THEGAYUK

Author: Richard Vytniorgu

  • FILM REVIEW | Dating Amber – Cute but predictable

    FILM REVIEW | Dating Amber – Cute but predictable

    Rating: 3 out of 5.

    An engaging but ultimately flawed twink flick that reinforces the idea that you can only be openly gay in the big city, rather than remaining in the provincial community in which you grew up.

    Dating Amber – Amazon Prime’s latest LGBT+ offering to coincide with Pride season. And it’s a cute film, if you’re into soft and gentle twinks being goofy and finding themselves in a sea of prejudice and misunderstanding.

    Irish actor Fionn O’Shea is undoubtedly the star here. We’ve seen him before in Handsome Devil (2016), where he played a similarly confused twink alongside the beautiful Nicholas Galitzine. The only difference is that Eddie in Dating Amber is a more rounded and complicated individual than Ned Roche in Handsome Devil, who spends most of the film crushing over his rugby twunk dorm mate, Connor.  

    In all fairness though, Dating Amber is about two closeted teenagers, not just one. Lola Petticrew gives a strong performance as Amber—a frustrated but determined closeted lesbian who runs a side business renting out one of her mother’s caravans for schoolmates to have romantic liaisons.

    Side by side, Amber and Eddie struggle with their sexuality in a hostile school environment and if it weren’t for the fact that both actors are so engaging, this plot premise would make a predictable film into a very predictable and frankly dull-as-ditchwater one.

    But somehow O’Shea and Petticrew manage to pull through as their characters start dating one another as a ruse to throw off the incessant crowing from their homophobic classmates.

    Trips to Dublin, late-night drug-fuelled escapades, and lies lies lies follow as these two try to convince everyone else, including themselves, that they’re straight.

    Eventually, of course, the truth comes out, and Eddie ultimately finds his way. To London, in fact, where the promise of a fulfilling life for this ‘baby gay’ beams into Eddie’s sunny face.

    A predictable outcome

    What I wanted, though, was a less predictable and ultimately less deceiving ending. We’ve seen it before. A provincial gay boy who is closeted because of his misunderstanding community and family can only find freedom by escaping to the big metropolis.

    The consequence of this is that as viewers, and as gay people, in particular, we internalise the assumption that rural, provincial communities are no place for ‘an out gay man’, as Little Britain’s Daffyd Thomas (Only gay in the village) used to tell us repeatedly.

    Now, I grew up in a provincial rural village, admittedly in the 2000s, a decade later than this film is set. But, while there weren’t nuns on every street corner signing themselves each time they saw the local bum boy walk into the Co-op, it wasn’t easy. Rural communities tend to be built around heterosexual families and their needs, and there is intense pressure to follow suit. And I felt it.

    I went off to university, to the great metropoli of Exeter, Leeds, and Leicester, but have I been any more fulfilled? There are opportunities that big cities present to LGBTQ people which are undeniably advantageous and, ideally, it doesn’t have to be either / or.

    Yet Dating Amber makes it precisely into an either/or decision. Either you stay here and this place will kill you, as Amber explains to Eddie, or you go out there, to the big city, and find yourself and be happy.

    The result is that rural communities are drained of the kind of social diversity that makes for more tolerant neighbourhoods, and being gay itself becomes synonymous with a kind of metropolitan and urban lifestyle that those of us who are more rural at heart find hard to bear.

    What we need, then, are LGBTQ films, like God’s Country, that wrestle hard with the realities of being ‘the only gay in the village’, and where communities themselves go through a process of slow adaptation so that they become welcoming places for all sorts of people.

  • OPINION | Is it time to revisit Gay Labels?

    Gay labels are ubiquitous, and some would argue that we don’t need them and even that they’re harmful. I’m talking about labels such as Daddy, bear, jock, twink etc. I think we do need gay labels, but we need them to mean something other than what they currently mean.

    At the moment, gay labels refer to a whole package. For example, ‘twink’ seems to refer to a particular male build and appearance as well as a personality and implied sexuality (bottom boy). ‘Daddy’, by contrast, seems to denote a well-built mature man who is probably a total top and is into twinks.

