Imagine if in 1985, instead of acknowledging the existence of AIDS for the first time, President Reagan had announced the discovery of the preventative drug PrEP. Imagine if, as a result of taking it, many of the greatest artists of the late 20th century had lived to see the new millennium. If pre-exposure prophylaxis pills had arrived early enough to begin shifting AIDS from a diagnosis of certain death to, at least for those with access and cash, the chronic condition it can be today, maybe Arthur Russell, Sylvester, Patrick Cowley, and Larry Levan could have kept producing astonishing records. Instead, all those artists and so many more icons of queer culture—from Keith Haring to Klaus Nomi to Cookie Mueller—are dead. And not just them, but hundreds of thousands of people who loved them. As famed author Fran Leibowitz once put it, “The knowing audience also died and no longer exists in a real way.”

Last night, Frank Ocean sought to make a space for that knowing audience with the launch of his queer club night, PrEP+, named for the drug and the HIV status it treats. A press release announced that the events would pay “homage to what could have been of the 1980s NYC club scene if the drug…. had been invented in that era.” (He later clarified that Gilead, the drug manufacturer behind PrEP, had nothing to do with the party.) What might this mean? PrEP, in a significant way, has facilitated a sexual revolution in New York City over the past few years. Would Ocean’s party be an orgy? Queer culture has always intersected with drug use; could PrEP+ be a rave where PrEP was sold at the bar instead of vodka sodas, on the dancefloor instead of MDMA? Would he perform, surrounded by survivors of the plague years? Would there be merch?

The answer to all this was no. The reality was, he asked some people to play some music in the basement of the Knockdown Center, a snazzy Queens venue-compound just north of Bushwick. If you had to ask how to get a ticket, you weren’t getting one.

But if you had one, you could follow the brightly lit tunnel leading you underground, around a few blind corners, and into the club known as Basement. A very young, very turned-up crowd wandered around the crepuscular maze of concrete, full of hidden nooks that have been used, at queer parties I’ve attended, for sexual encounters. At PrEP+, they were mostly used for chatting, which suggested a different party potential, a mix of plan-hatching and queer solidarity-building.