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Grindr is an app men can put on their phones to find other men to have sex with. But it automates the work that once made a subversive and politically potent world.

by Max Fox

Last Thanksgiving, more men logged on to Grindr, the largest “all-male, location-based social network in the world,” than any other day of the year. Somehow, Grindr managed to tout this fact without mentioning stuffing. On its official blog, the makers of the app suggested a few possible holiday uses for Grindr: You could “find out where your crew is and dance off that gravy,” or, more strangely, you could “ask your neighbors on Grindr” to pick up a forgotten ingredient from the grocery store. No reminders were given to use protection, nor was there even an acknowledgement that Grindr is overwhelmingly used for hooking up for sex.

Grindr is an app you can put on your smartphone to find guys to fuck. It uses GPS-enabled smartphones to triangulate a potential mate’s location in real time, without requiring any eye contact. Since launching in 2009, it has claimed the title of largest gay social network from other contenders, mostly thanks to word of mouth, though it has enjoyed more than a few breathless trend articles. Joel Simkhai, Grindr’s youthfully handsome CEO, is as virginal as his company’s PR. In interviews, he demurs when pressed and insists that all his app wants is to help men find out who nearby is gay. This self-neutering is partly explained by Grindr’s need to conform to the decency guidelines of Apple’s walled garden. The user agreement for Grindr stipulates that no “offensive or pornographic” materials be included in a profile; violation leads to profiles being disabled.

But Grindr’s media celibacy, however, doesn’t stop the app from publicly identifying as a gay concern or from participating in gay politics as popularly understood. In a move that must have caught Chris Hughes’s eye, New York users were greeted with the telephone number of the state legislator for their GPS coordinates when they logged on early last June and were urged to place calls in support of marriage equality. (Other platforms for user-generated content, such as Tumblr, have made similar efforts to push political action, encouraging the idea that brand identification can also be a sort of de facto political subjectivity.) After a few decades of gay politics’ rightward-glancing sanitization — from closing the bathhouses to the current focus on children’s bullying — this development should not surprise anyone. With Grindr we see the conjunction of a gay political identity with a discursive rejection of the very aspect of gayness that is both most definitive and which the app mobilizes for profit: sex.

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