Dashiell Hammett, who basically invented the noir genre (think: The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man) hung out enough in the queer scene in San Francisco in the 20s-30s that he picked up some contemporary queer lingo that he folded into his stories. In The Maltese Falcon, there’s a scene where the wildly gay-coded villain shows up at a meeting with a skinny little blonde with a bad attitude and a gun in tow, and detective Sam Spade tells him to “leave the gunsel outside” — gunsel being contemporary gay slang for a young, effeminate man who probably bottoms (from the Yiddish gansl, meaning gosling). Basically, he’s saying “I’m here to talk to you, not your twink.”
However, a lot of writers mimicking Hammett did not know gay lingo or Yiddish, saw the word “gun,” and assumed “gunsel” meant “scary bodyguard with a gun.” They took off with a word they didn’t understand and spread it so fast that it’s now basically impossible to read a noir story written between 1930-1960 without someone accidentally being called a twink at least once. Look out for it next time you’re reading Raymond Chandler or his ilk, I guarantee you’ll find it.
