Welcome back to our web series InQueery, where we delve into the his, er, themstory of our favorite queer words. In this episode, YouTuber, author, and entrepreneur Connor Franta explores the history of the word everyone seems to be talking about lately — "twink."
What is a twink, who is a twink, and where did the word come from? You may twink you know, but do you really? Connor is here to answer your burning questions and teach you a thing or two about queer history. Check out the video above and the script below.
There are plenty of "tribes" in the gay male community — bears, otters, and daddies, oh my! But we're here to dive into the wonderful world of twinks. So: What is a twink, and where did the word come from? Let’s take a stroll back through time to figure out just where the concept originated.
These days, we’re all pretty much in agreement about what the word “twink” means: It’s a pretty exclusionary term, tightly focused on young men who are slender, hairless, usually blond, and usually white.
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines "twink" as a noun: a “wink” or “twinkling,” and also as a verb, meaning to “punish” or “thrash.” Oh Webster, you dirty bird!
Go back 100 years, and you’re unlikely to hear “twink” in queer circles. But in England, you might hear the word “twank,” referring to what we would call sugar daddies. A far cry from the word’s meaning today!
Of course, young hairless fair-featured men still existed, but they had different monikers back then. They went by mollies in England, and knabe in Germany — a problematic term, since it translates to “boy” and raises questions about age of consent. Sadly, there isn’t much gay porn that survives from the 1800s, so if there was a Victorian version of Bel Ami, it’s lost to the ages.
“Twink” might have evolved as shorthand for the term “twinkletoes.” In a 1919 novel called Twinkletoes: A Tale of Limehouse, a girl is first nicknamed “Twinkletoes” which is then just shortened to “twink.” In the book, one observer comments, “Ain’t she a dam queer kid?”
“Twink” as gay slang might have come from straight culture, which simply wasn’t using the word to its full potential. In the early to mid-20th century, the word was widely accepted to refer to twinkling, as in something sparkly and shiny and new. There was a home perm kit called Twink, and a baseball team in Los Angeles called The Hollywood Twinks. I know a few Hollywood twinks myself... (it's me).
Browse through old newspaper sports sections from the 1930s through the 1950s, and you’ll find headlines like “Twinks Badly Mauled by Seattle” and “Twinks Hold Stiff Workout.”
A lot of people assume that the word “twink” derives from the fluffy, insubstantial, cream-filled snack. Tasty to eat, but of no nutritional value. Linguists are skeptical about that, though. It’s a cute story, but there’s no evidence that queers were particularly invested in Twinkies as a basis for slang. Just the opposite, in fact — in the late 70s, Twinkies developed an intensely negative association after they were implicated in the murder of Harvey Milk.
It sounds unbelievable, but it’s true: Harvey’s killer, Dan White, claimed that he had been suffering from depression and pointed to his binge-eating of Twinkies as proof. It was a super weird argument to make in court, and gave rise to the term “Twinkie Defense,” meaning an outlandish excuse for committing a crime. If any slang is derived from Twinkies, it’s that.
Prior to internet porn, there was a lot of confusion about exactly what a twink really was. The book Homolexis defined it as “as attractive youth” in 1985, which is pretty close to what we’d say today. But if you go back to the 70s, there’s a lot more variety.
The 1972 book The Queens’ Vernacular defined “twinkle-toes” as “effeminate.” In 1975, the leather culture resource Drummer Magazine defined “twink” as the masochist or slave in a relationship, and added that “twinkie” was an unrelated term referring to young men. And in 1978, a language survey called the Maledicta stated that “a youthful, effeminate young man” should be called “twinkle-toes.”
Because queer communities tended to be geographically isolated back then, it seems as though different cities and subcultures had their own meanings for all these different words. But the term seems to have become common and accepted by the 90’s, when a 1995 article in The Advocate casually used the word “twink” to describe the band Take That — fair enough.
The spread of “twink” in queer communities might even be related to the Internet making twink-related pornography readily available. For a time, twinks were a bit of a novelty. It was impossible to troll 90s porn sites without being bombarded by images of slender young men.
By the early 2000s, the word was broadly used in gay media. You can hear twinks jokingly referenced in the movie But I’m a Cheerleader, and hissed like an epithet in the first season of Queer as Folk. The late 90s and early 2000s were basically the time of peak twink, when young, thin, pale bodies were often prized over larger, furrier bodies.
Despite the growing popularity of dad bods, twinks are all around us. The word popped up on recent episodes of mainstream shows like Veep and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. And when Andy Cohen recently referred to One Direction as a bunch of twinks, their PR rep shrugged it off as a compliment.
It seems like it should be easy to refer to young skinny men, but it took about 100 years of shifting words and meanings to land on the definition of “twink” as we know it today.
Today, of course, twinks are an enduring part of queer life. But as gay clones fall out of fashion and the community welcomes more diverse body types, “twink” has earned a bit of a bad reputation. Being skinny and pale is fine, but it’s no longer seen as the height of desirability — and thank God for that!
These days there’s room for all types: bears, otters, high femmes, sport dykes, and more. In other words: If you want to twinkle, you don’t have to be a twink.
Click here to watch the first episode of InQueery, on the history of the word "queer."
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