The platform is regularly criticised as a source of racism, fatphobia, depression and disordered eating. As it celebrates its 15th anniversary, we look at how it has changed gay culture, for better and for worse
Everyone hates Grindr. Arguably, this is especially true for those who use it the most. The hook-up app – which celebrates its 15th anniversary today – has become a symbol for everything that’s wrong with contemporary gay life. A constantly whirring machine that generates everything from sexual racism and hierarchies of status to depression and disordered eating. Responsible for the rise of “hook-up culture” (until Grindr came along, gay men were famed for their chaste lifestyles and sexual restraint), it’s the reason why it’s so hard to find a boyfriend. It’s a coping mechanism, too – the expression of a community-wide childhood trauma, which has forced us into a never-ending hunt for validation through fleeting and meaningless sexual encounters.
Even those who retain faith in the life-enhancing pleasure of anonymous sex are inclined to harbour a grudge against Grindr, blaming the app for the death of physical spaces, and for making the process of getting laid so atomised, so alienating – so damn neoliberal! The Grindr luddites – myself included – like to believe that burning down its servers would lead to a gay renaissance, forcing us back to the bars and the bathhouses, where the experience of finding someone to sleep with would feel less like work and more like fun. For people my own age and younger, the pre-Grindr world is particularly alluring because we never experienced it – it’s easy to imagine that the app’s real-world predecessors were more exciting, spontaneous or authentic. But the reality is more complicated: you don’t have to act as a cheerleader for the Grindr corporation to acknowledge that the problems we associate with the app predate its existence by many decades, and that its effect on gay culture has not been entirely negative.
Despite the efforts of the company behind it to promote a more inclusive sexual culture, Grindr remains a site of hierarchies and prejudice. Joel Simkhai – the man who invented the app before selling in 2018 – seems to have become afflicted by Oppenheimer-like remorse at the force he unleashed on the world: in 2022, he launched a rival app – Motto – which carries the tagline “no more headless torsos” and aims to offer its users a less addictive, toxic and discriminatory experience (it doesn’t appear to have caught on). In fairness to its critics, there is good reason to believe that Grindr is often a toxic space. A 2019 research paper by academic Audrey TA Maslen found that – alongside obvious factors like whiteness, age and body shape – people’s erotic capital on Grindr increased if they appeared bored, disinterested or unapproachable in their profile pictures. These qualities, all of which are coded as masculine, are hardly conducive to a feel-good atmosphere.
The same study also found that looking visibly queer or “alternative” (in terms of dress sense, tattoos and piercings) corresponded with a loss of sexual capital, which shows the platform’s homogenising effect: as well as being young, white and gym-fit, it pays to be normal. It might be rarer these days to see someone include the phrase “no fats, no fems, no Asians” in their profile, but this doesn’t necessarily signal a change in preferences. “It doesn’t mean that those attitudes have disappeared, it just means that sometimes they’re written in different ways,” Dr Carl Bonner-Thompson, a queer geographer at Utrecht University, tells Dazed. “One thing I’ve noticed, anecdotally, is people will write that they have a preference for slim, toned or muscular, so they’re not outright saying ‘no fat’ but they are effectively saying, ‘I’m only going to have sex with you if you’ve got a six-pack.’”
It may well be the case that Grindr has intensified these sexual hierarchies, but it did not invent the system of value whereby white, muscular, cisgender and masculine men are deemed more desirable than others. In his 1987 essay Is the Rectum a Grave?, queer theorist Leo Bersani wrote, “Anyone who has ever spent one night in a gay bathhouse knows that it is (or was) one of the most ruthlessly ranked, hierarchised, and competitive environments imaginable. Your looks, muscles, hair distribution, size of cock, and shape of ass determined exactly how happy you were going to be during those few hours.” Grindr – with all its racism, ageism and transphobia – is merely a continuation of the same set of values, although we can at least say that it hasn’t succeeded in dismantling them – the company’s ‘What the Flip?’ campaign, in which users of different ages, races and body sizes swapped profiles for the day, having failed to usher in a sexual utopia.
“It’s all about the one picture, and if that doesn’t pass muster, then you’re just one of the grid” – Dr Tom Roach
But Grindr has, in some ways, changed gay sexual culture for the better. For one thing, it has been a valuable tool for education around public health. According to Benjamin Weil, Head of Research at the non-profit The Love Tank, the app has made it much easier for people to communicate with one another about sexual health. “For a while now it has had inbuilt mechanisms for people to share things like their HIV status, whether or not they’re using PrEP, their recent test results and their preferences in terms of safer sex,” they say. “If someone shares their HIV status, they might still encounter stigma and ignorance, but Grindr allows them a range of options for how they might present that information and to initiate these conversations in a safe manner.”
