[In this excerpt, which appeared originally in Sollers' book Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist Modernism," the critic calls "The Toilet" a play about race and acceptance for blacks in a white world.]

"The Toilet," first performed in 1962, is set in an urban high school and deals … with loving self-expression in terms of homosexuality. The one-act play contrasts the homosexual relationship of two protagonists with the hostile and threatening, all-male outside world. … Homosexuality is viewed positively by Baraka both as an outsider-situation analogous to, though now also in conflict with, that of Blackness, and as a possibility for the realization of "love" and "beauty" against the racial gang code of a hostile society. But there is [another] element of race consciousness in the play.

In the course of the one-act play, Black student Ray Foots has to deny and denounce his love for white student James Karolis. Although Ray had written him a love note, he feels compelled in the presence of other students to deny his own feelings, to act tough, and to let the other students rough up his beloved. Only after the others leave the latrine can Foots express his feelings by cradling the beaten Karolis. In "The Toilet," the Black protagonist has to choose between his generic identity as "Foots" and his individual peculiarity as "Ray." While Foots denotes a "lower" kind of "plebeian" existence, that is closer to the ethnic roots and the soil, "Ray" suggests a more spiritual personality with a cosmic genealogy.

On one level, "The Toilet" is the affirmation of Ray's individual self-expression—of a person different from that majority which defines his reality negatively. "The Toilet" contrasts the possibility of the free expression of homosexual love, as admission of "any man's beauty," not only with the repression of this freedom of the protagonists through a "social order," but, more than that, with a total inversion of the positive metaphor of homosexuality into the perversion of sadism.

"The Toilet" is undoubtedly an indictment of a brutal social order, depicted fittingly against the background of a filthy latrine. This time, however, in Baraka's familiar confrontation of outsiders with the group, the representatives of the "social order" are young Black males; they are the kind of group Baraka increasingly attempted to speak for, and with whom he tried to identify, in opposition to "Liberals."

The approach to the play as a perverted "love story" is thus challenged by an interpretation of the majority-minority relations that inform "The Toilet." With this focus, the function of homosexuality and the roles of Ray Foots and James Karolis appear in a different light. Instead of representing love and the situation of the outsider, homosexuality now becomes a metaphor for acceptance in the white world. In other words, homosexuality becomes the gesture of individual assimilation, of trying to rise above the peer group, of "liberal" betrayal. As a consequence, the identity of a down-to-earth "Foots" would now seem somewhat more desirable than that of the lofty "Ray," who has removed himself from his ethnic reality. For, if the "love story" is a sentimentalization of "Ray," the "black-and-white story" is a bitter acceptance of Foots. And this acceptance, which implies a painful exorcism of interracial and homosexual love, was increasingly felt to be necessary by Baraka.