When I was coming of age, my uncle ran a longstanding neighborhood bar in Arvada called the Red Lion Lounge, and my dad ran a longstanding neighborhood bar in Lakewood called Eddie’s Cordial right across the street from Casa Bonita.

Whenever I walked into either joint, I felt fully welcome, despite not yet being of an age that some sticklers might classify as strictly … legal. Both bars have been scraped into the dustbin of Old Denver history, but their essential places in thousands of lives and livers is fixed.

Having a place to feel known and surrounded by family as a young person felt as comfortable to me as a couch. There’s a reason the “Cheers” theme song is one of the most popular in TV history.

“Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. And they’re always glad you came.”

Josh Franklin never felt that security growing up in Colorado Springs. During his senior homecoming at Doherty High School, someone spray-painted the six-letter f-word on Franklin’s car. “Matthew Shepard and I were the same age, so … I saw leaving Colorado Springs as survival,” he said.

The teenage Josh who got out soon after graduating from Doherty would never have believed that older Josh and his legally married (!) future husband would eventually settle down back in Colorado Springs and open a downtown piano bar called Icons. Or that, when it would be shut down by a mysterious but unrelated nearby fire this past December, the couple would fully commit to the expense and headache and necessity of reopening Icons just a block removed from its original location at 3 E. Bijou St.

“As a kid growing up gay in Colorado Springs, if I had even driven past a place like Icons and saw the amount of life that was waiting for me there, I wouldn’t have left,” said Franklin, who, for the record, we’re glad left — for a few years, anyway. He went on to a spectacular performing career in New York that has included eight Broadway musicals and an introduction to his husband, John T. Wolfe.

Kai Lee Mykels, the drag name of a Colorado Springs elementary public-school teacher, never felt that security, either — until she found Icons in 2022. Mykels showed up on the bar’s doorstep after a lot of nights, as the “Cheers” song goes, “when you’ve got no lights.”

“Icons is the place where I came back from the brink of death,” said Mykels, who on March 18 emceed a benefit at Hamburger Mary’s in Denver to help the Icons owners raise some of the estimated $500,000 it will cost to reopen the bar.

“I was dying of active AIDS in 2022, right when I got sober — and now I’m the strongest I’ve ever been,” said Mykels. “Icons is a special place. They stood by me the whole time. It truly is family.”

Colorado Springs, to put it mildly, has a complicated history with the queer community. This city of 700,000 has long been known as the evangelical capital of the United States. The confluence of Ted Haggard, Focus on the Family, the Air Force Academy, Fort Carson, NORAD and the anti-gay Amendment 2 movement conspired to make this city at the base of Pikes Peak a logical place for evangelism to germinate and grow over 40 years.

The online site gaycities.com lists 16 gay bars in Denver. In Colorado Springs right now, there are none.

It says something that the reason Colorado’s second-largest city entered 2024 without even one open gay bar in 2024 is because the last two were taken out by a mass shooting (Club Q) and a fire (Icons). It says something, Franklin says — but it does not say everything. Because Franklin has come to discover that the Colorado Springs he couldn’t wait to leave as a teen “is actually a really inclusive, welcoming, amazing place to live in 2024,” he said.

Much of that credit goes to his husband, who describes the couple today as “those old boring Broadway gay dads.” Wolfe, a performer from Huntington, W.V., discovered a completely different Colorado Springs in 2018 than the one Franklin experienced growing up.

“I thought, ‘Colorado Springs is bumping and awesome,’ and we’re very happy here,” Wolfe said. They bought a house in Colorado Springs because it was a smart thing to do at the time. But it didn’t become home until the shutdown. Franklin had just performed in an off-Broadway revival of “Cyrano” (starring Peter Dinklage) and Wolfe was touring the country in “My Fair Lady.” Instead of cocooning in New York to wait out the shutdown, Franklin suggested, “Let’s meet in Colorado Springs.”

Because Wolfe wasn’t from here, he said, “I met this city with fresh eyes and no baggage. And I fell in love with it as it is — not as it was. There is just so much art and culture, and there are the mountains. I thought it was amazing. From the start, we quickly became invested in the queer community here. Everyone was so nice — and I think Josh was able to see that.”