    I think we are right to be sceptical about gay labels when they are used in this way, and gay apps like Grindr don’t encourage us to think differently about them. But we can’t seem to come up with any alternatives at the moment.

    Naming is important because it helps us to make sense of the world around us and to integrate that meaning into and through language.

    One way of recalibrating these labels is to think about naming in terms of bodies, sexualities, and characters.

    Bodies

    It’s useful to have labels which describe particular body shapes, but such labels mustn’t over-reach themselves and try and encompass sexuality and character as well. They denote structural features only.

    Example labels to describe body shapes and physical appearance include:

    • Bear
      • Hairy, average-to-large build, any age
    • Twink
      • Slim-to-skinny build, youthful, little body hair
    • Jock
      • Athletic-to-muscular build, any age
    • Daddy
      • Any build, mature appearance

    Note that where possible, labels to describe physical appearance are age-blind and ignorant of these people’s sexual dynamics and personalities. Such labels, moreover, can refer to any male, gay, straight, bisexual, whatever.

    Sexualities

    Additionally, it can be creative to name different modes of sexuality and those who embody those modes. Labels to denote gay males of varying sexualities are concerned with direction – the direction bears, jocks, twinks etc. take their sexuality.

    Example labels to describe (polar opposite) embodiments of sexualities include:

    • Dom
      • Dominant top, protective (‘Sir’, ‘Man’)
    • Pussyboy
      • Submissive bottom, boyish (‘bumboy’, ‘bitch boy’, ‘boi’)

    It follows, therefore, that there can be Dom twinks, pussyboy bears, and Dom Daddies etc. This considerably revises the way we usually think of such labels.

    What I’m trying to steer away from is the widespread tendency to equate physical build and appearance with a particular sexuality.

    Don’t get me wrong, though. Sometimes we are attracted to particular physical builds because of distinct sexual arousal connected with how they look. A Dom Daddy might be attracted to a slim twink because of the implied power dynamics. But such dynamics are built up through encounter and relationship; they are not inherent in particular body types. They are also connected to personality, of course.

    Characters

    Adjectives to describe character concern the ways personality traits enliven our physical presence and sexuality.

    Example labels to describe character traits include:

    • Artsy
      • Cultured, creative, intellectual
    • Manly
      • Virile, noble, strapping
    • Effeminate
      • Graceful, expressive, dainty

    These adjectives are not automatically associated with any body type, but they are associated with particular sexualities: manly Dom, artsy pussyboy, etc.

    The key is to play around with different combinations and to begin using this language in more specific ways.

    Example combinations include:

    • Manly Dom twink
    • Artsy pussyboy jock
    • Manly Dom Daddy
    • Effeminate pussyboy twink

    Some combinations will seem strange because we are so used to associating physical shapes with sexualities and personalities. I’m not saying that our physical build and appearance are irrelevant; far from it. But when we do associate skinny twinks with being effeminate submissive bottoms and big muscular Daddies with being dominant tops, this is because these dynamics occur through encounter and desire and the stories we tell about each other. As long as we recognise that, then we’re OK.

     

    Opinions expressed in this article may not reflect those of THEGAYUK, its management or editorial teams. If you’d like to comment or write a comment, opinion or blog piece, please click here.

  • COMMENT | What is an Eastern European Twink? Probably not who you think he is…

    Over the last decade the porn studio Bel Ami has become a byword for an Eastern European twink factory among those au fait with gay porn, churning out flawless Slavs with hard abs and harder co*ks. Based in Prague, but with filming locations in Slovakia and Hungary as well, Bel Ami specialises in a clean-cut, high-spec image replete with frolicking young bucks. But let’s just pause and consider what we mean by “Eastern European twink.”

    In gay nomenclature, a twink is a boyish-looking, slender male with little or no body hair, either by DNA or by design. Cute rather than handsome, soft rather than hard, he can appear more feminine than masculine. Think Eddie Redmayne, the younger Sean Paul Lockhart, and Chris Colfer. In gay porn, the twink has become something of an icon, usually positioned as a bottom boy and desired by more dominant males.

