Though Suki Waterhouse’s look for the Met Gala didn’t make much of an impression, her post about mentally preparing for the fashion event did go viral for all the wrong reasons.
On TikTok, the Daisy Jones & The Six star posted a video about the stress of being subjected to the public gaze — or rather, the public gays.
“Aligning my chakras in the hotel room before the carpet knowing that in merely two hours every twink with an opinion will be critiquing my outfit,” she wrote on the video.
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While Waterhouse’s post is clearly a joke and she likely didn’t mean any harm by it, her video still exemplifies a concerning trend: people using the word “twink” as a socially acceptable replacement for anti-gay slurs.
Twink, of course, has a non-derogatory meaning as a description of a certain gay man’s body type: slender and hairless. But when people like Waterhouse use the term as a catch-all for negative stereotypes about gay men, it has nothing to do with physical appearance. Rather, as queer folks across the internet pointed out, it seems like a palatable stand-in for the f-slur. “Twink kinda turning into a slur lowkey,” one user wrote. “In like 30 years we gone be like ‘omg he called me the ‘t slur’’ and then people gone be like wait which one?”
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Some folks connected the discourse to Troye Sivan’s take on the topic from last fall, where he addressed homophobia head-on after an offensive rumor about him spread on TikTok. “If you say ‘twink’ where you meant to say ‘f*ggot,’ that’s still a slur,” Sivan said at the time. “That’s, like, our word. I don’t think straight people should be using that.”
While “twink” still isn’t on the level of other anti-queer slurs — after all, one was censored throughout this article — that doesn’t mean it should be used to further homophobic stereotypes under the guise of humor. “Twink” originated in the queer community, and based on the way its usage by straight folks is headed, it should stay in gay hands from here on out.
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