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2021 pop culture collage
Pop Culture

Best of 2021

6
min. read

From the “MONTERO” music video’s lap dance in hell to that White Lotus ass-eating scene, 2021 was brimming with iconic moments we’ll be thinking about for at least 6 more ‘All Too Well’s (that’s one-hour standard time). We surveyed 10,000 Grindr users about their favorite queer pop culture moments of the year, and here's who came out on top.

Gay gasp of the year

We were heavenly blessed with many opportunities to damage our vocal cords this year, but the one gay gasp to rule them all came courtesy of America’s sweetheart, Lil Nas X. The “MONTERO” music video featured Lil Nas sliding down a stripper pole into the underworld and giving Satan a lap dance. Sinful? Maybe. Sexy? Honey. Iconic? Absolutely. Keep giving ‘em hell, Lil Nas.

TV show of the year

Who else had, “Let’s play a squid game, play a squid game, do you want love, or you want fame? Are you in the game?” in their head for most of this fall? If not, maybe instead you were obsessing over Sex Education, a show about horny teens on Netflix that really resonated with people of all ages. Throw in renowned actress Gillian Anderson and some of the year’s best queer representation on television, and I truly do believe that the children are the future.

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Movie of the year

Pop quiz: are these statements from the House of Gucci press tour true or false? Gaga committed so hard to her character that a psychiatric nurse was on set? True. Gaga was afraid that Patrizia would find her while filming? True. During a red carpet interview Gaga said, "I don't believe in the glorification of murder. I do believe in the empowerment of women." Yeah, um, that’s true too. This woman gave everything. Father, Son, and House of Gaga!

Song of the year

Well, it wasn’t the Jamaican dancehall album we were rooting for, but Adele is back and, in typical Adele fashion, her lead single “Easy On Me” will absolutely bring you to your knees (not in the sexy way). Does everyone remember where they were when they first heard the part of the song where she goes “EeeEeEeeEeEeeeeeeeEeeEasy…on me”? I was sobbing while getting my ass ate. Let’s also give a huge shoutout to Lil Nas X and Doja Cat for making our return to the clubs that much yummier this year. Stream “SCOOP” for clear skin.

Album of the year

The fact that Taylor Swift moved the release date of Red TV up a week shows you the power and might of Adele’s music industry, so it’s no surprise that 30 took our number one album spot as well. Now, let’s talk about how hard it was to get a damn ticket to her show…haha just kidding we love you Adele. But seriously please help us get tickets to your show. Jk jk. Unless?

Podcast of the year

A podcast about Chippendales being the most popular with Grindr users? Groundbreaking. But there’s more to Welcome to Your Fantasy than meets the eye earthrow in a murder mystery with all that ass and you’ve got a solid mix of Magic Mike and Gone Girl. Special shoutout to Louis Virtel of Keep It for keeping all the actressexuals out there fed with anecdotes on Jane Fonda, Barbara Loden, Florence Pugh, and more. Mare Winningham hive, we eatin’.

Tiktoker of the year

Plastique using TikTok to show that she can be fish and trade with the blink of a hair flip? We love to see it. Her magical drag transformations have captivated the TikTok world, but we have one super important request: drop the skincare routine, sis. Special shoutout to Barry Brandon, who is always serving looks for the feed. Fashion line when?

Comedian of the year

Y’all really Nailed It! with this pick. That was cringe, but unlike me, everything that comes out of Nicole Byer’s mouth is actually funny and cool. This year she finally got to bring her whimsical brand of drunk auntie to the masses with her first Netflix special BBW (Big Beautiful Weirdo), and Grindr users ate it up. Special shoutout to our Las Culturistas fam, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, who gave their readers (fans) the most unhinged culture awards of all time.

Queen of the year

RuPaul may not know her last name, but Trixie Mattel is still the biggest star on our end-of-year tree. As a Queen of The Universe judge she keeps it real and funny, and we are dying to stay at her new Palm Springs spot, Trixie Motel. If I had to guess, I think the color palette will be giving…Pepto.

OnlyFans of the year

OnlyFans really tried it this year by saying they would ban pornography on the platform. Um, what? Don’t worry, they quickly backed that thing up and have continued hosting your faves. Speaking of which, former go-go boy and Slag Wars host Matthew Camp is your top…top? of the year. Hope he is ready to keep giving us the boyfriend experience in 2022.

Gay Sex Ed: Pup Play
Sex & Dating

Gay Sex Ed: Pup Play

Sex Ed is back and we’re asking the age old question: Who’s a good boy?
10
min. read

Art by Zach Brunner

Summer 2020 was coming to a fateful end, so I asked a few friends to join me at the nude beach, a local queer hotspot, for boozy freezies sold by big-breasted and bare-chested women, and for gay cruising nestled within the surrounding foliage.