    Of course, there are exceptions to this definition. Some boys are incurable ectomorphs and simply by virtue of their build are mistakenly called a twink, when neither their look nor their personality could be described as properly “twinky”. Think Ben Whishaw, Justin Bieber, and Andrew Garfield.

    And what about Eastern Europe? The tendency in the West is to refer to anything that was once in the Eastern Bloc as Eastern Europe, which therefore includes countries like the Czech Republic as well as Russia. But this is a mistake on many levels. The World Factbook declares Eastern Europe to consist of the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia. Southeastern Europe consists of the former Yugoslav nations as well as Bulgaria and European Turkey. Whereas many of us, including most of gay porn culture, would slot the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary into Eastern Europe as well, these countries are more aptly positioned in Central Europe.

    The concept of Central Europe has historical precedent as well. Large parts of current Central Europe were part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire or Mitteleuropa. People whose origins are in these countries sometimes get irritated when Westerners refer to them as Eastern Europeans. Their culture, much of it rooted in Roman Catholicism (and for some, in Protestantism), has historically (apart from the Soviet era) looked more to the West than to the East.

    In short, then, Central Europe encompasses the Catholic, Protestant, and Western Slavs; Eastern Europe, by contrast, embraces the Orthodox Eastern Slavs, as well as pockets of Romanians, Serbs, Moldovans, Bulgarians, and others, depending on whether you wish to have a separate territory called Southeastern Europe, to embrace the Southern Slavs.

    To set the record straight, Bel Ami is firmly Central European. Its aesthetic draws on the Central European and quite recently, on the pervasiveness of Roman Catholicism in its life and heritage. The studio’s models are mostly collected from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Of all the Slavs, the Western Slavs are best represented by Bel Ami. But undoubtedly, like many people east of Germany, no single ethnicity will uniformly predominate in a single person, so mixed are their ancestries likely to be because of recent and historic migrations and intermarriage. But prominent will be a mix of the Central European peoples – East German, Czech, Slovak, Austrian, Polish, and Hungarian. Bel Ami’s boys are strong, muscled, masculine jocks. There are no docile skinny twinks here. Even its ostensibly twinky Kinky Angels niche features boys who are more bros than cute BFFs.

    So what, then, is an Eastern European twink, if not a Bel Ami boy? An Eastern European twink will be one or a mix of Eastern and perhaps Southern Slav ethnicities, possibly combining non-Slav aspects too, such as Baltic, Romanian, and other Russian elements. In any case, he will look “Eastern” to Western eyes. With little or no muscle and body hair, such a male will be thin, boyish, with floppy East Slav hair, typical in Russians – very straight and ash blonde-brown. Tall or short, he might have a sweet smile, be quite shy, and certainly not very masculine. He might be a born bottom boy, although of course, he needn’t be.

    In short, online Eastern European twinks are really found in such gay porn studios as RUTwinks and Beautiful Twinks, which purportedly comply with 18 U.S.C 2257 Record-Keeping Requirements. Models such as Bad Boy Ton, Alex Vase, Sasha Peterson (a Russian-born American), and Zaki from Beautiful Twinks are representative of this kind of boy. Ton, at least, is now in his late twenties, also proving that twinky is not synonymous with biological age, but rather with body and personality, with someone’s “look.” Indeed, Eastern European twinks sometimes seem to remain in a state of perpetual boyishness.

    So the next time somebody combines Bel Ami, Eastern European, and twink in the same breath, it might be time to change the way we think about gay boys coming from east of Germany; it’s a more complex picture, and it’s time that the beauty of really Eastern European twinks was celebrated, instead of being dwarfed by the muscular energy of Central European Bel Ami bucks. Because their beauty is often overshadowed by the nouveau “muscle” twink — the masculine jock who has usurped this label.

    Our gay culture seems increasingly more obsessed with toned, athletic, and masculine. Perhaps the Eastern European twink can remind us that there is also room for the non-masculine, boyish, and skinny among us, especially if we’re exclusively bottom boys with souls like delicate flowers.

    Opinions expressed in this article may not reflect those of THEGAYUK, its management or editorial teams. If you’d like to comment or write a comment, opinion or blog piece, please click here.