Published March 26, 2025
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This podcast is funded by the New York City Council. It was developed by History UnErased and produced and edited by Dinah Mack; Kathleen Barker; and Deb Fowler.
TRANSCRIPT
Deb Fowler: Hello, and welcome to UnErasing LGBTQ History and Identities: A Podcast. I’m Deb Fowler, co-founder of History UnErased.
On January 13, 1983, Deborah Johnson and Zandra Rolón went to Papa Choux restaurant in Los Angeles for a romantic dinner. Little did they know that their desire to dine in one of the restaurant’s booths would lead to a landmark civil rights case. After being seated at the semi-private booth they had reserved, they were told that they had to move because they were not a “mixed couple”. They refused to give up their seats, and when they were denied service, they began taking names and then contacted Gloria Allred, a well-known civil rights attorney.
In our previous episode, you heard from Zandra, and now you will hear from Deborah about how this historic court case impacted her life. But first, Kathleen will provide some context.
Take it away, Kathleen….
Kathleen Barker: In the pursuit of justice, some cases transcend the courtroom, shaping history and shifting the cultural landscape. This interview delves into one such case—a groundbreaking legal battle that became a pivotal moment in LGBTQ history.
The story begins in 1983, with a simple yet profound act: two women, Deborah Johnson and her partner, Zandra Rolón, going out to dinner to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. What should have been a joyful evening was ruined by homophobia when the restaurant refused to serve the two women in a designated “romantic” seating area, claiming that it was “against the law” to serve same-sex couples. Incensed by their treatment, Deborah and Zandra knew that this refusal was not just about dinner—it was about equal access to public spaces.
What followed was a legal battle that challenged discrimination under California’s newly enacted ordinance protecting individuals from public accommodations bias based on sexual orientation. The case also challenged the state’s broader Unruh Civil Rights Act. With renowned attorney Gloria Allred leading the charge, the case gained national attention, sparking media frenzy and public discourse. While initial court rulings upheld the restaurant’s right to deny service, the fight continued until the appellate court unanimously ruled in favor of Johnson and Rolon, setting a precedent that solidified LGBTQ rights in public spaces.
This interview goes beyond the legal proceedings, offering a deeply personal look at the details and the historical impact of this case. Deborah Johnson reflects on the emotional toll, the societal resistance, and the eventual triumph—not just in court, but in shaping a movement that continues today.
Deborah Johnson: Let me give first just a little context for the case and how it got started in the first place, so like the front end and the back end. There's a lot of juicy stuff that happened in the middle, but the scene is January 13th, it's a Thursday evening in 1983. I'm fresh out of MBA school, UCLA. My new partner and I are doing this bold thing where we are deciding to take the next day off, Friday the 14th, to honor Martin Luther King's birthday the 15th, which is a Saturday. This happened to be the year before Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday became a holiday. So two things were happening. I had just been at this new position with Prudential as a real estate investment manager. Got rave reviews my first six months, and I'm being taken out by my former partner, Zandra. I don't know where we're going.
She's made the reservations and she's gotten this recommendation from a straight friend, mind you, and in this restaurant there is a particular section that's set off to the side for unquote romantic couples. It's off from the bar area. You walk up a few steps, there's a fountain, and then there are these six booths that are like a horseshoe that are booths where you sit next to each other, not in front of each other, they slide the table out, you sit next to each other and then there's a very sheer curtain that goes in front of you and you get serenaded with violins and all of the rest of this. So when we get there, they seat us, but they won't serve us. They won't give us the menus or anything and they say, oh, there's some kind of mistake you can eat in these other sections, but you can't eat here. And we're like, why? And they said, well, it is against the law.
Excuse me. Yeah. They said, we can't serve you here like two men and two women. Now, there was a new ordinance that was passed that we actually wound up suing under, and that was an ordinance that prohibited discrimination in public accommodations based upon sexual orientation. I'm triply sure of this. I'm on the board of directors of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center and with all the people who started the thing, it's like, I know this. And it kept getting, before they said it was against the law, it was all of these other excuses. It didn't make any sense. They said it was for mixed couples. And I said, I'm black, she's Latina, we're mixed. What the f, what do you need to eat here? They just would not serve us. And it was the wrong day. We came to celebrate Martin Luther King who said, no, you can sit anywhere in the restaurant.
