Gay & Lesbian

Is too much Candy bad for you? When it comes to lesbian venues, the Candy Bar has pretty much ruled the roost in Soho, the only place that’s open regularly throughout the week. But after ten years on the block, it’s become the place that lesbians love to hate. Ask them why they go and they tend to answer the way Sir Edmund Hillary did when quizzed about climbing Everest: ‘Because it’s there’.But now a couple of other bar nights have popped up offering alternatives to the long-standing haunt, albeit only on Wednesday evenings. Pink is now in its ninth week at Element, a delicious venue around the corner on Greek Street which offers sprinklings of fairy lights, warm furnishings and candles.

The music gets funkier later on and the place has a big dance space, with doors that open out on to the street.‘My friends just won’t go to the Candy Bar,’ says Pippa, the unlikely instigator of Pink who, by day, works as a classical violinist. She found herself ‘moaning on so much’ that she managed to persuade Element’s owners, the gay guys behind the Orange empire, to give a lesbian night a whirl. ‘I was just really fed up with having nowhere to go’.

Punters at Pink (who, the night Time Out swung by, ranged in profession from a lawyer to a designer and a police officer) were all in agreement that there was a need for ‘a more pleasant alternative’ to the Candy Bar. As one of them put it, she wanted somewhere to go where ‘you didn’t have to be under 21 with a brain the size of gnat’.

It’s difficult to judge brain size but the girls down the road in the Village could well have been hovering in their early twenties. The Village also runs a Wednesday night for lesbians, this time called Girls on Girls. Down a flight of steps, the venue is scattered with chairs the size of giant golf balls. The music is upbeat funky house and the vibe is a little more cruisey than at Pink. It has been running for three months now and attracts a trendy young crowd, some of whom definitely do go to the Candy Bar (and spill directly out of it once it closes).

‘There aren’t many girl bars to go to if you are not interested in the Candy Bar,’ say two girls with artful haircuts who have come direct from working at First Out café. ‘It’s chilled here. You can speak to people. It’s not like G-A-Y where the music is 20 decibels too loud!’ A couple in the corner feel much the same: ‘We’ve been coming to the Village for years so thought we’d pop in. It’s all right. It makes a change. Usually it’s full of gay blokes.’

The gay male manager at the Village is philosophical about running a lesbian night and admits that it ‘needs some more time’. So far, a lot of the promotion has been through word of mouth. Another gay-owned bar, the Edge (located within spitting distance of the Candy Bar) also attracts its fair share of lesbians, though as yet there are no plans to launch a women’s night. Traditionally, gay male bar owners haven’t wanted to mount a challenge to old-fashioned feminist loyalty to ‘women-owned’ businesses. But with more lesbian nights welcoming gay male guests, maybe the days of ‘by women for women’ bars and clubs are behind us.

Back at Pink, Pippa says she is ‘not poaching’ from the Candy Bar. Whether there are enough lesbians to go round is a question that’s been asked for years, as promoters attempt to carve up the women’s portion of the mighty pink pound. But, ten years on from Candy Bar first opening, when there genuinely was nowhere to go, the options open to lesbians seem to have grown a little. A noisy gang at Girls on Girls admits: ‘We’ve never been here before. We usually we go to the Ghetto in the week on a Thursday.’ After bemoaning the Candy Bar for being ‘tacky’, they laugh and say: ‘It’s a bit quiet in here, though. So we might go there afterwards.’