It’s a half hour past midnight on a Saturday night—technically Sunday morning now, but who’s keeping track—and Val's Lesbian Bar on South Street is still humming with a soft, lively energy.
There are a couple of seats left at the downstairs bar, but all ten tables are occupied. Lovers cozy up next to each other in booths, friends chat while nursing their cocktails, and one person sits by themselves against a wall, head down on their phone.
One couple sits at the bar, tenderly chatting and people watching as they occasionally kiss and run their fingers through each others’ hair. Behind the bar, vibrant batches of fresh flowers—orchids, lilies, baby’s breath, a single red rose—line the walls alongside bottles of alcohol.
As its tagline states, Val’s certainly is a bar for lovers.
This is the spirit in which Val’s was christened. Several months ago—before the venue officially opened—the bar’s owners, Clover Gilfor and Julia Harris, hosted a ticketed event on Valentine’s Day called LoveFest. The event sold out online, but the promise of walk–up tickets drew a line out the door.
Pink, orange, and red lights—colors on the lesbian flag—illuminate the space, and the menus are printed with ink in shades ranging from a light rose to a bright magenta. The seasonal drinks include names such as “Butch Bait” and “Touch–me–not,” referencing phrases that describe certain archetypes within the lesbian and sapphic—or women–loving–women—community. It’s a subtle reminder: everyone is welcome, but at its core, Val’s was established with lesbians in mind.
“Sorry, she’s had too many drinks,” Ashley McCall laughed as her wife Wendy Ultreras cracked another joke.
It’s the couple’s first time in Philadelphia, all the way from Culver City, Calif. Val’s is quiet this rainy Wednesday night, and they’re in town to attend Penn State University’s graduation the following weekend.
“We travel pretty frequently [around] the country, and we just always look up lesbian bars, and there are never any,” Ultreras laments.
There are fewer lesbian bars currently in the United States than there have been American presidents. Unlike the latter, the former number has fluctuated dramatically. During the COVID–19 pandemic, fewer than 20 remained afloat, leading some to fear for their extinction. However, after lockdowns lifted and people sought in–person gatherings amid rising political attacks on LGBTQ+ communities, the tide shifted. When Val’s hosted its grand opening on March 18, it became the 37th lesbian bar in the country. But it is the only one in Philadelphia, after the Toasted Walnut fell victim to a myriad of factors in 2021, including untenable rent rates and an unrelenting landlord.
Sure, there are gay bars in Philly—Woody’s, Tavern on Camac, U Bar, Franky Bradley’s. For the most part, they’re welcoming enough to all the letters in the alphabet, but—perhaps inadvertently—the clientele ends up being mainly cisgender gay men.
“It ends up feeling like you’re sort of a guest, not the target audience,” Ultreras says. “So I think that a place like this, that is explicitly for lesbians and there’s no issue around gender identification or any of that stuff—like, that’s rare, and it’s nice.”
And, McCall adds, the drinks are better at lesbian bars.
For Gilfor and Harris—who are co–owners and girlfriends—all of this is by design. Harris just graduated from Harvard University with her Ph.D. last month, where she studied lesbian history. Gilfor is likely the only trans woman to currently own a lesbian bar in the country—although, she tells me, she recently learned of a “much more old school” trans woman who owned several bars, including a lesbian bar, in California during the latter half of the 20th century.
“It sounds like she thought [the lesbian bar] was kind of a mistake, because it didn’t really make money,” Gilfor says.
In a way, Gilfor and Harris are on a mission to prove her wrong.
Clover Gilfor is tall, lanky, and affable, with tattoos on her neck creeping out from under her T–shirt. I called her at a good time, she says—she’s on her way to get her cat’s medication. After the whirlwind rush of the weekend, Mondays—when the bar is closed—are when she can run errands like these.
At Val’s, she describes her role as “kind of like a general manager.” People come to her with questions, problems, and things that need to be fixed. Something’s wrong with the point of sale system? The bar needs to get proper signage up front (as of now, it’s currently still a temporary banner anchored to the front of the building). The soda gun is jammed and it’s gushing Coke all over the place? Gilfor is probably already on it.