So it was, you can eat over here, you can eat over there, but you can't eat here. And it just got to be this big showdown, but they were not going to serve us. So we left and we wind up suing and using Gloria Allred who's a media hound. She's the one who's done the women in the Cosby case, and she never loses. She just doesn't lose. Got to be a really big media circus anytime you get Gloria Allred. So she managed to get the judge, the first judge to actually go down to the booths, all of that on television, back and forth. It was just a lot. It was always in the Times, the LA Times, the Herald Examiner, Ms Magazine, Jet Magazine. It just, it got to be a big thing. And what we didn't know was that we were essentially the test case for the right to be out in public what the courts, because we kept losing. What the courts were saying was the same thing that they said back with the sitting in the booths and the dining halls and whatnot back before the sixties that our presence was offensive, just our presence, and that the restaurant had the right to deport us simply because we were offensive to the public eye, not because of behavior, just who we were.
So we didn't realize that we were a national test case essentially for the right to be out. The earlier judges were saying, because we kept losing, saying that it was very important, but they wanted it to go to full trial because they understood the implications of this and that the courts didn't want to get ahead of the public because the public may not be ready for all this. And they acknowledged that they were double standards and all the rest of that. So fast forward, we finally win, unanimous, at the appellate level for the state of California and they certify it for publication, which is why it's in the law books. And then the restaurant refused to serve us afterwards and closed the booths on television. They had a public funeral, same thing like they did with the swimming pools and all that other stuff. Rather than serve you, we're going to close it down and they kept taking out ads in the paper.
So our case and how it set like all these precedents is that we sued under two things. We sued under that local ordinance, which specifically said you cannot discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. However, it was so new it had never been tested and the courts were not willing to rule under it.
We also sued under the state's Unruh Civil Acts Bill, which says that you can't discriminate on the basis of sex. So we did double. One was specifically sexual orientation and the other was sex, because there was never dispute of the facts - ever. They agreed to every fact that we said, it was strictly interpretation of the law. Their view was it wasn't discrimination on sexual orientation or even sex, how they did it because they treated the sexes equally. No two men and no two women. That was their logic. And they swore they didn't know we were lesbians because we were dressed so nicely. So they weren't doing it because we were lesbians. And that sometimes business people would come in and they would say, you can't sit there. They admitted that they didn't allow children there and the appellate court was, you need to shut up because that's illegal, too.
And what wound up happening then is that the criteria for the discrimination was the fact that on sex, that it was that we were both women and quiet is kept, I've been a diversity trainer for decades, almost all the stuff that we say is sexual orientation is really about sex and gender because that's where the discrimination happens. We used to say gay marriage, gay people could always get married. They just couldn't marry somebody of the same sex. And it's like we miss that sometimes. So what wound up happening here, and part of the reason why this is a big win and part of an untold story as well, is that when we finally did win at the appellate level and it got certified for publication, they didn't write sexual orientation into the civil rights bill. It's still not there. They interpreted it. What they said was that it was meant to be included. And that laundry list that we think of as protected classes, like race and nationality and all of that was meant to be illustrative and not exhaustive.
They didn't want to keep saying don't discriminate because of this and don't discriminate because of that. If it's wrong and it's arbitrary, don't do it. So it was a win not just for sexual orientation, but for oneness as a whole, for justice as a whole to say, don't do it. We're not just carving out this sliver for these people, but no, no, you shouldn't do it at all. And at the time, we didn't know how big it was going to be at the time we had absolutely no idea. It wasn't until we were coming out of the appellate court, before they even made their decision, when the opposition attorney came to us and said, “You made history in there today.”
They could see the way that it was, that it was going down. Justice is sweet, as it turned out, the attorneys that turned, the judges that turned us away, it wound up back in their courts. They had to reverse their own opinions. And the cherry on the top is the restaurant wound up closing up because that was their big draw, this particular area. And then some black gay friends of mine bought it and turned it into a soul food restaurant called Geraldines. And when the final judgment was being made, a young lady who was a junior attorney with the other, with Papa Choux, defected in the hallway and asked to join Gloria’s firm.
There were so many just really choice and wonderful things about it. But that's stuff that, like, unless you were there and following it, you wouldn't know. In terms of precedent from a curriculum standpoint, the precedent for our case was actually a couple in Marina del Rey, and it was about adult-only housing where the couple had gone into this adult-only complex - this is in the LA area, the Marina del Rey. And then they had a child, and at the time, something like 80% of all of the housing apartments in California were, at least the LA area, I should say, were adult-only.
