If you’re a woman who loves art and other women, then get down to Goldie Saloon: London’s newest bar and café for Flintas (which stands for female, lesbian, intersex, trans and agender—essentially anyone who isn’t a cisgender man). It is envisioned as a “sexy, gay living room down an alleyway in East London” by its founders, one of whom happens to be Ellie Pennick, the owner of Guts gallery, below which Goldie is conveniently situated.
“We’re part of a Flinta renaissance,” Pennick said during a busy night at Goldie, where the afterparty for a Guts opening was taking place. They cite several examples of flourishing lesbian cultural activity in London, from the recently established Dyke March to the UK chart success of the queer pop artist Chappell Roan, whose campy confessionalist bops were playing from the speakers to a warm reception.
Unsurprisingly, with Pennick at its helm, art is central to Goldie’s and works by the gallery’s queer artists are hung on the walls. Despite this association, the bar was reassuringly filled with its intended community, rather than an art world set. Such concerns were raised over an afterparty for another London gallery a few months ago, held at the lesbian bar La Camionera, in which virtually no lesbians (besides the bar staff) were present. But looking around the sleek—and, indeed, sexy—Goldie, it was wall-to-wall women and chic androgynes, flirting, sipping natural wine and spilling out into the street.
Ventures like this are vital: the decline of London nightlife, especially queer spaces, is well-documented. Moreover, bars and cafes have been integral to fostering artistic scenes, from La Closerie des Lilas in Paris, where Picasso and Gertrude Stein sipped absinthe, to the Bricklayer’s Arms in Shoreditch, where Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst helped to establish the YBA scene. Pennick hopes it will be a “convivial space to spark ideas, build relationships and foster community”. If we’re lucky, a group of sapphic scenesters will be gathering in that sexy, gay living room, ready to shake up the London art world.