I guess some folks feel that unless they have the blessing of a sex advice columnist, they must endure unsanitary conditions in perpetuity.

STENCH, if you can smell poop from the moment you walk into your apartment so can your niece and her boyfriend; they cannot be unaware of the odor. If they are responsible for the smell then they are knowingly being disgusting and wholly inconsiderate. In light of that, your fretting about speaking up in your own home is bizarre. All the more so since you cannot possibly invite any guests to your home. Be clear and direct, whatever they are doing to create that stench stops immediately or they can find another place to live. And for the avoidance of doubt, no burning incense, using fans, or spraying air fresheners to simply cover up the smell they create.

Oh, the niece is a trans woman. I thought LW was living with 3 people: a niece, a trans woman, and the trans woman’s boyfriend.

Are we sure this is the niece having anal sex or is it sewage backup?

This all sounds pretty made up, like some conservative southern Christian's stereotype of queer/gay sex. Not saying it's impossible that this is happening, but the writer made sure to include lots of loaded content.

It's also just possible that it is not them. I know from unfortunate experience that a critter, e.g., a mouse or g-d help them something much larger, smells a lot like shit as it decomposes. If it's every day with no let-up, I'd want to rule that out.

Dan & LW seem to be overlooking the possibility that the smell is coming from something else entirely unrelated. Case in point: My brother and his roommate began acting resentfully of each other because their place stunk, and each thought it was due to the other’s awful BO/laundry habits. Eventually they discovered the actual source: a pumpkin they’d placed on their windowsill for Halloween had rotted, and gone unnoticed behind a window curtain.

Makes me wonder if LW’s niece & partner are also wondering why their uncle stinks so badly.

Oh good god, Dan: first a letter about a guy who cleans a toilet with his toothbrush and then uses that toothbrush and then a letter about a house reeking of poop.

Can you give us a break. Some of us read this column on our LUNCH break.
Please, no more than one poop-based letter per week, if you can manage it.

@6, 7: Yeah, my kid once brought some mussels home from a trip to the beach, put them in a cup on the mantel, where they were immediately forgotten (and then something else was obscuring the cup) and in a week or two, the stench was unbelievably bad. But it didn't smell like feces, it smelled like death. I looked everywhere at floor-level for what I assumed was a decomposing mouse or rat. Finally, after gagging for a couple of weeks, we took the old birthday cards off the mantlepiece, discovered the cup with the decomposing mussels, and threw it out--voila! Smell was gone within seconds.

I don’t know why this is assumed to be sex. I wish he had included some clue there (do I?) - that it also smells of lube and general...sex.

Agree that the smell may not be from sex. Are they on city sewer or a septic tank? I suppose the LW has never run into this issue before, hence his assumption that it's because of the other folks there. But it sounds to me like it may well be a septic system misfiring, so to speak. In which case, ya know, there's bacteria for that.

Ms Cute - Ouch; I hope it wasn't lobster.

NO ONE could be blissfully unaware of causing said stench unless they are collossal assholes (and HAVE colossal assholes). There MUST be dead animal somewhere. Get our the Lysol and spray the place down while commenting, "HOLY FUCKING SHIT Batman! This place smells worse than the shithouse door on a tuna boat! Let's DO something about this before we get condemned!" Hopefully they'll say, "No shit, man. We thought it was YOU!"

I agree that this sounds made up, but maybe the letter writer and his roomies are just weird.

LW, if your place smells constantly of shit, then it might be a sewer problem or something dead and rotting in the heating vents or crawl space. If your niece and boo were not emptying out before doing anal, or are playing with feces, then your place shouldn't smell bad all the time because the smell should dissipate (unless they are not cleaning up after their poop play, in which case you need to evict them right away if they won't clean your whole house instantly, AND then cease and desist!).

Why don't you ask your niece and her bf to help you figure out where that smell comes from. Look around to see where the stench is strongest. Call the heat vent cleaning people or the pest control people to get the dead thing out and sanitize the place and the air. If it's because one of them is having bowel or digestive problems, then you can get them treatment or change their diet.

If your niece and her bf are getting lots of brown stuff during sex, or have a poop play kink, then your asking them about the stench should get them to tell you that's where the smell is from, and you can give them info on how to do anal hygienically and safely, and/or tell them that the poop play must cease while they're sharing with you. Because you have the right to live in a place that doesn't smell like shit and/or is full of shit on various surfaces! And they must be not cleaning it up property to have the stench stay around so long. Tell them about E Coli! Tell them about UTIs and bladder and kidney infections! Tell them how painful those are!

You are a generous and caring uncle, but that doesn't mean you are required to gag every time you come home or live in a shit-filled place to be a good uncle. You can get evicted if you're renting! Your dates will dump you the first time they come over. Investigate, talk to them, get rid of the problem before you all get sick!

@13 You are awesome!

The LW isn't saying anything for fear of embarrassing his queer niece and her BF. And they aren't saying anything to their gay uncle / landlord for the same reason.

