This rather takes the idea of gentrification to new heights, doesn’t it? I’m an East Coast gay boy myself, more familiar with Chelsea and the Village than the Castro, but when a bunch of rich white queens start making rules based on wealth and class, we’re perpetuating the very systems of oppression we struggled against at Stonewall.

Background checks to stay at a hotel in the Castro? A one-time center of counterculture queer liberation?

One wonders if a marijuana conviction is enough to get someone’s reservation refused. How about meth? God knows gay white men never do meth! Cough.

And the whole government ID thing and profile information — how does hotel management plan on dealing with trans people who haven’t changed their government IDs, either because they can’t or because they haven’t been able to afford jumping through all the hoops yet?

Are those trans people just out of luck in the Castro? Maybe trans folks are supposed to ease on down the road to the Tenderloin?

The story is seriously depressing.