Photo by @mjb.

In 2009, a local lesbian couple claimed that they were unfairly asked to leave the Tastee Diner in Silver Spring after a manager at the restaurant witnessed them in an embrace which he claimed one was “burying her face in the other’s breasts.” The incident, though vigorously disputed by the management, led to a kiss-in protest at the restaurant, which was attended by dozens of gay couples.

Well, now the diner’s back in the news for similar reasons. According to the Washington Blade, a Maryland woman, Angel Cox, has filed a complaint with Montgomery County alleging that she was asked to leave the diner due to her sexual orientation.

Cox’s complaint, which was accepted by the Human Rights Office on Aug. 2, says several of the diner’s managers entered the dining room and began to stare at Cox and her female partner as the two women sat at a table at Tastee Diner on July 16.

“I asked one of the other waitresses why the managers were starring at us and she said, “They don’t like our kind here,’” Cox says in her complaint.

Cox states that her partner, who works at the diner, left the table to begin her shift and Cox ordered more food before moving to a different location to use one of the slot machines at the diner.

“After finishing desert, I played poker on the slot machine again,” she said. “The manager of the restaurant, a man named Romanee, came over to me and asked me to leave the restaurant. I was not told why I was asked to leave,” she wrote in her complaint. “I believe that it was because of my sexual orientation.”

Of course, the Diner states that they weren’t discriminating against Cox, merely asking her to stop distracting her partner behind the counter. Cox’s story takes a bit of a hit when she backtracks a bit on whether she was actually talked to by the manager directly — but then again, you’d think that the Diner’s management might have learned their lesson at this point about kicking people out of their restaurant for less-than-serious offenses.