By Brian Sonia-Wallace
This issue of The Feminist Toilet appears (#3) is entitled “If These Stalls Could Talk” and has been designed in tandem with my temporary public art installation of the same name. In the installation, words of queer and trans writers (Stephanie Burt, Cameron Awkward Rich, féi iká shumari, Andrea Gibson, Jennifer Espinoza, and Brian Sonia-Wallace) are laser cut into copper plates and affixed to bathroom stall doors at Los Angeles’ premiere cultural plaza, The Music Center, in April and May of 2026. The project is a challenge, a provocation, and part of a long-standing investigation with the founding editor of this journal, Sammy Ginsberg, into our most intimate space.
A restroom is a small room with a lock. A mirror. A moment alone. It’s where some of the best ideas happen. We go here to cry. To breathe. To escape. To put ourselves together again.
But a bathroom is also fundamentally civic infrastructure — a threshold between public and private life. In recent years, restrooms have become symbolic terrain for debates about gender and belonging, and for trans and gender-expansive people this ordinary space can carry extraordinary weight.
If These Stalls Could Talk (the installation) casts restroom stall doors in copper and engraves them with poetry by trans and queer writers. A material historically reserved for permanence, authority, and memorialization is applied at human scale, transforming a politicized site into an archive of lived experience. The theme that unites each poem in the installation is comfort — the verb — the act of creating ease, freedom — even luxury. Please. Finally.
We wish we could show you the doors themselves, but do accept this concept art in place, as they are currently being built. You’ll have to go see the exhibit to see those poems. You’ll have to be a little flexible in your identity to see them all. And you know what? In the State of California, no one can challenge your right to do that or demand your ID.
At The Feminist Toilet we believe that gender exists along a spectrum, and is accessible, unique, and mutable for everyone. As protections are stripped from our trans siblings we stand with them in solidarity and demand the access to privacy and dignity that is so encapsulated in the physical space of the restroom.
The poems you will read here are from a large community that supports this mission — we put out a call for art and poetry by anyone who uses the bathroom, and received a powerful stream of responses. These poems range in subject and tone from gas stations to gay sex, nursery rhymes to critical theory, bulimia to a first kiss. Our youngest contributor is four. Each poet is united by a shared experience — using the bathroom.
~Co-Editor Brian Sonia-Wallace
Former Poet Laureate of West Hollywood
This piece is from The Feminist Toilet #3. To return to the table of contents, click here.
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