In a year, I’ll be 40, a milestone I once believed I would somehow be exempt from. In my younger years, I thought, “Surely that would never happen to me.” Despite the obvious lunacy of it all, I treated the very notion as nothing more than a cautionary tale, something fed to gay youths by the cosmetics industry to enforce a regimented beauty routine, or a work of Hollywood fiction starring Demi Moore or some other such dinosaur. But alas, in about 12 months, 21 days, and three hours, that dinosaur will be me.

At a time when political and economic strife feels at an all-time high, and the list of nihilistic threats grows longer by the day, I find myself hyper-fixated on the loss of collagen in my hypodermis, or whether skinny jeans are still a plausible option. Like most superficial obsessions, however, these thoughts point to something deeper, a far more existential kind of dread.

Through a blend of good genetics and an early commitment to Botox, I held on to my youthful appearance well into my twenties and early thirties. Over the last several years, however, there’s been an undeniable shift, and I’ve begun to experience the inevitable signs of what is commonly referred to in the gay world as twink death.

Mourning the loss of youth has become an almost daily occurrence, something dredged up repeatedly over the past decade. As the years have passed, I’ve grown further apart from the sprightly creature that once defined my identity. Things are no longer where they once were, and in some cases, gone entirely. Even though life has offered me a range of gay personas to adopt in my postmortem shame (twunk, otter, bear) none of them possess the charm or the distinct advantages of the elusive twink. And now that I no longer qualify for twinkdom from a physical standpoint, I sometimes fear that my mental development hasn’t progressed nearly enough to compensate for the absence of the latter.

Through the use of studio and documentary photography, featuring subjects, objects, and myself, I construct a visual narrative drawn from my thoughts, fears, and memories, exploring the experience of aging out of twinkhood in the shallow and, at times, unforgiving world of the modern gay man. This work invites the viewer to reflect on the relationship between identity, desirability, and the slow detonation of my waistline.