“Honey, you’re gripping that rail like it’s a cliff edge,” Frankie chuckled. “Relax. This isn’t a test. It’s a living room.”

As he was pulled toward the small stage, he passed a memorial wall covered in photographs. Black-and-white, color, Polaroids. Faces of people who had come before. Some had died of neglect, some of violence, some of a plague the world had ignored because it was killing the “wrong” people. But in each photo, they were smiling. They were in The Haven .

The noise hit him first—a roar of laughter, a shattering glass, a drag queen’s cackle that peeled paint off the walls. Then the light: a disco ball throwing fractured rainbows over a sea of faces. Faces that looked, for the first time in Leo’s life, possible .

Frankie appeared beside him. “That’s Danny. He opened this place in ’82. He said, ‘If they won’t let us into heaven, we’ll build our own basement.’”

One photo, dated 1985, showed a young trans man with a defiant grin, holding a sign that said: WE ARE YOUR NEIGHBORS.