One of pop culture’s early but most seminal depictions of gay online dating comes from a 1999 episode of Sex and the City. Stanford Blatch, Carrie Bradshaw’s gay friend, played by the late Willie Garson, is seeking advice. He’s been chatting to another man on an online chatroom – the height of technology at the time – and wonders whether they should meet up.
“What do you know about him?” asks Bradshaw. “Well, his name is bigtool4u” answers Blatch – cue hysterics from Bradshaw. Fast forward 25 years and although the tools are different, the activity is, arguably, much the same. Instead of online chatrooms, one of the most popular means of gay and bisexual men around the world connecting with each other is Grindr, which has 13 million monthly active users worldwide.
“We [gay men] kind of created the concept of online dating,” claims Grindr’s CEO, George Arison. Prior to Grindr, gay men had found connection through a variety of means, including classified ads, phone chat lines and, during the late 1990s and 2000s, dating websites such as Gaydar and Manhunt, with the former having 5 million subscribers in 2009.
While Match.com was launched in 1995, before Gaydar and Manhunt, Arison claims many straight people were still “weirded out” by the concept of online dating at that time.
Then, in 2009, along came Grindr. Founded and launched by Joel Simkhai just nine months after Apple added GPS functionality to the iPhone, it was one of, if not the first popular location-based dating apps in the world, a full three years before Tinder was launched. Fifteen years on, its core functionality remains largely unchanged. It allows users to chat with other gay and bisexual men in their immediate area (with location details down to the number of feet away another user is) and arrange to meet up – often for sex.
“It was revolutionary,” says Alex Morley, a 36-year-old gay man from London. “You really have to search out community as a queer person and Grindr was a turning point in bringing that together.”
‘Grindr killed the gay bar’
As Grindr took off in the mid-2010s, gay bars in many cities around the world were closing at rapid rates. Gay bars had for decades been the predominant way gay and bisexual men could meet potential partners, but now an app offered millions the ability to contact other gay men quickly and easily. The idea that “Grindr killed the gay bar” soon began to gain popularity.
Research by Dr Ben Campkin and Laura Marshall at University College London found that between 2006 and 2017 there was a net loss of 58% of LGBTQ+ venues in London. Similar research in the US echoed this trend.
It is true that Grindr has changed the way that people use gay bars, Campkin says, but the argument that it is responsible for gay spaces closing is overplayed. “It detracts from the actual reasons why venues might be struggling to stay open,” he says. “Those are more to do with longer term urban planning, urban redevelopment or macro-economic cycles.”
Dr Jamie Hakim, a lecturer at King’s College London whose research focuses on digital intimacy, says that the initial reaction from many people was “There’s a gay bar in my pocket!” so the temptation to see it as a replacement rather than an addition to physical spaces is obvious, but that belies the complexities of how people use it.
Hakim says criticism of Grindr’s impact on gay bars ignores the fact that even before it was available not all gay people frequented bars. “People didn’t always want to have to go to a bar to hook up, now it’s easier … I’ve spoken to people on Grindr I would have never had the confidence to speak to in real life,” he says.
For some, Grindr is an additional layer to the physical space, allowing them to augment their in-person experience. “These days if I’m in a bar and see someone I like, my first reaction is to check whether they are on Grindr rather than go and speak to them,” says Mike*, 29, from London.
A ‘crash course’ in objectification
For many younger users, Grindr now acts as the first glimpse into the “gay world” before they are able to visit a gay bar or make gay friends, especially when they live in areas without a large gay community. George Lucas, 22, who grew up in a small town in northern England, first went on the app at 16, but had a blank profile with no photos.
“I remember it feeling really risky,” he says. “I would go on it just to see who else was brave enough to be on it in my area, because being outwardly gay wasn’t a desirable trait where I lived.” With little to no sex education that focused on gay relationships at school, much of his initial understanding was picked up through the app.
“I didn’t have a high school romance like other people, so Grindr sort of helped me understand my type and my attractiveness to other men … it made me feel less alone.”
This wasn’t always positive though, and Lucas says that Grindr’s focus on sharing (often sexual) photos was a “crash course” in objectification – and feelings that one’s worth is tied to their attractiveness.
In the early days of Grindr, it was common to see “no fats, no fems, no Asians” on Grindr profiles, says Dr Gene Lim, an Asian man living in Melbourne. “People can be really racist.”
