When tragedy strikes, thirteen-year-old Maddy Barnes's life shatters. Torn from her family and village, she finds herself out on the mean streets of Toronto in the 1970s, a gritty twilight world of street kids, speed freaks, glam rockers, body rub parlours and a vicious biker named Hermann. But Toronto is also the centre of Canada's emerging gay revolution. As men and women start coming out of the shadows, Maddy confronts the shadows of her own past, and ultimately comes to understand that sometimes there's no explaining the unspeakable things we do for love.