Check the damn plumbing, look for dead animals, etc.

It doesn't even have to be animals. My daughter once used a package of frozen tofu on her sore knee and then put a stack of clean clothes on top of it and forgot about it. I'd moved every piece of furniture in her room and torn apart the closet looking for the dead rat before I found it. Oh my god, that stuff smells foul when it rots.

I had two comments: first, the headline's wrong. The letter writer doesn't fear the worst, Dan does. The second was, yeah, ask them if they can smell it, too, and it may turn out to be something completely unrelated to anyone's sex life or personal hygiene...

Iseult@16~ awwww... I’m blushing.

But you’re right. I AM the omniscient comment god of thunder and light!

I feel like I should win something.

I was invited to one orgy once. The stench (mostly sweat, but other bodily fluids as well) was so overwhelming I balked. I'm glad it happened though. I've never had to feel I missed out on anything.

"We live in Alabama, where all the young Christians are busy being "virginal" except for their asses. So yeah, I blame abstinence education." Um, you don't blame the fact that your niece hasn't got a vagina? You don't mention whether her partner does. But yeah, say something.

Steve @20: He's a 40something man. They're, presumably, much younger. What are the odds that he owns the house he's letting them live in? Perhaps after her own parents kicked her out for being queer? His place, his rules, and sex that stinks the place up is a no no.

Haven’t you got a mouth LW? Say something. Trans people don’t need to be treated with kid gloves in situations like this. Life and social skills training, as I’ve found with the adult sons who breeze thru my space, is always ongoing with some. Think how others would respond if this happened in their house? Best they hear it from you.

I’m weighing into the camp of those who think it’s probably something else, and LW needs to use his words with housemates to track down the problem.
Once a roommate and I had a similar problem. Our apartment was arranged with the bathroom just past the refrigerator in the kitchen. There was some terrible smell and we thought it was coming from the bathroom. I thought she must have some horrific vaginal discharge or an intestinal difficulty. She thought the same of me. When we finally discovered the rotting vegetables in the bottom drawer of the fridge, it was such a relief!

This is the kind of situation where it seems like it would be advantageous to be bi or pan and poly. If only we had been sleeping together, we would have known it was not coming from us.

Disagree with nocutename @8. More columns like this, please! I almost died laughing @13 DonnyKlicious.

Squidgie @26: Yes, because bi, pan and poly people are incapable of having platonic roommates.

All STENCHES needs to do is ask them, "What's that smell?" when it is particularly strong, and they can get to the root of the problem.

This letter seems fake. Is he doing nothing about this other than writing to an advice column? Has he tried Febreze? I just don't believe that anyone is progressive enough to tolerate this.

Rotting potatoes are some of the worst smells I've ever smelled. I threw up one of the times I was cleaning up the whole situation. They don't smell like poop, though, they're in the Death category.

I enjoyed the "once a philosopher, twice a pervert" quote but I agree with literally every other commenter that STENCH should invite his roommates to collaboratively search for some non-sexual source of the smell before implying that his transgender niece is having sloppy anal sex every day. Good gravy.

I can't even wrap my head around how the LW came to the conclusion that the smell must be sex related. In my limited experience, anal doesn’t leave an overpowering odor in the entire house, even if there is a bit of poop. Even coprophilia wouldn't, unless they were just leaving piles of shit laying around, which would be noticeable for more than just the smell. What was Dan thinking jumping on the LWs train of thought instead of coming to the same immediate conclusion as the entirety of the commentariat so far? (There really is something wrong with a LW perspective when there is consensus in the comments!)

It never occurred to me to think this before, but man am I glad to be a shit muggle!

The LW wrote back and it’s on Friday’s thread.
He says he smells it in the evenings when he gets home, if it was food etc, he’d smell it in the morning too. Or did he just omit that part.

Occam's Razor: Plumbing problems in the apartment most probably.

Yeah, I don't know if it's sex or not, but lots of things can smell like lots of things.

When I was still living at my first college (oh, halcyon days of depression and hypersomnia!), my mother drove the 90 minutes north (she is a classical musician and plays in an orchestra in the area) with some hellish smell in her car. It was absolutely horrid. It had apparently been going on for weeks -- nay, months. My parents had the car detailed, had the ventilation system cleaned out, had the mechanic check the engine compartment for dead animals -- nothing. I threw up out the window on the way back to my school from the concert she was playing, and she decided to scour the car one more time in the parking lot of my dorm.

We found the most disgusting....... package of cucumbers! They had apparently fallen out of the grocery bag and ended up under the folded-up third row. They were entirely coated in slimy blue-green fuzz. They had probably been sitting there for nigh on eight weeks. That is one smell I will never forget. If the same package of cucumbers had gone AWOL in some obscure place in a house, I don't know what conclusion we would have come to about the source of the stench -- or that we would ever have found it. It was just decaying plant matter, but it definitely smelled like a dead animal. Anything can be anything.