Franklin also could see how much bigger Colorado Springs had become than he remembered. “But when you would Google ‘gay bars,’ nothing came up in downtown Colorado Springs,” he said. “And we said, ‘We’ve got to change this.’”

Then the idea happened.

With zero outside support, the couple opened their piano bar, pandemic be damned, in October 2020 — with a twist. Every bartender at the club is also a professional singer. One is Gina Milne, who performed “Defying Gravity” at the March 18 benefit while holding her mic in one hand and her developing baby bump in the other.

“Icons found me in a time in my life when I was going on three years of no singing, and I was in a dark place,” Milne said. “They reached out to me on Instagram and asked if I wanted to come work as a singing bartender. From there, I found this beautiful family and rediscovered my love for singing.”

The Club Q shooting in November 2022 left many in the local gay community and their allies feeling frustrated, angry, afraid — and very much aligned.

“It’s still heavy,” said Franklin. “That’s the personal response for us just as gay people in Colorado Springs. But then the immediate realization set in that people are counting on us at Icons to provide a safe space, to provide work, to provide community.”

Club Q will eventually reopen as “The Q” in its original location as both “an important step in community healing and a proactive response to hate,” said co-owner Matthew Haynes. In the meantime, Club Q survivors Michael Anderson and Tara Bush on March 29 opened “The Q” as a lounge in the Satellite Hotel in southern Colorado Springs.

“Safe venues are still very important,” Haynes said. “Transgender people are being attacked and legislated against throughout the country, and the art of drag is under attack as grooming. The Q, in the tradition of Club Q, will stand up to these attacks.”

Wolfe and Franklin said at no point after the shooting did they think maybe they got it wrong about the “new” Colorado Springs or consider moving back to New York.

“No, never, not at all. It was the opposite,” said Wolfe. “It was more important than ever.”

That’s what made the Dec. 4 fire all the more heartbreaking. Icons was one of several  businesses along Bijou Street that sustained major damages. Fire officials determined that the blaze was started by an electrical malfunction with a kitchen refrigerator at a storefront four doors down from Icons. But the duct work to all those businesses was connected and the smoke damage was so bad that the owners of Taste of Jerusalem, Yobel, the Local Honey Collective and Icons were told they all would have to permanently relocate.

Which is a daunting thing, given how astronomical rents have become in downtown Colorado Springs. “We pretty quickly decided that, if we can swing it, we should buy our own building as a way to make sure this is a long-term move for us,” said Wolfe, who just signed a contract to buy the new Icons space at 16 E. Kiowa St. “But it’s not a bar, so we have to build out from scratch, and that’s going to cost about $500,000 that insurance isn’t going to cover.”

A crowdsourcing effort has raised $42,000 of an initial $75,000 goal — boosted by a random donation from music icon Gloria Estefan, who is a friend of someone who had visited Icons only once. “I feel bad about the loss to the community. Hopefully, it contributes a little towards their rebirth,” Estefan wrote with her donation.

“Oh my God, that made my year,” said Wolfe. “We have a group chat with our staff, and it just went wild.”

The March 18 benefit in Denver, organized by Julia Tobey of Give 5 Productions, was a remarkable show of inter-city solidarity, with three dozen gay, straight (and everything in-between) actors, singers and drag entertainers raising $6,634 at the three-hour cabaret at Hamburger Mary’s.

“We were really excited to have the artistic communities and the queer communities from Denver and Colorado Springs do something together, and I am excited to see that bridge,” said Wolfe. “But we never doubted for a second the support we have statewide — and not just from the queer community. There are so many allies. The state of Colorado gave us a $30,000 grant. The mayor of Colorado Springs (Yemi Mobolade) is super supportive. We hosted two campaign events for him at our gay bar — which is unprecedented.”

Barring construction and permit delays, Wolfe believes the new Icons can be open by August, which would obliterate all construction records. But for them, it can’t happen soon enough.

“We’ve been told through tears how much this place means to our patrons,” said Wolfe. “I think a lot of people don’t quite understand that a lot of people in our community maybe don’t have the support from a family or a home base that they do. Having a place like this can be lifesaving for them.”

The queer community, Franklin added, is a hard place to be sometimes. “I think it’s really about just lifting people up and celebrating who they are and making that OK and very public without apology.”

To support efforts to reopen Icons in Colorado Springs, go to gofundme.com.