word of the day: twink

In my 2013 word of the day post for “twinky” I said the book I was reading at the time provided the first instance I’d read of “twink” being used in a non-gay context. Not true; I’d forgotten Naked Came the Manatee:

Joe Sereno caught the Odyssey night clerk as he was going off: prissy guy, had his lunch box under his arm. … Joe said, … ‘You hear the shots? You must’ve.’ 

‘I was in the office,’ the night guy said.

Joe wondered how this twink knew he was in the office at the exact time the shots were fired.

Naked Came the Manatee is a round robin or serial novel. A different author writes each chapter. It originally appeared in The Miami Herald Tropic in 1995, and was later collected as a paperback from Fawcett. My “twink” excerpt comes from the Elmore Leonard chapter. Leonard uses the word clumsily, referring to the motel’s “night guy” as “prissy,” saying he “rolled his eyes,” “had different poses,” “walked with his knees together.” It comes across pejoratively rather than affectionately (or leeringingly), as though Leonard were just switching out a non-PC word like “faggot” but was still relying on the old stereotypes. 

Maybe that’s why I didn’t think of it as the first time I’d come across “twink” in a non-gay context. Leonard doesn’t use it the way a gay person would. Twinks are sexy, not prissy. In the 2013 DIR post I quoted a straight author comparing the twinks of the Twilight series to “naked girl vampires and sexually depraved demons” created for the gratification of straight men. That gets it right.  

In a 2018 essay self-proclaimed twink Connor Franta says the word has gotten popular among the straights: “The word popped up on recent episodes of mainstream shows like Veep and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

source:

Naked Came the Manatee

a novel by Carl Hiaasen, Paul Levine, Dave Barry, Brian Antoni, Elmore Leonard, Tananarive Due, Edna Buchanan, John Dufresne, James W. Hall, Vicki Hendricks, Les Standiford, Carolina Hospital, Evelyn Mayerson

1995/1998. Fawcett Books / Random House, New York