28 E: I’m Eric Marcus from Making Gay History. Over the course of two decades beginning in 1988, I conducted a hun- dred interviews with trailblazers from the LGBTQ civil rights movement. Now, with the Give Voice to History Project, I’m bringing some of those trailblazers into your classrooms to help tell the story of this part of the American Civil Rights Movement. Meet Deborah Johnson and Zandra Rolón Amato. Deborah 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. Back in January 1983, they were a young couple on what was supposed to be a romantic date night. But when they faced discrimination over their dinner reservation, they refused to back down. Speaking to me in 1991, Zandra told me that she made the reservation for a special occasion. Z: At the time I was working on Satur- days. So this was the first weekend that we were gonna have a complete week- end together since we had gotten to- gether. It was also the year right before Martin Luther King’s birthday was made into a holiday. And a friend of mine told me about this restaurant that was really nice. And the restaurant had these six booths on one side that were real romantic. And we got there and the, um, waiter kind of questioned us about,“Are you sure you want the booths?” And we told him, yes. And it’s the type of booths Deborah Johnson and Zandra Rolón Part I Transcript In this Give Voice to History Project archival audio oral history recorded in 1991, you will hear Deborah Johnson (“D” in the transcript), Zandra Rolón (“Z”), and the interviewer, Eric Marcus (“E”). where you have to move the table out so that you can get in—like a horse- shoe. And in the middle of the horse- shoe was like a fountain and there was a guy with a, a violinist who came around. And right in front of the table was a little white sheer curtain that closed. And candlelight. And it was just romantic. E: Did it occur to you that this might be a problem? Z: Not at all. I mean, to me, discrimi- nation never enters my mind first, ever. So they showed us to our table. We sit down. And we’re taking our jackets off and this tall humongous guy comes by and... D: … and yanked the table away and told us, you know, you know,“So sorry, but you can't sit here. It’s against the law to serve two men or two women in these booths.” Z: We asked to see the manager. D: We were not going to move. Z: The guy that turned out to be the real maître ’d kept giving us the, you know, the back of the bus type of thing. “Well, you can sit over there. And you can sit over here and you’ll have free drinks.” The whole thing.“But you will not, you cannot sit here. You will not be served here.” And kept insisting that it was against the law, it was against the law. D: And, you know, that, that really… Oh, it makes me crazy thinking about it. You know, it made me more mad. So you gotta remember, we were there about Martin Luther King’s birthday and that we were gonna take off the next day as this real show of solidarity 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85