## Facts

- In 1976, the City of Austin, Texas enacted a public-accommodations ordinance making it a misdemeanor for a place of public accommodation to discriminate based on sexual orientation, punishable by a fine of up to $200.
- In 1977, the Driskill Hotel, a historic Austin hotel, opened a dance bar called the Cabaret.
- The Cabaret attracted some gay patrons, and hotel management became concerned the venue would gain a reputation as a gay club.
- The hotel adopted a house rule prohibiting same-sex couples from dancing together.
- Hotel staff began telling same-sex dancing couples to stop or leave, and word of the enforcement spread in Austin’s LGBT community.
- A group of four students (two men and two women) went to the Cabaret with a city attorney and a member of the city’s antidiscrimination commission to observe and test the policy.
- The students first danced in male–female pairs and then switched to male–male and female–female pairings.
- A hotel manager told the students the Cabaret had a policy against same-sex dancing and required them to leave.
- The city’s antidiscrimination commission investigated, and the city attorney charged the Driskill Hotel with violating the ordinance.
- The city attorney’s office sought help from Matthew Coles, a young California attorney who had helped draft San Francisco’s gay-rights law.
- At trial, the Driskill argued the rule did not discriminate based on sexual orientation because it applied to any patron who danced with a person of the same sex, whether gay or straight.
- To show that the “neutral” rule in practice targeted gay and lesbian patrons, Coles initially retained four expert witnesses to testify that people generally choose dance partners consistent with their sexual preferences; all four withdrew the day before trial.
- Coles instead called an Austin disco owner who operated one gay disco and one straight disco to testify about typical dance-partner patterns he observed in each venue.
- The student witnesses testified about the exclusion they experienced, including feeling treated as second-class citizens and describing the difficulty of being openly gay at the time.

## Issues

1. Whether a place of public accommodation violates Austin’s sexual-orientation antidiscrimination ordinance by enforcing a rule that bans same-sex couples from dancing.
2. Whether a policy framed in facially neutral terms can still constitute discrimination “based on sexual orientation” when evidence shows it disproportionately burdens gay and lesbian patrons.

## Decision

- The case is presented in secondary sources (including a 2010 published account) as an unreported criminal prosecution tried in Austin municipal court.
- A municipal-court jury found the Driskill Hotel guilty of violating Austin’s public-accommodations ordinance by enforcing the no-same-sex-dancing rule.
- No published judicial opinion or appellate reporter citation is associated with the matter; the result is known through later summaries and historical reporting.

## Legal Principles

- Public-accommodations protections against discrimination “based on sexual orientation” may reach conduct rules that, in operation, deny gay and lesbian patrons equal access to a venue’s ordinary services.
- A defendant’s claim that a policy is neutral on its face does not end the inquiry when the factfinder can consider how the rule functions in context and whom it predictably excludes.
- Evidence of real-world effects, including testimony about common patterns of dance-partner selection, may support a finding that a purportedly neutral policy is tied to sexual orientation in practice.
- Testimony describing humiliation, exclusion, and unequal treatment can be relevant to whether patrons received the same benefits of a public accommodation on equal terms.

## Conclusion

City of Austin v. Driskill Hotel, (2010) is a secondary-source case brief describing a late-1970s Austin municipal-court prosecution in which the City of Austin charged the Driskill Hotel for violating its sexual-orientation public-accommodations ordinance after the hotel enforced a rule barring same-sex couples from dancing; the jury returned a guilty verdict, and the matter is historically notable despite the absence of a published opinion or appellate citation.
