In Defense of Aging Twinks and Edmund White ‘States of Desire’
Share
A gated community inspired by Edmund White?
View this post on Instagram
DAZED’s In defence of ageing twinks:
There is a spectre haunting the gay community: the ‘ageing twink’. He is an object of pity and scorn; tragi-comic and embittered, desperately clinging on to something, occasionally drug-ravaged or otherwise scarred by excess. There are countless Reddit threads where people discuss his unfortunate fate and how one might escape it: these conversations are staggeringly bleak, with some approaching the idea with vindictive relish and others, clearly anxious twinks themselves, engaging in something approaching digital self-harm; anticipating their own bodily decay and permanent banishment from the world of desire. The ageing twink is mocked in front-facing comedy TikToks: “one day, you’ll lose your charm, you’ll be a husk just like me” hisses one 29-year-old character, while another bemoans that “23 is 40 in twink years”.
This idea that there’s something pitiful about being an ageing gay man has a long legacy. Take Jacques, the middle-aged gay man in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956): “In some ways I liked him,” reflects the narrator. “He was silly but he was so lonely; anyway, I understand now that the contempt I felt for him involved my self-contempt.” Perhaps the contempt some gay men feel for ageing twinks always involves a degree of contempt for themselves, too. In my view, the literary ageing twink par excellence is actually a woman: Blanche DuBois, the brittle, fading southern Belle in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). “Oh, in my youth I excited some admiration,” she tells a potential suitor, batting her eyelids and making sure to avoid harsh lighting. “But look at me now! Would you think it possible that I was once considered to be – attractive?” Recently I was shocked to discover that Blanche – this icon of decline, dissolution and lost youth – is just 30 years old.
People resent twinks for the exact same reason they desire them, because they are blessed with youth and attractiveness. To age is the comeuppance twinks face for once having been fresh-faced, slender and beautiful. As they get older, the men they might have one day rejected can take comfort in their good fortune finally running out, their ill-deserved capital dwindling at long last. How else to account for the disdain with which people talk about them? What have these people done to deserve such contempt, beyond getting older than 25 – a fate to which most of us succumb? The word ‘twink’ implies a degree of femininity and, in a patriarchal society, femininity is a depreciating asset. It’s always devalued in men, but being young and good-looking can have a compensatory effect. Past a certain point, however, to be a feminine man is often viewed as pathetic or even grotesque.
In sneering at ageing twinks, we are reproducing the values of the dominant social order (or at least that’s what I like to hiss at 19-years-olds in clubs when they ask “aren’t you a little old to be here?”) This idea is explored in Edmund White travelogue of gay America, States of Desire (1980). It’s a fascinating book, published immediately before the beginning of the AIDS crisis and therefore documenting a culture that was heading towards a cliff. In a section that takes place in Kansas City, White explores a dynamic where twinks exclusively date older men, then find themselves discarded once they reach their mid-twenties. When this happens, their sexual options are sorely limited, while the older men who tossed them aside continue to date a string of 19-year-olds.
View this post on Instagram
Reading States of Desire today, the dynamic being described doesn’t seem entirely alien, even if it’s no longer as common or rigidly coded. But crucially, White argues that it was already old-fashioned in 1980, a throwback to an earlier and more repressed era which, by then, continued to exist only in places untouched by gay liberation. In New York and other sophisticated cities, the new ideal was “the hot man of 35” rather than the pretty young boy, and men in their thirties and forties were free to sleep with one another. The twink-and-older-man dynamic is a “game in which everyone loses,” writes White. “The beautiful boy can look forward only to outgrowing his looks and his beauty. The older man retains his attractiveness by virtue of his power and position in the world – a precarious perch.” The idea that twinks must become masculine daddies in order to retain their desirability is, in White’s words, “especially cruel to the shy, sexually passive lad who is prized for these very qualities when he is young and spurned for them when he is older.”
“Let’s face it, he thinks, we are all packages,” writes Holleran in The Beauty of Men. “An assemblage of elements. The traditional three are youth, beauty, cock. When you have all three, you are a god. When you have two of the three, you still do OK. But when you have none, you are in trouble.” We don’t have to capitulate wholesale to this way of thinking. At any age, there are people who want to be with you simply because they like spending time with you. Not everyone is as shallow as imagined when we talk about people ageing out of desirability; not everyone is going to react with revulsion at the appearance of crow’s feet or the occasional crack of a knee. We are not reducible to the slenderness, or otherwise, of our bodies; the dewiness, or otherwise, of our skin.