As fate would have it, moments after we arrived, the sunny skies turned dreary and grey. When the rain came minutes after our arrival, many of the beach-goers had begrudgingly picked up their towels, their jockstraps, and fled for the city, save for a few 20-something otters in pup gear.

Being the only others on the beach, I observed as these four men fumbled with a tennis ball and frolicked in the wet sand together. Each wore a leather mask with ears and snouts, a spiked collar, a silicone tail, and a clear plastic cock cage. They topped a communal dog bowl with White Claw and would take turns lapping it up and licking one another.

“Bobby, are you crying?” a friend asked, concerned.

Surprising even myself, a few tears had trickled down my cheek. Something about the pups’ playfulness was just so beautiful to witness. They didn't have a care in the world and, as a radical neurotic, I admired and envied their devil-may-care attitude.

After their play session, the pups laid down on a bundle of blankets fixed like a dog bed and took a nap nuzzling each other. I, on the other hand, was an emotional wreck and had to go home.

Making fetch happen

Pup play is considered a subset of the “pet play” fetish, where individuals behave and inhabit the headspace of a particular pet or animal. While pups are the most popular, many other animals are emulated as well, from ponies and foxes, to cats and dragons. No biological animals are involved and, while categorized as a fetish, pup play isn’t necessarily sexual.

In fact, when a survey asked over 4,000 pups and handlers to rank pup play from 1 to 10—1 meaning “purely social” and 10 meaning “purely sexual”—the average score was 5.5.

For Pup Fox (real name: Ray),  the fetish is a combination of the two. Sexually, Fox uses his pup persona and gear as a way to allow himself to surrender to his deepest desires. Non-sexually, he uses the persona as a coping tool to subdue his anxieties. In both cases, Fox’s “pupsona” helps him feel more confident, sexually and socially.

“I never used to be able to be social in any setting,” Fox tells me, sheepishly. “But as a pup, I feel confident enough to put myself out there and play with others. In my pup world, every experience is a good one.”

Generally speaking, there are two roles one can assume in pup play: the pup and the handler. Pups typically inhabit the submissive role, whereas handlers (or sirs, masters) are dominant, though every pup and handler has their own dynamic.

“For pups, it’s generally about finding a top or dom that helps them get into that puppy headspace,” Pup Amp, sex educator and co-host of the YouTube and Twitch channel, Watts The Safeword, tells Grindr. “Sometimes the pup is looking for a lifelong mentor, sometimes short term play or direction, or just looking for some quick sexy times.”

The hierarchy among pups is more nurturing than authoritarian, and these roles are especially common among “packs” (a community of pups who belong to the same social group). The most common roles being: Alpha, Beta and Omega.

Alphas are the dominant pup, offering guidance and structure to Betas and Omegas. They’re the “top dog”, so to speak. The Beta is in the middle, following the guidance of the Alpha while serving to train and care for the Omega(s). Sort of like a vice president. The Omega serves the Alpha and Beta and devotes themselves to supporting and learning from the pack, while “strays” belong to no one and roam on their own.

“For the handler, the appeal is about training a pup, taking control of a leash and providing directions,” Amp says. As a queer person, mentorship can be crucial and hard to come by. Finding a handler is one way some will seek this support.

“I enjoy giving my pups lots of attention and affection, in the same way it’s fun to pet and love up on a real dog,” Dan, a 43-year-old handler, shares. “I even have a treat pouch that clips to my pants to hold M&Ms or gummy bears to give my pups as a treat when they’ve been good boys.”

Handlers take pleasure in guiding their pups in the right direction and protecting them from the dog-eat-dog world. In return, they receive unconditional love and affection. “I think of pup play as a power exchange that's much more focused on positive reinforcement than negative reinforcement,” Dan says. “It's got a much different vibe because its operant metaphor is different from, say, sir/boy or master/slave.”

Art by Zach Brunner
Art by Zach Brunner

Headspace or tails

The “pup headspace” is arguably the most important aspect of the fetish. This allows pups to let go of their inhibitions and embrace their primal side.

For some, entering the pup headspace is as easy as putting on gear, getting on all fours, and playing with a chew toy. Others advise that you meditate and envision the type of dog you want to emulate, analyzing how it moves and barks, and trying it out yourself.

For some, pup headspace can be difficult to achieve and the difficulty can differ by the day, but there are courses, online and off, that one can take for more personalized tips for entering the headspace, as well as Youtube videos and even pup-themed playlists.

Art by Zach Brunner
Art by Zach Brunner

Pup life

To better understand the pup life, I reached out to Support Pup Cooper, an educator and coach for pups and kinksters, to chat about his inaugural experience as a pup.

Cooper met his first handler, Cutter, a handsome Alpha pup transitioning to Handler, online, where their relationship quickly evolved from in-app chatting to video messaging. Cutter would ask Cooper to send him photos in full gear and ask him to send videos playing fetch and feeding from a dog bowl.

