Gay twins in a relationship
The “Boyfriend Twin” and Our Tendency to Date People Who Look Like Us
They have matching puffed-out chests, green plaid shirts, and endearing bedhead. Their facial hair was carved by the matching blade. When they kiss, they stare like they’re doing an especially salacious rendition of the Marx Brothers mirror routine. Forget the homonymous gay couples, with their quaint troubles of joint first names and confused friends. Behold the boyfriend twin.
As the Tumblr that appeared recently asks, “What’s sexier than dating yourself?” Partner Twin’s ever-growing scroll of photos seems to have charmed and terrified its devoted audience in equal measure, scratching at unconscious fears about how we choose our mates. In one portrait after another, two men with similar expressions pose for the camera with complementary profiles that match all the way down to the chest hair. Straight couples who are confused for siblings have been ticklish fodder for lifestyle stories for years, but the boyfriend twins seize that a step further, suggesting that what we’re really searching for is our own intimate clone.
This anxiety, of course, longpredates the Tumblr, as its anonymous creator has acknowledge
Doubling Down on Boyfriend/girlfriend Twins
Why do so many gay couples look alike?…
By Jesse Boland
At first you think you’re seeing double. Have they finally perfected human cloning? you wonder. Not quite. Was the movie Us based on a true story? Not exactly, but you’re getting warmer. Has fascism become so hegemonically embraced in Western culture that we are all slowly blurring into one idealized image of beauty to conform to Eurocentric standards of presentability and respectability in an oligarchical consumerist society? I mean…probably, but that sounds like a much smarter article and we won’t be talking about that here. No, this strange spectacle you’re bearing witness to is a far more terrifying manifestation of mankind’s twisted narcissism ripping the fabric of our existential being: the phenomenon of boyfriend twins.
Boyfriend twins are the colloquial legal title for two men in a amorous relationship who bear uncanny visual similarities to one another, rendering them virtually identical – minus the obvious signifiers, of course; Brandon has light-brown hair whereas his partner Brendan has dirty-blond hair; Steven’s eyes are blueish-green unlike his partner
Brotherly Love
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Dear Prudence,
My fraternal twin and I (both men) are in our late 30s. We were always extremely close and shared a bedroom growing up. When we were 12 we gradually started experimenting sexually with each other. After a couple of years, we realized we had fallen in love. Of course we felt guilty and ashamed, and we didn’t dare tell anyone what we were doing. We hoped it was “just a phase” that we’d develop out of, but we wound up sleeping together until we left for college. We knew this could ruin our lives, so we made a pact to end it. We attended schools far apart and limited our contact to family holidays. But we never fell out of love with each other, so after graduation we moved in together and have been living very discreetly as a monogamous couple ever since. I’m not writing to you to pas
Are Twins Kinda Gay?
The Dead Ringers series helpfully clarifies that the cultural panic over twinhood is not fundamentally about queerness. Given the gayness throughout the present, though—one Mantle twin will fuck anyone in sight; the other is trying to get pregnant with her girlfriend; Rachel Weisz is present—the point can be easy to miss. A girl I went on a dine with this spring told me that she could not receive past the first couple of episodes because the show felt pathologizing to her.
“That scene where she’s crawling over the counters stuffing food in her face and looks completely insane?” she said. “I’m so over it. I want to spot queer people just looking normal.”
I reported this to my neighbor when we settled down to watch Episode 4. They agreed that Elliot Mantle did not come across as normal in that scene—or in any scene, for that matter—but they resisted my date’s take.
“Something is organism pathologized here,” they remarked. “But it’s not queerness.”
True enough. While the catalyst for Elliot’s and Beverly’s final meltdown is Beverly’s budding gay relationship, the gayness is incidental. The root cause of the drama is that Elliot and Beverly, a nonromantic adu