A troubling incident captured on video and shared widely online shows a gay man, adorned with makeup, facing harassment while using a men’s restroom.
Zachary Willmore, an influencer who documents his life as a feminine gay man with HIV, shared the video of his experience on New Year’s Eve with the caption: ‘Happy new years, I guess I can’t win.’
The footage, which has garnered over 13 million views on TikTok, features Willmore, who is seen with glitter on his face. He is confronted by a seemingly intoxicated man in the restroom.
The man aggressively states, “I don’t like a dude, a dude with pearls on his eyes,” demanding Willmore show his face.
Continuing his tirade, the man adds, “I don’t like that in a men’s bathroom, showing your chest like a girl. Dressed like a girl with belly button rings,” as he continues to insult Willmore.
In response, Willmore turns the camera on himself and explains to his followers that he chose to use the stall to avoid any conflict.
The man interrupts once more, exclaiming, “Yeah, because you’re a girl, you want to be a girl so bad,” further escalating the confrontation.
Willmore then said he was unsure of what to do.
‘They don’t want transgender women – I’m not transgender by the way – they don’t want transgender women to use the women’s bathroom, they don’t want a gay man to use the men’s bathroom, so I’ve got to piss on the floor,’ he concluded.
Zachary Willmore, an influencer who documents his life as a feminine gay man with HIV, shared a video of him getting harassed inside a men’s bathroom on New Year’s Eve
In the video, which was viewed more than 13 million times on TikTok alone, Willmore -wearing glitter on his face – could be seen being confronted by an apparently drunk man in the bathroom
When the man the asked Willmore, ‘Why don’t you just use the girl’s bathroom?’ he replied, ‘because I’m a f***ing boy.’
‘Exactly, so why are you dressed like this?’ the man then continued, before Willmore decided to walk away.
But even as he tried to get away from the situation, the man could be heard in the background verbally accosting him, asking him if he had ovaries.
In a follow-up post on Instagram Stories, Willmore claimed he stood beside the man at the urinal, which apparently made him ‘uncomfortable.’
‘I told him there are 8 billion people on this Earth, how can you expect everyone to think and act exactly like you?’ he wrote, according to Them magazine.
‘I also just wanted to pee.’
In an effort to avoid a confrontation, Willmore said he then decided to use one of the stalls in the bathroom.
At that point, he claimed the man began shaking the stall until he emerged, which led him to take the video.
The man who accosted Willmore inside the bathroom has since been identified by Danesh Noshirvan, a TikTok ‘accountability’ influencer, as Jaxon Terill, who said he has apologized to Willmore since the incident
Willmore also posted a follow-up TikTok video showing him tearing up the dance floor prior to the interaction.
‘It happens so much, it shouldn’t affect me still, sometimes I’m just shocked [people] are actually homophobic,’ he wrote.
‘It doesn’t make sense to me, I’m just living my life,’ Willmore continued. ‘If more people got to know me, I think they’d like me.’
The man who accosted Willmore inside the bathroom has since been identified by Danesh Noshirvan, a TikTok ‘accountability’ influencer, as Jaxon Terill.
In a video posted to Instagram, Noshirvan shared a screenshot of the conversation he had with Terill in which he refuted Willmore’s claims that he shook the stall.
Still, he admitted that his actions were ‘wrong and not OK.’
‘I am in no way justifying my actions last night, because they can’t be justified,’ he wrote. ‘But I was also drinking all day long and that was towards the end of the night, so you can imagine how I was feeling during this video.
‘Like I said before, what I did was wrong and not OK,’ Terill reportedly continued. ‘I’m not trying to justify it with alcohol either, but it definitely played a role.’
He added that he has ‘sent multiple apologies to Zach’ in the aftermath.
