WHEN THE NEWS broke that Danny Wan, an openly gay member of the Oakland City Council, wanted to create a gay business-improvement area in his District 2, many progressive queers reacted negatively.

The part of District 2 that is targeted is home to many working-class people of color, including a large population of immigrants. What will happen to them if the business district is established? Will they be forced out of their houses to make way for gay establishments and the upscale folks who will want to live in a gay neighborhood?

Oakland has the largest number of lesbian couples of any U.S. city. It has a thriving community of queers of color. They deserve a place to call their own. But creating a new Castro District seems like the wrong way to strengthen the queer community. The Castro wasn't created by politicians. It grew out of a gay liberation struggle that understood the connections between oppressed groups.

What Oakland proposes to do will pit queers against working-class folks, immigrants, and people of color. It's already happening throughout the country. Washington, D.C.'s multiracial Logan Circle is a thing of the past, thanks to middle-class white gay men. In Harlem, the new faces of those gentrifying the neighborhood are white – and often gay. In the West Village, a major struggle has erupted between black and Latino queer youth and the upscale white neighbors on Christopher Street who don't want them walking their infamous block at night, as queers have done for generations.

In San Francisco's Castro, the battle is clearly along class lines. A few years ago, as the dot-com boom made real estate in the Castro shoot skyward, gay neighbors opposed a shelter for homeless queer youth. They complained about a weekly meals program for poor folks at a nearby gay church. Their concern: these programs might bring down their property values. As the dot-com bubble burst, real estate speculators invaded the Castro, buying up two-unit buildings to flip as tenancies in common (TICs), evicting working-class people with AIDS. They also grabbed buildings in the Mission District, pushing out poor Latinos and artists. Some of those moving into those TICs were upscale gay men, the kind that the "home ownership for the middle class" Plan C and the TIC coalition attract.

Philadelphia wants to attract them as well. The Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. recently produced ads to bring gay tourist dollars to a city that has a rich history. The tagline on one ad featuring two white gay men dressed in colonial garb says, "Come to Philadelphia. Get your history straight. And your nightlife gay." The man behind the ads says the city wants a piece of the $54 billion a year gay tourists supposedly spend. That's why Montreal also has a tourism campaign targeted to gay men.

It's all very troubling.

By portraying themselves as people with large disposal incomes, middle-class gays turn our pride parades and our movement into promotional fetes for every corporation with a product to sell. By being a part of the gentrification of working-class neighborhoods, they alienate our longtime allies in communities of color. They create a greater divide in our own community between the haves and the have-nots. They play into the right-wing argument that we don't need "special rights" because we supposedly have economic privilege.

It doesn't have to be this way. In Oakland, Queers Against Gentrification successfully made the gay business district an issue in the District 2 special election to replace Wan, who was retiring. In other cities as well, queer activists have risen up against to gentrification, demanding, "Not in our name!"

The issue won't go away. Even if Oakland never builds its own Castro, middle-class queers in Oakland and throughout the country clearly have to decide which side they're on.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a longtime working-class, queer antigentrification and tenants rights activist.