SOURCE: "Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)," in Essays on Contemporary American Drama, edited by Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim, Max Hueber Verlag, 1981, pp. 105-22.

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...