Older queer people have cautioned that the culture has ever been thus, from anonymous cruising in parks to the piers, bathhouses, phone lines, and AOL chat rooms that transmuted yet again once smartphones came along. Casual sex is a fact of life for single people in the city, a place crowded with young, horny men reluctant to settle down - and all the more so when presented with this digital watering hole of sexual conquests. Grindr, though anonymous and astonishingly efficient, has presented us with something of a social and romantic quandary. Instead of dating, we Grindr’d, attracted to the frictionless nature of the app, soaking up the attention and the possibilities of businesslike coitus. The reality, though, as reality tends to be, is something far more subdued, and it often feels far more sinister: We went to gay bars every so often as 18-year-old freshman, enamored with the garish pop music and drag queens, but eventually settled in and began to get our entertainment not from Cher sing-offs at Pieces but by inaudibly cruising through Grindr’s stock list of men, sometimes meeting up with someone, other times falling asleep phone in hand. In moving to New York City from a suburb of Baltimore, where the prospects for sexual activity for a gay teen are dire, I imagined I was migrating to a place where queer folk commingled in gay bars, a place where the telegenic gay romances we were trained to pursue - Glee’s Kurt and Blaine, specifically - took place in real life, for everyday bow-tie-wearing urbanites.
I downloaded the app a few weeks into my freshman year in New York City, and it became - as it has for many gay millennial men - my first introduction to sex, a digitized bathhouse.īut it’s certainly a far cry from what I was expecting. It’s a bit like Seamless - rendering a hookup, or, if you’re looking for them, drugs, as readily available as a carton of General Tso’s and as stringently transactional, too. In places like New York City, sex, or the prospect of it, is laughably easy to procure thanks to Grindr, which launched in 2009, when my friends and I were closeted 14-year-olds, going to high school in provincial suburban towns, watching our straight classmates dip their toes into the world of promiscuity as we hunkered down and studied, sexless. We pass around a joint, conversing every few minutes about a message we’ve received (“this guy’s hot” “come look at this fairy” “this fucking asshole just stopped responding”), either from a handsome prospect who lives a few floors down or the silver fox who’s 836 feet away, but the night ends as it started, with four single, fledgling gay millennials, supine and slightly stoned. Having come of age in a swipe-right-or-swipe-left culture in which a willing-and-able hookup seems like it’s always just steps away (if your location services are turned on) - maybe as close as the dorm room a few floors down, or the co-op across the street, or in line for Quiznos in the dining hall - my generation, the smartphone cognoscenti, has this technology down to a T. My three friends, whom I’ll call Hunter, Louis, and Stephen, are sprawled out on my unmade twin XL bed, each of us on our iPhones, silently scrolling through Grindr and assessing the abs and buttocks of Union Square’s proximal gay men. An RA stalks the hallway amid the fragrant aroma of weed, and a half-bottle of Two Buck Chuck rests on the wooden dresser. It is a typical Tuesday night on the ninth floor of an NYU dorm.