Since the Donnelly is an independent hotel not managed by a nonprofit or outreach agency, turnover is high and tenants’ mental stability variable. “It’s basically like a world’s fair in here,” Brent says. As a gay man, he’s endured a lot of harassment. “I’ve heard the word faggot so many fucking times.” Three years ago, friends of another tenant assaulted him in front of the building. Brent pressed charges but was unwilling to navigate what he describes as San Francisco’s labyrinthine court system. More recently, his upstairs neighbor attempted to force his way into Brent’s room and punch him “for absolutely no reason.”

Perhaps more disturbing is the behavior of his next-door neighbor. “That guy, I swear he sold his soul to the devil.” At one point the neighbor set up cameras to record the hallway and apparently still has several more in his window running surveillance on the street. At night he taps the baseboard in his room for hours, “trying to bore a hole to stick his little three-inch dick through,” Brent says.

Despite these incidents, Brent is content at the Donnelly. When he first came to the Bay Area from Seattle in 2001, he was homeless and lived out of his car. He worked sporadically as a drag queen in the Castro — Miss Sharon Needles before the Sharon Needles — and got a monthly allowance from his mother, but it wasn’t enough to keep him afloat. “I manage my damage very well, and I’ve never hit bottom,” he says now about that period.

He recently bought a flower printer and plans to run a business out of his room selling personalized roses. “This is a multimillion dollar industry,” he tells me. “Once production takes off it’s going to be crazy in here.” As Toby growls to himself somewhere in the near dark, Brent offers a last word of advice: “Don’t take anything for granted, because once you do shit will be taken right out from under you. And believe me: You can’t change death. It’s going to happen and you better fucking deal with it.”