Bold & Beautiful: Peter Goldie

Three brightly colored tattoos of ice cream are etched into the forearm of Peter Goldie: an ice cream sandwich, soft serve with sprinkles and a strawberry shortcake bar. Just below, on his upper thigh, is a scuzzy rendition of Mickey Mouse, which he aptly calls “Mickey Rat.” Like his tattoos, Goldie is a man of versatility. 

Perhaps this is most evident from his Salt Lake bungalow, home to a treasure trove of curious objects. Statues of cats border the room. A dramatic painting of an old sailing ship battling a storm hangs above the fireplace. Vinyl records and VHS tapes spill out of bookcases. A pink pastel wall borders one side, a red wall on the other. Ceramic donuts stacked on top of each other hold a slew of markers. The ambience is completed by soft pink candles and tunes drifting out of a vintage RCA radio.

Goldie relaxes on a lavender couch. When asked to describe himself, he responds, “I’m driven and focused … but scattered.”

His days are spent rotating through different projects. Currently, he’s writing a theme song with his band, DJing, finding the right books for a collage, cultivating his garden and hanging out with his two dogs, a giant Newfoundland retriever named Bubbles and a tiny Chihuahua mix named Potato. 

So, who is Goldie? And how did he end up doing all of this?

His story begins in Long Beach, California where he was born and raised. From his time there, he remembers spending time at the beach, skateboarding and being raised Mormon.

When he turned 13, his family moved to a small town in East Texas called Kilgore. Population: 13,476.

“It was like a really bizarre reset at a bizarre age,” Goldie recalls.“I felt like I was being subjected to a social experiment. In Long Beach, I felt like there [were] a lot more differences. In Kilgore, there are three kinds of different and anything else is bad. It’s the Bible belt.”

“I was trying to do the righteous Mormon thing. I tried being a pretty girl—it’s so fun to be pretty in Provo. But yeah, it turns out that wasn’t for me.”

After graduating from high school, Goldie moved to Provo, Utah with a friend who enrolled at BYU.

“I was trying to do the righteous Mormon thing. I tried being a pretty girl—it’s so fun to be pretty in Provo. But yeah, it turns out that wasn’t for me,” he says. It was during this time that Goldie came to the realization that he was trans. 

“I took an anthropology class at BYU and in the first lecture, the instructor had us do a ‘get-to-know-you’ exercise. I noticed the entire time how much people were saying ‘the church.’ Why is this so exclusionary?” he pondered. 

That feeling of exclusion was magnified by his sexuality. The shame he felt signaled that it was time for him to leave ‘the church.’ Goldie relied on Tumblr and YouTube to give him the confidence and education BYU couldn’t and soon after came out to his friends and family. 

“Knowing that I was 22, I’m kind of proud of myself. It’s just like, man, I was a crazy person,” says Goldie.

Although he lost all of his Mormon friends, he had a newfound freedom to dress how he wanted and got a job working at the Salt Lake City Public Library downtown where he began researching various topics, including the history of hair cutting and styling. Eventually, he enrolled in hair school, where he rose to become a stylist and guest educator. He began doing live hairstyles in front of audiences and caught the performance bug. 

But music was always his primary passion. “My first memory of music was when I was laying on the couch when I was nine or ten and using my big sister’s cool yellow Walkman. I put a tape into it that I recorded from the radio—The Cranberries’ ‘Dreams.’ I was like, ‘I want to be a rock star,’” says Goldie.

Not long after, Goldie got a guitar for Christmas, took a month of lessons and began writing and singing. “It was a really strange feeling, like I was jumping into unknown territory,” he remembers. 

“My first memory of music was when I was laying on the couch when I was nine or ten and using my big sister’s cool yellow Walkman.”

Forgoing a formal music education allowed Goldie to experiment. In his opinion, how a song made him feel and move was more fascinating than its sound.

Through the years, Goldie has formed various bands, covering many different genres—a term he has a hard time understanding. Eventually, he came up with a solo project that would feature a rotating cast of band members, and Goldie and the Guise was born. Currently, the band features Katy Ducos on bass, Koty Lopez on guitar and Jeremy Devine on drums. 

While the music they create can’t be pinned down to a single genre, Goldie describes it as “anti-steam punk, guitar-forward Western pop.”

The songs have a certain kind of worldliness as Goldie moves between words and builds the melody. During performances, the band members lock in together, as if singing just to each other. In a newly-recorded song called “Stinky,” Goldie recalls someone hearing it and interpreting it as a love song. “I laughed and said ‘No, it’s about wanting to kill yourself,’” he says. “But it felt nice to be like, ‘Maybe this song is a love song to myself.’”

When writing songs, Goldie sometimes finds himself getting into a gray space where even he doesn’t really know what the song is about; he only knows how it makes him feel.

More than anything, Goldie wants his art to be simple and accessible. It’s not limited to a certain audience and because of that, everyone can enjoy it and apply it to themselves in whatever way they choose. 

Find Goldie and the Guise on Instagram at @goldieandtheguise and catch the band performing live at Craft Lake City’s 16th Annual DIY Festival on Friday, August 9 at the Utah State Fairpark.

Read more Bold & Beautiful here:
Bold & Beautiful: Diana Lone
Bold & Beautiful: Whorechata