You descend the dank and crumbling steps to the Seattle Asian Art Museum's men's room, confident that all you have to worry about is touching the door handle on the way back out once you've washed your hands. Poor fool.

You enter. There's a sound!--like the scuttling of obese roaches, only hairier. You've got company. Someone's in the stall--and the stall has no door. How immodest!

Ignoring the immodest pooper, you select a cleanish pissoire and try to relax into your business. But you can't. Soft, rhythmic noises make you pee shy.

Your curiosity is terrible. Risking humiliating "toilet banter" ("S'up, dude?" "Crappin'. You?" "Peeing." "Right on.") you turn as... casually... as... possible....

And there he squats!

More leer and belly than man, upon a sweating porcelain pedestal he sits, smelling like hot whorehouse panties from Dog Butt City, his gingivitis grin craggier than cat-piss Stonehenge, and boasting more diseases than the Mayo Clinic. Can he be real? (Oh my god--those eyes!!!) And he's either struggling to pleasure himself or he's trying to force a waterlogged weasel to do power yoga in his lap.

Panicking, ashamed, and wanting to die for reasons you can't begin to describe, you launch yourself from the loo, half-unzipped, forgetting your unwashed hands, swearing off pissing forever and reconsidering Rick Santorum's viewpoint....

You've been Toilet-trolled!

The Toilet-troll is all too real, his jerking horribly sincere. Go. Look. He's there right now. He's always there. And accidentally stumbling upon him can sear permanent holes into your emotional upholstery.

Why does he do it? That's as obvious as the moonscape of his pudding belly, lopping over the porcelain bowl like a monstrous meat valance. Don't take it personally. The Troll wangs his wang at everyone--fruits, breeders, milkmaids, little girls, bald Republicans, his own mother, the willing, unwilling, unconscious, the wall, whatever. Even if you've been sufficiently blessed to have escaped a vis-à-vis encounter with the Troll, you've surely encountered his leavings: He's the Picasso who scrawls the lurid, dripping urethras and drills those impossible little spy holes. He's a one-man Turkish prison, the boil on the boil on the butt of good taste, and on behalf of my faggy, faggy people, I demand that breeders take him. Take him far, far away!

I'm not insecure enough to believe that the Toilet-troll's public displays of erection are any reflection upon me personally (oh, heavens, no!), or to accuse him of being some sort of mal-ambassador of the quote-unquote "gay community." I reject all notions of "collective gay responsibility," an unfair, two-dimensional notion that prompts breeders to ask innocent members of the gay community what we "think" of toilet-trolls, when what they mean is, "Do something about the Toilet-troll! Make him stop!" I also reject, for that matter, the existence of a "gay community." A Toilet-troll represents one person, and that's the Toilet-troll, and it's rather emotionally exhausting attempting to explain this to each and every breeder who's ever encountered him. (He's not my fault, dammit!) Besides, he's far less a perverted political issue than just plain icky--a revolting oddity, as barf-making to me as to any breeder who might fly into his unwholesome web, and only marginally more embarrassing.

Experience and good sense tell us that an encounter with the Toilet-troll (or others of his trolly, toilety ilk) may not be the reason behind gay bashings and Christian Coalitions etcetera, but it's true that upon encountering the Troll, "Equal protection under the law" is not the first thing that springs to mind.

But does the salty dog give the slightest nod to the gay political situation? Or the radical notion that there are more elegant modes of sexual expression? That perhaps (dare I say it?) the time for such shenanigans is past, and we should be aspiring to more ostensibly happily, politically endorsable nuclear couplings? Indeed, no. And does it bother him that maybe he's a perma-wanking humiliation even to your occasional loo-cruiser, one driven by fetish, wife, or Smurf-colored balls to seek quick, standing-up, and surreptitious release--the kind who has the good sense to zip up when the cops come in? Nope.

He's ruining the party for everyone.

So breeders, take him--odds are better that he's already straight-identified, with a wife, children, or congregation waiting for him at home or in the rectory. And with him take all boring notions of collective responsibility. In exchange for all we've given you--butt sex, endless fag jokes, and the ability to extend your adolescence infinitely--we beg, nay, command you! Appropriate our Toilet-troll!

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