authored three books focusing on her experiences. Her third book in 2011 -- When We Were Outlaws; A Memoir of Love & Revolution -- chronicles her life in the 1970's as an investigative reporter for the LA Free Press that leads to her involvement with anti-government radicals and the early gay rights movement.

Appearing with Cordova at the Long Beach Rally on Friday will be Jennifer Pizer, the Law and Policy Director for Lambda Legal - the nation's oldest LGBT national legal organization. Pizer was co-counsel in the case that won marriage equality for California same-sex couples in 2008 before the passage of Proposition 8.

The Long Beach Dyke March was organized by the Long Beach-based Artful Thinking Organization, a nonprofit dedicated to programs raising awareness for the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS and Breast Cancer.

Long Beach's local march joins a long list of formal and renegade Dyke marches and protests that have long traditions in large metropolitan areas across North America. The protest marches are traditionally held on the Friday or Saturday of the local Pride Weekend to highlight women's interests and lesbian visibility.

• The first two documented "dyke" marches were in both in Canada in 1981. Two hundred marchers marched in Vancouver in May 1981 as part of a Bi-National Lesbian Conference. In October of that year in Toronto, a group called Lesbians Against the Right held a march.

• In 1992 in New York City, a group called the Lesbian Avengers began as an action group to focus on issues deemed important to "lesbian survival and visibility." The organization quickly spread globally and one year later on April 24, 1993 rallied 20,000 participants to march in Washington D.C. one day before the official April 25th, 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation.

• In June 1993, San Francisco and New York lesbians marched the Saturday before their cities’ official Pride Parades. The events have been held ever year since and neither protest march has ever applied for a permit.

• Chicago’s Dyke Parade started in 1998 and occurs around the June 28th date of the New York City Stonewall Riots (considered the beginning of the Gay Civil Rights movement). Chicago's march had originally been held in the city’s traditional gay-friendly neighborhood of Andersonville. However, since 2008, the Dyke March organizers have rotated the parade every two years to different Chicago neighborhoods to increase visibility in other communities across the city.

In keeping with the historic tradition of the early Dyke protest marches as opposed to traditional Pride Parades, the major metropolitan Dyke marches continue to have home-made signs. Earlier marches had little evidence of organization or corporate sponsorship; and many are done without permits.

Further on Facebook www.facebook.com/LongBeachDykeMarch.

Previous LBREPORT.com PRIDE Week Coverage: