“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’.