Viral 'Best Western' Hotel Clerk Is Gay—and a Transphobe

Gay hotel clerk Craig Brooks became a woke icon for a Twitter moment when video of him turning a racist away went viral on Sunday. Then the discovery of numerous anti-trans tweets ended his 15 minutes of fame.

Brooks tweeted video of himself working the front desk of a Holiday Inn in Texas as a woman who earlier called him a racist slur on the phone call tried to check in. He politely sent her to the motel next door with the iconic phrase, "There's a Best Western next door."

"It's above me now," he told the guest repeatedly.

The guest apologized and inexplicably said she used the hateful slur because she was grieving her mother. Brooks, who posted the video with a band of crying laughing- emojis, explains he couldn't accept the apology. At one point, he cites "the climate that we live in today" and "today's society."

Brooks posted the video on Sunday evening. As of Tuesday morning, it had been re-tweeted more than 147,000 times and liked by 425,000 different users.

But then out filmmaker Q. Allan Brocka discovered Brooks had posted at least a dozen tweets slamming transgender people as undeserving of incusion in the LGBTQ movement.

"This guy REALLY REALLY despises trans people," Brocka tweeted.

In July 2017, Brooks wrote "I don't think trans people should be apart of the LGB community because Trans people don't identify as gay people."

Later that month, he tweeted "I don't like Trump but I agree on his stance about Trans in the military." That one came one day after President Trump tweeted out that he would ban trans troops from serving.

After Brocka exposed the old tweets, Brooks doubled down on his ugly entiments.

"You dug all that up," he tweeted, again with the crying emojis. "did I lie tho??"

Then, after much backlash, Brooks apologized on Facebook.