Rey is a young Filipino immigrant searching for a place where he belongs...
First dreaming of San Francisco from across the bay, he eventually makes his way to the Castro and into the world of the Dolores Beach Boys—a predominantly gay Asian circle of friends bound together by friendship, desire, sex, drugs, and the ecstatic circuit parties of late-1990s San Francisco. At the center of their world is Pleasure Dome, where for a few hours in that cavernous warehouse club, they can become whoever they want to be.
But Rey and his friends have arrived at a peculiar moment in gay American life: AIDS has already decimated the generation before them, leaving behind both the mythology of liberation and the absences of catastrophe. As the party begins to fracture, the Dolores Beach Boys are forced to confront what they have been chasing—and what it has cost them. Against the accusation that theirs were wasted lives, Rey begins to understand that remembering them may itself be an act of reclamation.
Years later, Rey returns in memory to the Castro and pens a love letter to his elusive City of Lights, excavating the friendships, betrayals, desires, and losses of a world that has nearly disappeared. Labor Day at Pleasure Dome is his lamentation for that lost tribe of the Castro—and for the young men who believed, for a little while, that they had finally found home.
