How Grindr Changed the Face of Gay Dating Culture and Social Venues

One of the early but most influential depictions of gay online dating in Oxygen pop culture comes from a 1999 episode of Sex and the City. The late Willie Garson, who played Kellie Bradshaw's gay friend Stanford Blatch, is looking for advice. He's been chatting with another person in an online chat room (highly developed technology at the time) and wonders if they should meet up.

"What do you know about him?" Bradshaw asks. "Well, his name is bigtool4u", Blatch replies - which hints at Bradshaw's hysteria. Fast forward 25 years, and despite the difference in tools, the activities can be said to be more or less the same. One of the most popular ways for gay and bisexual men to connect around the world that isn't an online chat room is Grindr, which boasts 13 million monthly active users worldwide.

"We [gay men] created the concept of online dating," claims George Arison, CEO of Grindr. Before Grindr, gay men connected in a variety of ways, including classified ads, telephone chat lines, and dating websites from the late 1990s and 2000s, such as Gaydar and Manhunt, which in 2009 had 5 million subscribers.

When Match.com was launched in 1995, before Gaydar and Manhunt, Arison claimed that many heterosexuals at the time were still "weirded out" by the concept of online dating.

Then, in 2009, Grindr appeared. Created and launched by Joel Simkhai just nine months after Apple added GPS to the iPhone, it was one of, if not the world's first popular location-based dating apps, a full three years after Tinder 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 (location details are accurate to the number of feet from another user) and arrange to meet up - usually for sex.

"It's revolutionary," says Alex Morley, a 36-year-old gay man from London. "As a cool kid, you really have to look for community, and Grindr was a turning point in bringing those communities together."

With the rise of Grindr in the mid-2010s, gay bars in many cities around the world are rapidly closing. For decades, gay bars had been the primary way for gay and bisexual men to meet potential partners, but now an app provided millions of people with the ability to quickly and easily connect with other gay men. The idea that "Grindr killed the gay bar" quickly became popular.

A study by Dr. Ben Campkin and Laura Marshall of University College London found a net loss of 58% in London LGBTQ+ venues between 2006 and 2017. Similar studies in the U.S. have echoed this trend.

Kampkin says Grindr did change the way people use gay bars, but the notion that it's to blame for the closure of gay venues is a bit of an overstatement. "It detracts from the actual reasons why venues may have trouble staying open," he said. "These have more to do with long-term urban planning, urban renewal or macroeconomic cycles."

Dr. Jamie Hakim, a lecturer at King's College London whose research focuses on digital intimacy, says that many people's first reaction is "I have a gay bar in my pocket!" So the temptation to see it as a replacement rather than a supplement to physical space is obvious, but this masks the complexity of how people use it.

Hakim says criticism of Grindr's impact on gay bars ignores the fact that even before it launched, not all gay people frequented bars. "People don't always want to go to bars to date, and now it's easier ...... I've talked to people on Grindr that I would never have the confidence to talk to in real life," he said.

For some, Grindr is an additional layer to physical space, enabling them to enhance their experience in person. "Nowadays, if I see someone I like in a bar, my first reaction is to check if they're on Grindr, not to talk to them," says Mike*, 29, from London.

For many young users, Grindr is now the place where they first learn about the "gay world" before they are able to visit a gay bar or make gay friends, especially if they live in an area without a large gay community. George Lucas, 22, who grew up in a small town in the north of England, first used the app when he was 16, but his profile was blank and he had no photo.

"I remember feeling really dangerous," he says. "I'm going to keep going just to see who else is brave enough to get involved in my area, because outward homosexuality is not a desirable trait where I live." There is little to no sex education on gay relationships in schools, and much of his initial understanding was gained through the app.

"I didn't have a high school relationship like other people did, so Grindr has helped me in a way to understand my type and my attraction to other men ...... It's made me feel less alone."

But it's not always positive, Lucas says, adding that Grindr's focus on sharing (often pornographic) photos is a "crash course" in objectification-the feeling that a person's worth is tied to their attractiveness.

Dr. Gene Lim, an Asian man living in Melbourne, said that in the early days of Grindr, it was common to see "no fat, no women, no Asians" on Grindr profiles. "People could be really racist."

Inspired by his experience of racism on Grindr, Lim is now a researcher at La Trobe University, focusing on LGBTQ+ public health and sexual racism.

For more than a decade, Grindr offered a paid feature that allowed users to filter by race, but it was removed in 2020 after criticism that people were using it to "filter" certain racial groups. People are also now prohibited from specifying racial preferences in their resumes. While Lim supports these changes, he claims that Grindr's attitude towards racism is "laissez-faire at best".

The glorification of hypermasculine bodies at the expense of more feminine images in the gay community is a well-worn area of academic research. But Lim says that apps like Grindr and its successor, Scruff, may make discrimination more common, as in-app comments have fewer consequences than face-to-face derogatory remarks. "You're already commodified in these spaces. You're really just a square and a few lines of text in a sea of other people ...... That doesn't activate empathy in some people."

Hakim says intimate photos are a form of "currency" on apps like Grindr that affects users' chances of interacting with others. "It seems silly to think that it doesn't somehow affect the way we see ourselves and the way we relate to our bodies."

Grindr operates in 190 countries/regions around the world, covering almost every country/region it can, although some countries such as Turkey and Indonesia restrict access altogether. Being openly gay can still be dangerous: homosexual activity is criminalized in 63 countries, many of which impose the death penalty.

In these countries/regions, the ability to communicate with others in the community online becomes even more important when there is no physical space to meet in person.

When the Taliban return to power in 2020, 27-year-old Cafecha* will be living in his native Afghanistan. Before the government collapsed, he used Grindr to chat with other gay men, make friends and meet visitors from abroad. He said that given that homosexuality was illegal, it was dangerous, but the ability to connect with others outweighed the risk.

Things changed dramatically when the Taliban came to power. "People stopped using it and we heard about people being attacked and disappearing ...... People were really scared," he recalls.

With the help of an NGO, Cafecha was evacuated to the UK in 2021, where he now lives happily ever after. He initially used Grindr to make new friends, but also for more practical purposes. "When we arrived, we were quarantined in a hotel for a month because of the New Crown epidemic. It was so boring, so we managed to convince people on Grindr to give us beer to our room."

There are frequent reports of police using false Grindr profiles to lure users into arrests in countries where homosexuality is illegal. Grindr says it monitors the political situation in the countries where it operates and works closely with local human rights organizations to warn users of potential dangers.

"We'll do what we can, but obviously there are limits," Arison said. He said non-governmental organizations have asked them not to shut down the service in one country altogether, and Grindr has in the past restricted new users from joining the app in some places.

Grindr also shares health and safety information with the gay community in Western countries. During the MPOX outbreak in 2022, many health services, including the UK and the US, distributed information about vaccination status through the app.

The future of online dating is uncertain, and it seems like every day there's a new think piece decrying the futility of using apps to find love. Depending on the number of weeks you view, statistics show that Generation Z is turning their backs on them, or looking for a more flexible form of relationship.

Grindr CEO Arison is keen to point out that while it has a reputation primarily as a dating app, its internal survey of users shows that 43% of users use the app to find relationships, 61% of users use the app to