What did she do before Val’s?
She lets out a singular, high–pitched “ha.” The short answer is, a lot.
Gilfor was born in Northeast Philly, but moved to Massachusetts around the age of eight, where she ended up going to college, studying film studies, and doing “a lot of naive Communist organizing.” Then, she worked at a botanical garden, which, in a very roundabout way, led to her moving to Portland, Ore. in the middle of the COVID–19 pandemic to work for a habitat restoration company. She moved back to Philly around three years ago.
The way she tells it, Val’s is just another way her life has changed by asking, “Why not?”
It was originally Harris’ dream to open Val’s. Just as others dream of opening cafes, bookstores, and flower shops, Harris had “a floating conception of a bar that she could run where all of her friends would get to be there, and everybody would get to hang out,” Gilfor says. She wanted it to be Valentine’s Day themed, in a “kitschy and sort of tongue–in–cheek” way—which seems on brand for someone who has now received a doctorate in lesbian history.
But a dream was all it remained until Gilfor was getting ready to move back across the country from Portland.
“I can’t even remember how or why now, but somehow I thought, ‘You know what? Why not? Let’s just try it.’ And we just started figuring out what we could,” she says. “We started slow. … And we kind of just started doing it. And we kept telling ourselves, if it seems like it’s not going to be possible and it’s too much for us, then we will pull out of it. And we just never did.”
On her birthday, Kelly Donoghue blew a wish for Val’s. A month later, it came true.
Donoghue—a Sagittarius, she was keen to remind me—met Gilfor and Harris roughly two years ago, when the bar was still just a mirage on the horizon. Landlords were being difficult, and money was never easy to come by for a venture like this.
Regardless, she really, really wanted to impress them. Sagittariuses are known for their optimism, passion, and willingness to seek change. So she started with a love letter, the way she knew how to write one best.
By Donoghue’s own admission, she doesn’t “really have a life outside of bars.” And at the time, her definition of a side hustle was still making drinks—she sold batch mocktails to party hosts, who could add alcohol to them at their own choosing. She made some for Gilfor and Harris, partly as a gift and partly as an audition.
“Clover came to my job to pick it up, and I put all this crazy effort into it,” she says. “Like, I made them a little six–pack of a variety of nine–ounce bottles. And I wrote the label with the ingredients, and I tried to make it look like a middle school note you would send to your crush.”
The heartfelt confession worked. Donoghue stayed in contact with the couple, who eventually asked her to be their bar manager.
At first, she was scared.
“I was like, I’ve never, not once in my life, wanted to be in management in a bar,” she says.
But she was just so intrigued by the vision that Gilfor and Harris had for Val’s, and was so impressed simply by the way they talked about it. So, not knowing at all what to expect, she took the plunge.
For the next two years, the team was trapped in a cycle of coming so close to securing a venue, only to suddenly go back to square one. In a May 2024 update on Instagram, they posted that they were “in negotiations” about a potential space—but that August, another Instagram post revealed it had fallen through. By the end of 2025, the search had worn them out, and it had nearly gotten to be too much.
“We were ready to call it quits, sort of indefinitely,” Gilfor says of the time.
Burnout was hitting them all, and hard. Donoghue’s friends in the industry all thought she was crazy for sticking by Val’s.
“[Gilfor and Harris] actually apologized to me. It was like, right before my birthday” in December 2025, Donoghue says. “They were like, ‘We’re so sorry. We wasted your time for two years in this thing.’”
She was “so sad” about the state of Val’s, and desperate for it to succeed.
Roughly a month later—right around New Year’s Day—the team found out from their labor license broker that Reef Restaurant & Lounge, a Caribbean restaurant just off 3rd and South streets, was about to close, and their team wanted to make a deal with the Val’s team.
From there, Donoghue says, “it then happened all of a sudden, very quickly.” Her wish had come true.