Motivated by his experiences of racism on Grindr, Lim is now a research officer at La Trobe University focusing on LGBTQ+ public health and sexual racism.
For over a decade, Grindr offered a paid-for feature that allowed users to filter by ethnicity, but this was removed in 2020 after criticism that people were using it to “filter out” certain ethnic groups. It now also bans people from specifying ethnic preferences in their bios. Although he supports these changes, Lim claims that Grindr’s approach to racism has been “laissez-faire at best”.
The glorification of hyper-masculine bodies at the expense of more feminine figures within the gay community is a well-worn area of academic study. But Lim says that Grindr, and apps that followed such as Scruff, have potentially made discrimination more common because in-app comments have fewer consequences than a derogatory remark made face-to-face. “You’re commoditised in these spaces. You’re literally a square and a few lines of text amongst a sea of others … that doesn’t activate the empathy centres in some people.”
Intimate pictures are a “currency” on apps like Grindr, says Hakim, and impact on users’ chances of hooking up with others. “It would seem silly to think that this doesn’t have some sort of effect on the way we see ourselves and our relationships to our bodies.”
A lifeline for many
Grindr operates in 190 countries worldwide, almost everywhere it can, although some nations such as Turkey and Indonesia restrict access completely. Being openly gay can still be dangerous: in 63 countries homosexual activity is criminalised, with numerous applying the death penalty.
In these countries, when physical spaces to meet up are not available, the ability to communicate with others in their community online takes on new importance.
Cafecha*, 27, was living in his native Afghanistan when the Taliban retook power in 2020. Before the fall of the government he had used Grindr to chat to other gay men, make friends and meet visitors from outside the country. It was dangerous, he says, given that homosexuality was illegal, but the ability to connect with others outweighed the risk.
When the Taliban took power, things changed drastically. “People stopped using it and we heard of people being attacked and vanishing … people got really afraid,” he recalls.
With the help of an NGO, Cafecha was evacuated to the UK in 2021, where he now lives happily. He initially used Grindr to make new friends, but also for more practical uses too. “When we arrived we were quarantined in a hotel for a month because of Covid. It was so boring, so we managed to convince someone on Grindr to bring us beer to our rooms.”
There are frequent stories about police in countries where homosexuality is illegal using fake Grindr profiles to trick users into arrest. Grindr says it monitors the political situation in countries where it operates and works closely with rights organisations on the ground to warn users of potential dangers.
“We’ll do whatever we can, but obviously there’s a limit” says Arison. Short of shutting down service in a country completely, which he says NGOs ask them not to do, Grindr has in the past restricted new users from joining the app in certain places.
Grindr shares health and safety information with gay communities in western countries too. During the outbreak of mpox in 2022 many health services, including in the UK and US, distributed information on vaccination availability through the app.
Beyond hook ups?
The future of online dating is uncertain and it seems like every day a new thought-piece decries the futile use of apps for finding love. Depending on which week you look, statistics purport to show that Gen Z are turning their back on them, or looking for more fluid forms of relationships.
Grindr CEO Arison is keen to point out that although it has a reputation primarily as a hook up app, its own internal surveys of users suggest that 43% are on the app looking for relationships and 61% use it for making friends.
Yet, unlike many other apps that it competes with, Grindr is notable in that it doesn’t market itself on finding love.
With societal conceptions of finding “the one” and “happily ever after” being questioned, could a different approach be the secret to continued success? Often people are seeking different things at different times, and that isn’t always a long-term partner.
Erin Shoji, a vice president at Feeld who previously worked at Grindr, says both apps give users a sense of community, “which is one of the top things we crave as humans”.
Feeld describes itself as an app “for everyone, no matter their relationship status” and is geared towards non-monogamous and casual relationships. For Shoji, this upfront approach, which gives users a large array of ways to define their gender and sexual preferences and encourages them to be open with kinks, is the reason she says it has gained market share from other apps.
Arison, meanwhile, says that Grindr is evolving. Alongside adding a separate, dating-specific feature within the app, it is looking at how AI could aid matching users up with each other. “Intimacy is a key part of gay culture and we get that.”
And if Grindr was a pioneer of our current app-first hook up culture, industry eyes may be looking to it to predict what the next 15 years holds for online dating.
*Some case study names have been changed
