Twink

A slim, smooth, young-looking gay man in his twenties or so, with little body hair and a boyish face.

A twink is a slim, smooth, young-looking gay man: little or no body hair, a narrow frame, a boyish face. Twinks are young adult men, usually somewhere in their twenties, and the word is about the look rather than the birth certificate: some men are still read as twinks at thirty-five, some lose the label at twenty-three when the beard comes in.

What a twink is not: necessarily a bottom, necessarily femme, or necessarily shallow, whatever the jokes say. The word lives at one end of the gay body spectrum, with the bear at the other, and it comes with its own family: the twunk, a twink who found the gym, the hairier otter, and the gym-built jock.

Where it comes from

Nobody knows for sure. Green's Dictionary of Slang lists two possible roots: the "twinkle in his eye" of an attractive young man, or the Twinkie, the American cream-filled sponge cake, sweet and light and not very nourishing. The cake theory is the one gay men usually tell, and it has a cousin in "twinkie", which Bruce Rodgers' 1972 glossary of gay slang, The Queens' Vernacular, records for a young, inexperienced gay man.

The word itself is older than most people think. Green's finds "twink" in American college slang of the sixties, recorded in 1968 as a word for a gay man, or one suspected of being gay. You will also find acronyms online that claim to explain it: no dictionary backs them, so take them as jokes made up after the fact.

How it is used today

Today "twink" is a tribe, a profile tag and a porn category. Plenty of men call themselves twinks with pride, and the word has spread well beyond gay circles, to describe slim, pretty young actors and singers. It can still sting when used as a put-down, for a man who looks too young, too thin or too eager, and in some corners "twink" is shorthand for vain and empty-headed, which is the stereotype the word has to fight.

The classic pairings are the twink and the daddy, and the twink and the bear, the body contrast that keeps a lot of gay porn in business. Twink porn is one of the oldest and biggest genres, always with adult performers, and the studios that specialize in it sell the same thing the word promises: youth, smooth skin and a lot of energy.

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