So what the courts ruled for them was that you cannot discriminate against a whole class of people, namely children, because of perceived anticipated behavior. And it was that case that wound up setting the precedent. I mean, it'd be at the court records, anybody that wants to read it. That was the main precedent for us, as well as the Lawrence versus Texas about privacy and all of these cases stack. And when you don't show up for reproductive choice, for example, you have no idea of how intricately things like that are tied to what we would consider queer rights. So yeah, we stacked on top of that in addition to the civil rights bill that already existed, that initially was there upon race and it's like one by one. We've been trying to claw in group after group after group into this inclusion. And it was nice that my case said, we're not going to do this piecemeal. This is, it's like this is it. And the next year it became his birthday became a holiday.
It was very, very fast, very fast. Even the attorney said it was the fastest thing they'd ever seen. We were in and out of court like six, seven times within 15 months and over. We did not sue the restaurant for damages or anything like that. She and I both got $250 out of it, which was the fine for the local ordinance breaking it. And they picked up our attorney's fees as well as their own. But we deliberately did not sue for money because we didn't want to obscure what the issues were. A lot of debates between the attorneys on the air. It was a media zoo, it was a media zoo. Gloria did sit-ins and dine-ins and pickets out in front and boycott started the International Women's Garment Union was the first group to call for pickets. We didn't do it, but they just started pouring in.
And you know, this really informed me so much. I mean, I was already an activist in new and diversity work and what not, but one of the little nuances in there, we actually never went to trial, interestingly enough. The first thing we did was go for what's called a preliminary injunction, which basically says that harm is being done, and can we stop the practice now. And the judge was unwilling to rule because he says he didn't know who was going to win and he didn't want to hurt the restaurant in case the restaurant won. Then we went for what's called a motion of summary judgment, which basically says just rule in favor of the law because there's nothing to try. The two sides are not disagreeing with the facts at all. It's just a question of is this legal or not?
So in my mind it was, does the restaurant have the right not to serve us? And it quickly flipped to do we have the right to sit there? And the judge, Black guy as a matter of fact, who could have done the motion for summary judgment, he was like, Uhuh, nope. This needs to go to trial. Because he knew it was really big and you could tell he wanted it to really stick. It's like if it had just been a motion of summary judgment, somebody could have come back later. He wanted a Brown versus Board of Education, like let's do the thing.
So that nuance there that has informed me so much as a trainer and an activist was that everybody agreed that we had been violated based upon sex, that we were not served because we were two women. However, if it had anything to do with the fact that we were lesbian, it was unclear what our rights were. When we look at almost everything from marriage to sports to any of the things that are going on, it's like we had the right as US citizens or citizens of the state, but then the right got taken away from us because we were gay. Like in marriage equality, that's what the judges said. They weren't giving us the right to marry. They said, we already had it because everybody has it. And it was unduly held from us because we were gay. Voting. They didn't just give us the right to vote in '64 or '65, you already had the right to vote. It just had been unduly withheld from you because of your race. And that little nuance is so important because that's the only way we ever win. We don't win by asking for the equality. You show up as equal and then demand that the laws catch up and affirm that as opposed to grant us with something that we don't have. Don't take away what we already have because you think we don't deserve it, but it's already ours.
When you look at every single social justice movement, this is always the case right down to the slaves and the Underground Railroad. No slave got on the freedom train, only the ones who already knew they were free. What's a free person like me doing unjustly, enslaved? I'm out, and I'm not even going to go ask somebody to free me. I'm going to go to the territory where they already know it, where there's nothing to prove and you will miss it. I don't care what it is. If we don't take this stance, it's never going to happen. Otherwise, we're dealing with our own internalized homophobia, our own internalized racism, where we're waiting for validation from somebody else. And being a minister, of course, all of this is really near and dear to my heart. I wasn't a minister at the time. I was a more lay minister, I wasn't ordained. But this idea, essentially, of a universal oneness. There's a universal oneness that we all have and we have to stand in that, stand in that, that's where the equality comes from. It even says that in the Declaration of Independence, these truths to be self-evident, endowed by a creator, endowed by something higher than what the government can do. Now, you know, where they were with all of that, but the old folks used to say, the truth will be told even if it takes a liar to tell it. So you know, what they said was true, even if they couldn't live up to it, that we are endowed by something that is inalienable. It's just inalienable.