You’ve heard of ‘gaydar’, right? It’s the sixth sense gay men supposedly use to detect other men’s sexual orientation. I’m dubious whether it’s real, but then again I thought the tastefully-nude Lady Gaga posters in my teenage bedroom would be enough to convince my parents I liked girls (it didn’t), so my gay senses have always been way off. Even if gaydar is real, I think it’s dying out. The rise of gay hook-up apps like Grindr have made us gays lazy. Unlike the preceding generation, we don’t have to look for subtle clues in another man’s posture or voice to pick out fellow homosexuals, no. We just have to open an app and are presented with dozens of like-minded men.
I have friends who’ve each slept with hundreds of men all thanks to the little orange button on their touchscreen. Why exactly is it that, in some pockets of the gay world, having a triple-digit amount of sexual partners has become the norm?
There are quite a few queer characters in today’s movies and TV shows. Sam Smith, droning on about how some man gone done him wrong, gets played every fifteen minutes on Classic Hits. Non-straight people are represented in nearly facet of public life. Normalisation is a good thing. Queer people will be treated better if there are more queer stories circulating in the common discourse. It’s common sense.
I’ve noticed, however, that this otherwise positive trend has come at an unexpected cost. The true reality of many gay lives, and in particular gay relationships, has been ‘straight-washed’ out. Gay storylines, especially those where the target audience is really broad, basically mirror straight storylines. The gender of their love interests is the only difference. Gay characters seem to predominantly engage in in traditional dating and be monogamous and I don’t believe this reflects reality. It almost seems like the ‘normality’ of gay characters has to doubly reinforced; to make their inclusion acceptable to a mainstream audience their love lives need to be really straight-edge, or not even mentioned, to compensate for their liking the same gender. Think Neil Patrick Harris; everybody gushes about how “adorably normal” his husband and kids are. His family’s popularity rests on how ‘conventional’ they are despite the parents being two men.
I can’t get too upset this watering-down. During an ‘adjustment period’ the media will inevitably do this. They’re out to make money after all. I do think it’s a shame, however, because the gay relationships I’ve seen tend to follow a wildly different and fascinating narrative. My beliefs stem from my particular experiences. I’m gay, 22, and white, and if any of those things were different maybe I’d think different, but navigating the world of gay dating has always been very different to what I’ve seen on TV.
If, God forbid, I woke up straight tomorrow, I would have no clue what to do. I mean intercourse would obviously be a train-wreck (very recently I saw a lady-stripper for the first time and was shocked to discover the vagina is not on the front), but how would I even reach that access point? I feel like straight-person options to kick off these proceedings involve either being drunk together in a small, sweaty place, or waiting around impatiently for three months until one of you ‘accidentally’ grazes the other’s arm. I could be wrong though?
The reason for my confusion is simple. Arranging a sexual encounter if you’re a gay man can be very straightforward. You know how every few months the New Zealand Herald publishes a ‘thinkpiece’ with a grammatically dubious title like “Parents shocked! Teens ‘hooking up’ using app Tinder, as easy as ordering a Pizza!” and how untrue those headlines are? Literally 95 percent of Tinder use is for self-esteem boosting purposes and that’s a stone-cold fact. However, if these headlines were talking about Grindr, then yeah, that is actually what it’s like. In fact it’d make a great slogan; “try arranging a sexual encounter with another man TODAY! As easy as ordering a pizza!”
Most people know Grindr as the “gay Tinder”. This is misleading for a few reasons. Firstly, to send or receive a message, you don’t have to ‘match’ that person; they just need to be geographically close to you. Secondly, your profile is not connected to Facebook, which means you can be completely anonymous, and lastly, you can send and receive pictures. This mostly means pictures of dicks, but if you’re interested in a guy but not ready for the world to know, this feature means you can send them, and only them, a picture of your face. Basically, if you want to low-key meet up with strangers off the Internet and have sex with them, then Grindr is the perfect little electronic wingman.
With this in mind, it’s understandable that there’s a weird kind of contrast between the difficulty with figuring out you’re not straight, on one hand, and the ease with which you can then have a non-straight sexual experience, on the other. I had a liberal upbringing and accepting family, and despite this acceptance my gayness finally came after years of denial, confusion, self-hatred and blind terror, so you can imagine the difficulties faced by kids who aren’t so lucky. However, once you do concede that there are question marks hovering around your orientation, it’s actually really easy to test those waters. Make a profile with a tagline like “18 y/o looking for an older man 2 show me the ropes” and a porn-starry name like Dustin or Duke, and within hours you’ll have dozens of thirsty men messaging you, and you can do with that attention whatever you please.
Why is it so easy? My theory is that gay men tend to be much more promiscuous than any other demographic thanks to the lingering legacy of old-school gender roles. Today’s active gays, myself included, were kids at a time where, more strongly than today, it was reinforced through TV shows and movies that despite the sexual-revolution being forty years ago, guilt-free sex was still the dominion of the man. Before I had any idea I was gay, I’d been exposed again and again to the idea that a man having lots of sex was cool and normal, but a women having lots of sex was shameful and abnormal.