At a time when sexual health education in schools is often dismal – particularly for queer people – logging onto Grindr can be the first time that young people encounter terms like ‘PrEP’ (a medication which is highly affected at preventing people from acquiring HIV) or the idea of regular testing. By partnering with Grindr, The Love Tank has been able to promote targeted interventions to the people who need them most, including information about monkeypox vaccinations, harm reduction advice about steroid use and chemsex, and at-home testing kits – the latter being an especially important tool, which, as Ben says, “tends to provide access to testing to people who would otherwise be anxious or avoidant about attending a clinic”.
These demographics include queer migrants, people from lower-income backgrounds, and people who don’t speak English as a first language, who face additional barriers to engaging with the NHS (which, thanks to the government’s ‘hostile environment’ policy, is a fraught experience for migrants). Many of the people accessing at-home kits through Grindr are testing for the first time, and it is precisely the discreet, anonymous nature of the platform which makes this possible.
One common critique of Grindr is that it represents the atomisation of gay sexual culture: as the public sphere is diminished, people are forced to retreat into the privacy of the home, marketing themselves like commodities and pursuing sexual encounters which feel as convenient and empty as ordering from Deliveroo. But Grindr did not invent neoliberalism. For many people, it is a means – however imperfect – of navigating the loneliness of modern life, rather than the source of that loneliness.
According to Dr Tom Roach, author of Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era, one of the defining features of the Grindr experience is a feeling of “fungibility”: in other words, you are replaceable, substitutable and reduced to a small square; your personality, your life story and your inner feelings are rendered irrelevant: “It’s all about the one picture, and if that doesn’t pass muster, then you’re just one of the grid again,” he tells Dazed. While it can be depressing to think of yourself as interchangeable, Dr Roach argues there may be a subversive potential in embracing it. Why do we invest so much in our sexual identity anyway?
Dr Roach’s writing on Grindr was informed by studying the history of sexuality and, in particular, the work of the French theorist Michel Foucault. “Sexuality became a hugely important part of personhood in the 19th and 20th centuries, and that’s still how we understand ourselves today,” he says. “Foucault wasn’t happy about this turn of events because he thought that we were, in some ways, imprisoned into an identity, which limits our experiences, our behaviours, and what we might be.”
Much like older forms of gay cruising, the anonymity of Grindr can provide an escape from the demands of identity. While the platform is based around an ethos of constant self-promotion, much like the modern economy at large, this aspect can be subverted – Dr Roach argues – by embracing the sense of replaceability which can feel so uncomfortable. “However depersonalising the experience of using Grindr may be, I’m arguing that you can still be you – you just don’t have to reveal everything about yourself just to get laid or to connect with someone,” he says. “I’m arguing for a kind of disengagement: we empty ourselves to go on Grindr anyway, so why are we investing so much of ourselves back in it?”
“We know that for an individual who’s arriving into a city for the first time, whether as a tourist or a long-term migrant, Grindr and other sex apps are often the first port of call as a way of connecting with a community” – Benjamin Weil
In a more straightforward sense, Grindr can be a way to meet people (even platonic friends, if you can believe!) and find your way into a community, which is especially valuable if you are – for whatever reason – socially isolated. While the platform is rightly critiqued as a source of racism, it is often queer migrants who rely on it the most. “We know that for an individual who’s arriving into a city for the first time, whether as a tourist or a long-term migrant, Grindr and other sex apps are often the first port of call as a way of connecting with a community,” says Ben. While the app is a good way of meeting people if you’re lonely and adrift in a new place, this can be a double-edged sword. Queer migrants are disproportionately likely to engage in chemsex – not for any kind of pathologising reason, Ben emphasises, but simply because they are more likely to use Grindr as a way of socialising.
“Queer migrants are also much more likely to be susceptible to the risks and harms associated with chemsex, because they often lack the support systems which people who are already embedded in a community have,” says Ben. But where Grindr is part of the problem, it must also be part of the solution. “If we know that queer migrants are more likely to engage in chemsex when moved to London, then Grindr needs to be the same route for these people to encounter harm reduction advice. Rather than being pessimistic or defeatist, we should be seeking solutions which help people and meet them where they are right now.” Grindr is neither entirely good nor entirely bad, then, but an undeniable facet of gay life which can be instrumentalised for useful ends.
My own feelings on Grindr are still, on the whole, negative: I can’t help but feel that gay life would be more fun without it. But we can’t turn back the clock. The app – and technologies like it – aren’t going anywhere, and if we want to build a more egalitarian sexual culture, we have to work with what we have. We might never arrive at a gay utopia, but the one place we’re guaranteed not to find it in the past.