The Awl‘s coverage of Saturday’s “Tea Bagger” health care protest in Washington produced an interesting little anecdote out of Penn Quarter Sports Tavern: A bar manager telling a woman with “Kill Fags” t-shirt to piss elsewhere.

How long ago was it that a black woman would be denied entrance to a whites-only restroom? Well, at one point in the afternoon, a white woman wearing a shirt that said “Kill Fags,” which appeared to be a homemade silkscreen job, felt a similar call of nature. At the door of the Penn Quarter Sports [Tavern] she met Matt Hunter, the bar’s marketing and events manager. He told her that she could not use the restroom.

“So you’re refusing?” she asked.

“Yes,” Matt said. “There’s no public option here.”

“Bastard,” she said.

“I can do you one better,” Matt said. “I suck cock.”

He then put his tongue in his cheek and cupped his hand, moving it back and forth in front of his mouth in the internationally-recognized gesture for fellatio.

“I’m one of those,” he said, pointing at her shirt. She left to find a bathroom more accommodating to her sort.

On the phone, Hunter was more conciliatory to the “Kill Fags” set. “There was a lot of stuff said down here,” Hunter confirmed over the telephone. “It was a nightmare down here.”

Hunter says that at the Penn Quarter Sports Tavern, “everyone is welcome”—-but that the tea bagger protest stretched even the most inclusive bar’s resources. “Everyone had to put signs out that said ‘restrooms for customers only,'” says Hunter. “It was a big public event, and the city should have helped assist by putting public toilets out.” D.C. also could have done Hunter a solid by informing him that hordes of out-of-town tea-baggers would be descending upon the bar. “This whole thing just came out of the blue,” he says. “I guess because I don’t watch FOX TV, I had no idea what was going on.”