Meet Australia's Most Notorious Piss Fetishist, Troughman

An "alternative" pastime whereby aforementioned "trough boy" lies in a urinal trough (usually in a gay nightclub toilets) and proceeds to be pissed on all night by grinning, leather-clad full-bladdered sausage jockeys.

Every budding trough boy needs a trough man, and over the decades Sydney's top "Troughman," Leethal Elliot, has transformed his fetish for piss into a political act.

Like many others, Elliot had his first taste of of niche gay culture at New York's iconic queer bar, Mineshaft. "I heard of a club where guys were into getting fisted, but I'd never seen that done in real life," Elliot tells VICE. "Once I got down in the basement later that night there were about 30 or 40 guys in a piss orgy—it was amazing."

To get down into the basement of Mineshaft in the 1970s, you had to climb down a ladder. Only once you neared the bottom you could see a guy lying in a bathtub, getting pissed on by a small crowd. "I started sucking a guy off—'cause it was like a fucking orgy—and the guy pissed in my mouth and that was it," he says. "A little while later I was in the bathtub myself. It was as easy as that!"

Chances are, no matter how open minded you consider yourself, neither you nor any of your mates are likely to slip into a bathtub anytime soon. Even the need to socialise in dedicated queer spaces seems less of a necessity today, given how visible queerness has become in society. But Elliot is skeptical that fetishes like his will just recede into gay history books.

"I don't think piss fetishes are old fashioned. I reckon there are more people accepting of this practice than in the 80s," he says. "In the gay community, particularly those whom I have a relationship with (such as the Trough parties), it's really considered cool."

Trough is an infamous gay party series in Sydney and Melbourne. A cursory glance at its Vimeo makes clear that it's speaking to a certain gay audience: glistening muscles, skimpy speedos, or nothing at all. Those attending Melbourne's latest party a few nights ago saw Elliot make a rare appearance at Trough's… trough.

"You just kneel against the urinal and when guys want to piss there's a mouth available," he explains. "I don't see it as psycho-sexual humiliation, because it's not a master-slave type relationship. Instead, for me, it's about mutual respect."

As you can imagine, Elliot is a divisive figure. In Troughman (a short documentary screened as part of the 1998 Mardi Gras) some punters sledge that "he's lost all sense of reality… he's lost the plot." Others speak of past brushes with his mythical, or rather, literally hidden status: "He was there, but it was dark. I heard him," someone recalls. "He said thanks."

Elliot's fetish is one that's obviously not for the faint-hearted, and probably may not entice even your most seemingly liberal mates. But as hard as it may be to connect with, Troughman says there's a point to his overt sexuality.

"I was co-convenor of the gay rights lobby from 1981 to 1985," he explains. "I was involved with the homosexual law reform coalition and I'm an original '78er [meaning that he's an original Mardis Gras protester]. Throughout my whole life I often tried to combine my serious thinking about overt sexuality as being a part of the political visibility that we had in the 80s and getting law reform through."

Elliot's stance is a reminder that queer culture remains political. At this year's Mardi Gras, organisers specifically told other participants not to heckle Opposition Leader Bill Shorten over Labor's asylum policy, specifically addressing what would happen to homosexual asylum seekers held and resettled in countries with homophobic laws. Yet despite this example of line-towing, Elliot reckons there's still a place for radical queer politics.

"This requires people to keep pushing at the margins. If you want any kind of political movement, it has to house people who are outrageous and the people who are slightly more demure—in the hope that what was once unacceptable becomes palatable… like homosexuality," he says. "That's where I think we went in the 80s. I think we are probably still getting there but we've slowed down a bit."

Elliot's feeling that things have "slowed down" comes at a time when gay marriage and other forms of homonormalisation have lit up mainstream queer discourse in recent years.

"I'm not against it," he says of gay marriage. "I just don't think it's the right direction I want to go in. The last thing I wanted to do was to be like everybody else. I wanted to be me. I wanted my sexuality recognised and accepted and not to be 'acceptable.'"

And that's essentially what Elliot has been doing for decades: pushing the envelope until people start wondering what the fuss was about in the first place. "I still don't care about the privileged gays of our inner cities. I still don't want to be a part of that normalisation. I want to make space for the motor-mechanic in Blacktown who still can't come out," he says.

"I want to create a world where I can be outlandish in my sexuality. One where others who aren't hitting up Oxford Street can still attain liberation in the outer suburbs or in regional Australia. That's what we've still got to achieve—because those people are still getting left behind."

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