By the first time I was at Farmers with mum and, for some reason, I couldn’t pull my eyes away from men’s bulges on underwear packets (ask any gay man, this will have been their first inkling). Thanks to my being raised in profoundly sexist world, my brain has been wired to have a more sexually-liberated future in a way my female friends weren’t. This mind-set means that men, in general, are going to have a lot less problems with no-strings-attached sex, and so it is logical to see how the sexual politics of same-sex relationships have evolved out of this to be very different from the sexual-politics of heterosexual relationships. This, combined with the fact apps like Grindr make it stupidly easy to arrange a hook-up, means that alarming amounts of gay sex is probably happening all around you, all the time. Great stuff!
Grindr could be perfect, but just like communism or free-refills at Burger King, it doesn’t always work out so wonderfully because a few people ruin it for everyone else. Every online dating profile contains one or two little fibs; listing your annual salary as two hundred thousand a year isn’t convincing when I can see from your third picture you drive a 1996 Corolla. It’s cool though, because I’ve lied on my profile too (I’ve written that I’m “outdoorsy” and “active” more than once) so it works out to be an even playing field. Grindr takes it to a whole new level though; from little embellishments to straight-up lies. If there is a reason for a dude to lie about their age, job, their bloody favourite colour if it serves the purpose of getting you to come over and sleep with them, then they probably will. The hope is that once you make the effort to travel there and then find out they’re much closer to pension-eligibility than they let on, it’ll be too awkward for you to back out now. You tell yourself it could be worse and you have sex with them anyway, breathing a heavy sigh of relief when their “monster cock” turns out to have misplaced three of its promised inches over the duration of your Uber ride there.
As well as being great for seeking out no-strings-attached ‘fun’, Grindr is also heavily used to meet new people and make friends, arrange nice, normal dates, or just to gauge a sense of what the gay community is like. Understandably, for someone after more than just sex, opening the app and being immediately presented with the third picture of a spread asshole from funtimesindunedin56 this week can get annoying. The brilliance of not having to match somebody to initiate a conversation is that it opens you up to connecting with people you wouldn’t otherwise think you’re attracted to. Inevitably, however, it also means you people can, and will, send you insane messages.
Here’s some screenshots from my inbox:
Believe it or not, none of these message are particularly crazy and uncommon; it’s just that the crudeness-levels on Grindr are constantly dialled all the way up to eleven. Imagine some highschooler coming to terms with their sexuality and tentatively downloading Grindr, only to immediately be confronted with overwhelming evidence that yes, just like their drunk great-aunt loudly proclaimed at Christmas dinner, the gays are indeed a group of filthy, disturbed perverts. Actually, everybody is a pervert and the Internet just lets us be perverts more easily, but that’s beside the point. That poor kid would go scrambling back into the closet faster than you can say “Britney Spears is the greatest entertainer of the last 50 years”.
For some reason heaps of gays I’ve met think it’s impossible for them to be a bigot. Since they’re part of one marginalised group (and, let’s be real, it’s not that hard being a wealthy, white, reasonable attractive gay man), they feel like it gives them a free pass to be nasty people, quite often under the auspices of being ‘sassy’ or ‘real’. Racism, misogyny and yes, homophobia, are plagues on the gay community, and in no place is this more visible than on Grindr.
This is bullshit on so many levels. These dudes would defend themselves on the basis of “it’s not racist/close-minded, it’s just a preference”. Everyone has preferences, yes, but if you’re not into someone just don’t reply! I don’t even need to explain why putting “not into xyz” on your profile, a place where ‘xyz’ guys will definitely see it, is incredibly shitty. Your momentary inconvenience at having to look at a non-white guy’s profile, for example, is not something worth ruining another guy’s day over.
The whole “I’m straight-acting, not interested in fems” thing is especially saddening to me, and not just because it’s the only kind of discrimination that kind of affects me. The people who kick-started the gay rights movement were drag queens, camp, overtly queer people from all sorts of backgrounds. It seems like today’s gays, armed with apps like Grindr, have repaid those people’s sacrifices by pushing their kind to the fringes of the supposedly inclusive community they created. According to Grindr, it’s super hot to be as “straight acting”, as not-gay-seeming, as possible. Dudes like this will make a big deal about how they have straight-male friends, and like sports and cars and “aren’t like most gay guys”. It’s fine to put on your Grindr profile that you’re more masculine, sure, but it’s nothing but internalised homophobia to name certain “straight” qualities as desirable, to the exclusion of anything else. The only silver lining about these dude’s profiles is that they’re an instant asshole-identifier. You know not to reply when they message you “hey bro”.
Being a participant in the “gay lifestyle” has always been a wild and entertaining, if not always blissful ride, and as I’ve said, it’s kind of sad to see these crazy stories watered-down in mainstream representations. Of course it is only my (very wise and sage) opinions that have informed this piece. However, I like to think, as bad as Grindr can sometimes be, it has brought people together under the united front of collective having the same weird experiences. I mean, thanks to Grindr, any gay dude can have a smartphone full screenshots of weird conversations and un-asked for dick pics ripe for laughing about with your friends and family (possibly not the latter), and if that can’t bring us all together, I don’t know what can.