Last week, musician and actress Suki Waterhouse posted a video of herself to TikTok with text that read: “aligning my chakras in the hotel room before the carpet knowing that in merely two hours every twink with an opinion will be critiquing my outfit.”
TikTok content
She was talking about attending the Met Gala, and the hordes of armchair critics that like to analyze what high-profile celebrities, particularly women, wear to it. And the clip undeniably struck a nerve: It’s earned over a million likes and close to seven million views since Waterhouse published it. Yet as the TikTok made its inevitable way over to X, it drew a different kind of attention. “Twink kinda turning into a slur lowkey,” read one repost with over 16 million views.
Of course, two things can be true: Waterhouse’s video was funny, addressing the casual misogyny faced by women like her on a regular basis in what seemed like good faith. (“SUKI YOU DELIVERED ATE AND SERVED” read one top comment.) But the question of who can or should be using the word “twink” lends itself to a bigger conversation.
Historically, the term has been used by members of the LGBTQ+ community to refer to thin, pretty, and young gay men. More recently, however, “twink” has been deployed online to describe really any thin, white man (see: actors like Dominic Sessa, of The Holdovers fame; Anora’s Mark Eydelshteyn; or Kodi Smit-McPhee), as well as any apparently gay person, period. And in other, much less funny moments, it’s clearly a throwaway term to get around saying something else. Troye Sivan observed as much in a TikTok posted last fall: “If you say ‘twink’ when you meant to say ‘faggot,’ that’s still a slur, I don’t think straight people should be saying that,” he argued.
TikTok content
Aha! Finally someone said it, I thought then. (And to clarify, dear reader, the word twink has never been used to describe me; I’ve always been too fat, too hairy, too femme for it to apply.) Even if the word is not generally considered a slur by queer people when we use it, something changes when those outside of the community adopt it as a lazy shorthand or, worse, a punchline.
Take Mo Rocca asking the actor Cole Escola, in jest, if they “accepted the charge” of being a “demon twink” on a recent episode of CBS Sunday Morning. (That particular term, now mostly retired, originated on X to describe some chaotic behavior at a gay party years ago.) The moment was meant to be provocative—to leverage a bit of verbiage, once used almost exclusively by a minority community and its subcultures, for clicks and likes and 15 seconds of social-media attention. (Escola, ever the pro, had the perfect non-response. “That is for the critics to decide, and for the Tony voters to decide,” they said with a smirk.)
But the truth is, as queer culture has entered the mainstream, the scrutiny of our preferences and practices has also increased. With greater visibility—and, in the best cases, greater tolerance and understanding—has come an assumed permission to ask certain probing questions, including about our sex lives: Things like, Are you a bottom or top? Or, Which are you: a bear, otter, jock, daddy, or twink? (Personally, I’ve been asked “what I’m into” by my cis, straight friends enough that I’ve started to wonder if their curiosity about my kinks is either a manifestation of their own repressed desires, or some kind of voyeuristic kink in and of itself.)
In other words, as we’ve emerged from the closet, we gays have also, deliberately or otherwise, let straight people in on our codes. And, make no mistake: I’m not clutching my pearls. You folks online feel free to talk about bottoming and “painting” (google that one if you dare), about PrEP and twinks. Just keep in mind that the way in which you talk about us says everything we need to know about you.
