There is an epidemic on this campus. And that epidemic is bisexual twinks. They are walking around this campus with slutty waists, cunty outfits, and an unmatched audacity. They’re manipulating men and women alike. Someone must take care of them or they will run the city of Boston. As a (pretty much) lesbian, this role often falls to me. A twink handler, one could say. However, as the semester moves forward I have become overworked, underpaid, and overbooked!
This year Boston University gave me a brownstone room with a decent sized basement. While this may seem like simple luck, it was actually part of the stipend for my UROP project: locking as many bisexual twinks in that basement as damn near possible. Part research, part community aid I set up my new enclosure with all the necessary supplies: baggy pants (à la Troye Sivan), dangly earrings, a record player and cassette player (Alex G, Hole, Omar Apollo, and Patti Smith queued on a loop), a thousand fidget toys, Hot Cheetos, and a singular Yerba Mate. I captured my subjects sunning around campus with a very very large net, scooping them up every time I saw a walk too sassy or a baby tee too perfectly cropped.
Once safely in my basement enclosure, the bisexual twinks settled in quite comfortably, each finding a corner to brood in while eyeing the Yerba Mate and critiquing each other’s thrifting choices. I had even added a little ‘sulking station’ under a strategically placed patch of moody string lights (complete with all the oversized hoodies and blankets they’d need to feel safely enveloped) which quickly became the most popular corner. However, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Almost immediately, they began organizing a rebellion, communicating in half-baked TikTok quotes and hushed whispers. I noticed that with each week, managing the twinks required more of my energy. Every day, I fielded demands for new fidget toys, warm light fixtures, and never ending American Spirits. They girl-bossed and they gaslite me into thinking perhaps I made a mistake – perhaps I could not create them a new home.
But just when I thought the twinks had broken me down, a strange shift occurred. One of the more assertive twinks (the better of smudged eyeliner) stood up during a rebellion planning session and declared, “What if we just… like… thrive in here?”
The twink coalition found a new sense of purpose. They pooled their resources and divided up responsibilities with surprising efficiency. The artsier twinks became interior designers curating a vibrant living space that could rival any Brooklyn pop-up gallery. The philosophers and poets organized nightly ‘salons’ in the sulking station, where they took turns reading overly earnest zines and pondering the existential questions raised in both male manipulatory music and queer coded films. They even crafted a constitution, declaring the basement a sovereign nation known as Twinktopia.
Twinktopia became a self-sustaining ecosystem. They even set up a barter system, where talents and resources were exchanged for hand-rolled cigarettes, vintage accessories, or homemade kombucha. Some started learning practical skills – little bi boys who had once never held a power drill suddenly began constructing loft beds and floating bookshelves from salvaged wood, carving an artisan paradise in the heart of the basement. As for me?
No longer was I an overburdened twink wrangler; I have ascended (read: been promoted to) benevolent overseer, an ethereal monarch, a passive queer dictator. I realized they didn’t need containment, they needed a space to create glittering, grunge-worn utopia.