There is nothing quick about this particular Wednesday evening. There are only two people behind the bar—Gilfor being one of them. Anastasia Robitaille had gotten off work early, and her roommate Skylar Ducharme was in the area. They had asked Gilfor for a recommendation for a dark liquor Ducharme could try.
“I didn’t want to go home yet, so I was like, let’s go get a drink,” Robitaille says.
Val’s, importantly, is also a bar for friends.
Not every night is a dancing, partying, going–out night—and not every person is a dancing, partying, going–out person. Ducharme, who had been to Val’s a handful of times already, appreciated that it was “a really nice space just to exist in.”
Val’s hosts different types of events you typically wouldn’t imagine at a bar—for example, a “Magic: The Gathering” meetup one Tuesday each month, a craft night every Sunday and arm wrestling practice. It’s a way for more people to feel comfortable, and feel like they have a community around them.
“Not to say that there are no queer people in the ‘Magic: The Gathering’ space, but we’re always a minority in particular,” Ducharme says. “And having a space where I know that if I’m going to go play ‘Magic,’ the people that I’m playing with—well, they might not be as serious about the game as I am, [but] they are not straight white dudes. Which is probably about 70 or 80% of the people I have played ‘Magic’ with.”
Yes, these off–night events exist because of “us knowing what gay people are like and what they want to do,” Gilfor says. But there’s also a simpler reason why they exist: “We can’t throw parties, like, every day of the week.”
Part of the ugly truth is just that Val’s needs to keep the lights on. “The lesbian bar has taken on this kind of, like, mythological quality,” Gilfor says. “And I do feel the need to remind people that we are a business and we are to some extent motivated by a bottom line.” As much as she dislikes it too, she acknowledges, “we’re kind of trapped there.”
That’s also a motivating factor for why they developed a mocktail menu as diverse and extensive as their cocktail menu. (Her favorite is the “Day Off,” which has pineapple juice, lime, spiced honey, and jalapeño.)
“People are drinking less than they ever have in the United States,” Gilfor says. “And if you want to be a bar that’s going to make money and stay open, it's pretty important to get ahead.”
But, at the end of the day, it’s a lesbian bar, not an investment bank. Money is only as important as its ability to create a better future for Val’s. Gilfor has plans to add a film photo booth, give staff raises, and—most importantly—make sure that the bar can leave a legacy.
She doesn’t think the motivation behind hosting non–dancing events is as intentional as their reason for the bar’s mocktail menu. But they’re cut from the same cloth of trying to create diverse experiences for everyone who sits down at the bar.
“… That’s going to be really important to us that people will be able to come to this bar, not drink alcohol, and still feel like they had a special experience, and [felt] like the bar catered to that,” she says.
Gilfor acknowledges the work they have to do to curate trust among lesbians of color in Philadelphia, and among LGBTQ+ people of color at large, given that their ownership is entirely white. Val’s has already hosted a couple of events in collaboration with entertainers and promoters of color, designed specifically for Black and brown queer women.
“We knew [it was] impossible to make a space where every single day, every different type of person feels like it’s their space,” she says. “But if you can give it to people every once in a while, right? Once a week, twice a month, they can feel like they are in charge of the place. Then they know, on those off days, they have a claim [to the space].”
People have given the team at Val’s plenty of grace to find its footing, Gilfor says. So far, the reception has been overwhelmingly positive. After all, lesbian spaces are so hard to come by in the first place.
“A lot of bars are very focused on—you go here to get drunk and hook up with people,” Ducharme says. “But it’s also like, it is nice to have a nightlife space that is not solely catering towards that.”
Val’s wants to be both—the place where you get drunk and make out with someone on the dance floor, and the place where you just sit at the bar with your friend after work. They’re not picky about who walks through their cobalt–blue doors, as long as you’re a lesbian, a friend, or a lover.
“We’re lesbians, and we’re going to be opening a lesbian bar,” Gilfor says. “And if there’s a lot of people who like being around lesbians and like a type of bar that lesbians are gonna open, then those people are welcome.”
