In 1894, British artist and author W. Graham Robertson sat to be painted by American portrait artist John Singer Sargent. In the dead of summer, Robertson put on a velvet-collar full length coat and posed alongside his poodle, Mouton. Sargent purposefully painted the London dandy to appear as slender and youthful as possible. Experts have called the work homoerotic for the time. According to Robertson, he had no clue why Sargent would want to paint him.
“That was mock naïveté,” says Dr. Jonathan Katz, director of the doctoral program in visual studies for the University at Buffalo. “This is a classic twink story.”
Contrary to what a recent T Magazine article — “Welcome to the Age of the Twink”— might lead you to believe, the age of the twink never really ended.
If you didn't already know, "twink" is a term referring to waifish, slender, hairless, and usually effeminate queer men. And according to T Magazine, we are at the dawn of a new age of celebrity twinkdom — this time led primarily by straight men: Timothée Chalamet and his role in Call Me by Your Name, Tye Sheridan, the lead in Ready Player One, and Lucas Hedges in Lady Bird. The story tracks the history of this revelation and quickly sifts through its variations, like the "twunk" (that's "twink" plus "hunk") body of Zac Efron. These latest twinks, it declares, are "art twinks" inspired by the photographic work of Ryan McGinley and the models favored during Hedi Slimane’s three years as the creative director at Saint Laurent.
T Magazine's examples of twinks are mostly white, save the odd inclusion of Jaden Smith. The article then pivots, positing that the rise of the "art twink" is a cultural reaction to toxic masculinity. It calls them “a new answer to the problem of what makes a man.” But twinks have long represented an alternative form of masculinity for white men, and to posit as if that is not the case is ahistorical.
“For me, twink is the current term for something that goes all the way back to ancient Greek life, where the structure of male homosexuality presumed a young, hairless boy as the erotic object,” says Dr. Katz, whose work largely lies at the intersection of art history and queer history. “But we’ve seen this all the way through to the present, and of course at various points it’s become quite articulate.”
As Dr. Katz notes, the physical form of the twink appears in art throughout history, long before the term found its current meaning. But as the queer rights movement began, gay men began to ascribe themselves names and labels, twink among them. The term has always had queer connotations; it’s curious that such a word would be divorced of this historical context, sanitized of queer sexual connotations, and applied as a catch-all term for a phenotype of straight men. Especially when that same label has historically barred people of color from its ranks, regardless of how waifish their bodies may be.
“The ideal twink, as the term was [originally] used, was not just white but blonde,” says Dr. Katz, explaining the word's hyper-racialized original nature. As he notes, this definition widened over time to include other ethnic categories, starting with Asian men. “I think the progression of who moves to twinkdom is actually extremely culturally revealing. My guess is that we will find that African Americans as the last group to enter twinkdom.”
In the wake of the publication of the T Magazine article, queer men and nonbinary people of color took to social media to discuss that very exclusion, almost uniformly agreeing that Black bodies have not been included under the tent of twink. One Twitter user’s response provided an insightful critique: Black men aren’t often seen as twinks, he wrote, because they’re “sexually hypermasculated, beasts in bed, too big of a fetish to be the cute vulnerable thing.”
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And the idea bears out: Twinks have always been thought of as possessing a feminine nature. It is a type of nuanced identity that Black men have historically been denied; in the popular imagination, Black men are only allowed to embody extremes. And though the face of Black masculinity has begun to change and become more multi-dimensional in pop culture, even that is a recent phenomenon.
There’s a hell of a lot one could say about twinks, whether about how the word's connotations have oscillated from insult to praise and back again, or how twink culture has served as a microcosm of how Black bodies are excluded from nuanced portrayals of gender and sexuality. But to say that we now live in some sort of golden, heterosexual age of hairless, skinny legends, and to extend that idea into a commentary on how this “new era” is a response to a female-driven untangling of toxic masculinity? As Dr. Katz said when asked: “Absolutely not.”
Mikelle Street is a Manhattan-based freelance writer. His work generally deals with subjects in fashion who are people of color or who identify as queer, and the intersections therein. His tweets are... often times impassioned.
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