To age is the comeuppance twinks face for once having been fresh-faced, slender and beautiful. 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” “People resent twinks for the exact same reason they desire them, because they are blessed with youth and attractiveness. It’s jarring to reach an age where a 30-year-old is no longer really “an older man”, a development that seems to require some degree of recalibration of my place within the sexual economy. I’m in a long-term relationship, but I sometimes worry that should I become single again, I will myself longer be desirable to the same kind of 30-something men who I used to date, who will still be pursuing the same kind of 23-year-old who I used to be. I’d like to think this doesn’t apply to me, but in my late twenties I do occasionally feel like a depreciating asset. “The harder you attempt to stay twinkish as you get older and the more you try to wind it back and cover up the ageing, the older and more desperate you begin to appear,” advises one Reddit commenter. This is usually viewed as a tragic condition. The ageing twink who rejects this embodies Carl Jung’s archetype of the ‘puer aeternus’ (the eternal boy), the grown man who rejects the responsibilities of adulthood in favour of existing in a state of perpetual adolescence. While these qualities are seen as charming in youth, past a certain point there is a cultural imperative to grow up. In this sense, by becoming boring, I have swerved one of the most common charges levelled at the ageing twink: the failure to relinquish the past in favour of more age-appropriate aesthetics and behaviours being infantilised, frozen in time and still listening to the same Cheryl Cole songs that charted when they were young. Today I continue to have an extremely boring dress sense, largely consisting of chinos and black jumpers, which means that no one can accuse me of clinging onto a youthful aesthetic. But if I wasn’t a twink, I was at least twink-adjacent, and I can relate now to the feeling of ageing out of a specific type of attractiveness (slim, pretty, very slightly androgynous).
I wouldn’t classify myself as an ageing twink, because I’m not sure if I was ever a twink in the first place: while I was thin and possessed a stark, preternatural beauty, I also dressed like the bassist in a Sonic Youth tribute band. “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. “ Oh, in my youth I excited some admiration,” she tells a potential suitor, batting her eyelids and making sure to avoid harsh lighting. 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). “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. Take Jacques, the middle-aged gay man in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956): “In some ways I liked him,” reflects the narrator. This idea that there’s something pitiful about being an ageing gay man has a long legacy. 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”. 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. 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 is a spectre haunting the gay community: the ‘ageing twink’.