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Eric here

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I'm Eric Marcus and this is Making Gay History. In 1983, 27-year-olds, Deborah Johnson and Zandra Rolon Amato went to a Los Angeles restaurant for what was supposed to be a romantic

dinner. Instead, they wound up in court.

The two seasoned activists from the 1970s and early 1980s gay and lesbian civil rights movement

found themselves face to face with the kind of discrimination they thought was history.

By the early 1980s, dozens of cities and counties across the country had passed laws protecting the rights of gay people in employment, housing, and public accommodations.

That included restaurants, but that didn't mean everyone complied with the laws, and a lot of those new laws had never been tested in court.

Deborah Johnson grew up in Los Angeles in what she described as a very upper middle class bourgeois black household, a very well rooted, extremely well connected family.

Deborah called Zandra's family a Mexican commune.

Zandra explained jokingly that she was related to three quarters of the population in

Brownsville, Texas.

So here's the scene.

...