Dallas Gay Bar’s Bias Complaint Against City Rejected on Appeal

The owner of a Black men’s gay bar in Dallas failed to sufficiently allege that the city, on a private individual’s behalf, sent its police department to harass him and his patrons, a federal appeals court said.

Lonzie Hershner runs Marty’s Live. When a Marty’s patron parked near the home of a woman named Sherry Swanson, she allegedly shouted at the patron, “You gay people need to leave this community and stop parking near my house,” deploying a racial epithet to describe the bar’s patrons, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit said in a Friday ruling.

Hershner, ...