Ever it goes: Straight culture steals from gay culture as casually as gay men steal from black women. This transference of homo terminology to hetero folks fits with the week’s other gay-culture dustup over Rita Ora’s “Girls,” in which pop singers appear to try on lesbianism just for drunken fun. Most provocatively, Haramis uses the term twink-gay-male slang most earnestly used on hook-up apps and porn sites-to describe this class of boyish men, even though many of his examples are straight.
In just 600 words for T magazine, Nick Haramis asserts that youthful scrawniness characterizes a new class of celebrity male dreamboat, illustrated partly by the rise of Call Me by Your Name actor Timothée Chalamet, the cast of Dunkirk, and the pop singer Troye Sivan.
The New York Times article, “Welcome to the Age of the Twink,” that Twitter has gleefully torn apart this week is a bit too slight to sustain a full reckoning with the very real questions it raises.
