On Twinks

A Gay life cycle

What is a Twink? Twinkdom is an age, sex archetype, an attitude and a Gay life cycle. A slur, or crown, depending on who throws it…

Written in collaboration with Sniffies Hush blog.

My Twink Death was fast and brutal. A bear looked back at me and said, “fuck me, Daddy.” Daddy. When the hell did that happen? In my mind, I was still a Demon Twink®, spinning from bear to bear like a whirling dervish. Was it the 20 pounds I gained? Turning 30? 35? 40? What was the arithmetic, the threshold I’d crossed? What even is a twink?

The first time I heard the term “twinkie,” I was a teen in the '90s, it was a punchline on Will & Grace. Twinkies were dime-a-dozen boys who were thin, sweet, of no nutritional value, and filled with cream. The word had been around much longer. “Twink,” like many Queer words, is likely an amalgamation of sources: “twank,” a British term for a sex worker; “twinkletoes,” old slang for a dancer.

I was called a twink well into my 30s. Part of me was insulted, part of me loved it. It’s an inherently contradictory term: twinks are considered innocent but wild, scheming but naive, insatiable bottoms or big-dicked little jackhammers. Too small to be a threat, but evil enough to be demons. They’re androgynous and soft—but you better get a prenup if you marry one.

But, a twink is a powerful sex archetype, a versatile fantasy: son-daddy, little bro, teacher’s pet, the neighbor’s kid, the stories in the pages of HandJobs, or “Destroying a Twink” videos on PornHub. A twink is a sex icon as powerful and problematic as Lolita in her heart-shaped sunglasses.

And that's not the only problem with Twinkdom…

It was odd to me how I was usually described as a “Latin Twink,” and how “Asian Twink” was its own genre of porn, but we never have to say “White Twink.” Whiteness is implied in Twinkdom. It can even be an aspiration toward whiteness: Eurocentric features, a slim, smooth boy on the cover of XY Magazine in the '90s—blonde, with a delicate nose, six-pack, piercing blue or green eyes, frosted spiky hair, and puka shells. White twinks are allowed a softness rarely granted to Black or Brown gays. Gay culture demands we be a little dangerous and imposing to be considered sexy. “Latino” was sometimes added to my Twinkness as an asterisk.

Racism in Gay culture is old and unsurprising, but Twinkdom has even more pressing issues right now: the straights are already co-opting the word and will one day ruin it, as they have so many others. Too many women are a little too comfortable throwing it around. As professional White Twink Troye Sivan said, “If you say Twink when you mean Faggot, it’s still a slur.” (Which was, well, a very twink reaction of him.) Twink can be a slur or a crown, depending on who throws it.

When you're young, you know you’re beautiful, but you don’t believe it. When I was called a twink, it reminded me I was in that beauty—that it was dumb and ephemeral, but still powerful. A Twink Death implies that a twink is also a life cycle, an era, someone to be protected, admired, and eventually, obliterated.

(Photos by Leo Herrera. The Crib, San Francisco 2005)

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More on Queer identity in POST & Analog Cruising.