“It would make me so excited and so nervous,” Cooper says. “It made me feel submissive, especially when the things were recorded because then I knew they were out there.  It was one of the first times I felt the coveted puppy headspace.”

Eventually, the two decided to meet at MAL (Mid-Atlantic Leather), a three-day event celebrating the leather community,  and initially met in their hotel lobby in their human clothes. He requested when they meet the following day, that Cooper be fully geared up.

“As I met up with Cutter in the lobby, he immediately asked me to sit at his feet on all fours,” Cooper explains. “He put a collar on my neck and the click of the leash made chills go through my body.  Suddenly I felt cared about and safe, like I belonged.”  

After hotel staff informed them that they’d crossed the line of what was appropriate in their lobby, Cutter invited Cooper and another pup to his room. When they entered the room, Cutter sat in a chair and played fetch with the pups on the floor.

“We played like that for a while, and then Cutter unzipped his pants and had us come and play with his thick cock,” Cooper says. “Then he had me do something I wasn’t expecting. He had me play with the other pup’s ass and asked if I wanted to fuck him, and I did. The other puppy was on all fours and I was behind him, fucking him like dogs do, while Cutter watched and played with his cock in his chair.”

It was an eye-opening experience for Cooper, who would later meet with Cutter in his hometown, where more good times followed. Not much else occurred between Cooper and Cutter after that, save for the fact that Cooper knew without a doubt that he was a bona fide pup.

“Many aspects of that experience were not things I’d imagined I’d have done or enjoyed, but doing them opened my eyes to a whole world,” he says. “Pup play is about playing like a dog, of course, but it’s also a sexy and freeing place to grow in, and a place to be cared for and cared about.”

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Finding your pack

The simplest way for a pup to find community is to begin online. The advent of the internet is responsible for the pup play explosion in the ‘90s and again with social media’s growing prevalence in the 2010s. According to many pup sites, the fetish traces as far back as 17th century Europe, though much of its history, at least from an academic perspective, is largely speculative.

“I’ve found social media is a great way to find pups in the community and make connections, even if there isn't a thriving pup community in the immediate area,” Spot (real name: Garrett), shares. “There’s a large active pup scene on Twitter especially.”

Amp agrees. “Twitter is a large platform that allows anyone with ‘pup’ in their username to find each other, myself included.”

There are also resources like pupspace, an online community and app designed specifically for pups and handlers, as well as less specific sites like FurAffinity, which welcomes furries and pups alike. Fetish-based sites like Recon and FetLife are other worthwhile options, and have sections dedicated to pups and handlers.

“Most local groups, also known as PAH (“pups and handlers”) groups,  will have a website, Facebook group or some sort of social media presence to learn about events near you,” Amp says. “If you live in a small city without a PAH group, larger events and kink conventions exist in larger cities as well.”

If you happen to live in or near a larger city, there is a good chance your local gay/leather bar hosts a pup night or “mosh.” Just do your research, ask around and do some sleuthing, Scooby!

Doggy style

For many, pup gear is paramount to entering the pup headspace and their first purchase is usually a hood. Before making the investment, spend some time entering the headspace, fully envisioning your persona.

For example, are you more of a quiet and trustworthy Golden Retriever, or a yappy, rambunctious Jack Russell Terrier? Once you have a better sense of your pupsona, it’ll be easier to find a matching hood.

When it comes to tails, there are two types. One can be clipped onto a belt or harness, whereas the others are shoved up your ass. In either case, it’s considered disrespectful to touch one’s tail without permission from the pup and/or their handler.

Since pups spend much of their time on all fours, knee pads and gloves (or “paw mitts”) are another worthy investment. These are padded gloves specifically designed for pup purposes, forcing your hand into a fist so you cannot use your fingers.

Collars are a bit more complicated and can mean very different things to different people. At its most rudimentary, the collar signifies that a pup is subordinate to a Sir, Alpha, Beta, etc. and is the responsibility of the individual who collared them. For some, a collar is considered on par with a wedding ring, whereas for others, it carries a more casual meaning. Some will even throw collar ceremonies, which are celebrated similarly to weddings.

Leashes can be simple dog leashes that attach to your collar, or you can opt for a full-body harness. Queer retailers like Mr S Leather, Eagle Leather, Fort Troff, Square Peg Toys and The Stockroom will have any and all of the above.

Art by Zach Brunner
Art by Zach Brunner

Good boy!

At first glance, pup play can be perceived as silly. I’ll admit when I first laid eyes on the pack of pups on the beach, I scoffed. But I was ignorant and uneducated. The more I witnessed these young pups, the further I drifted from my initial reaction, because I dropped the societally influenced bullshit and saw the fetish for what it is: an innocent and powerful form of escapism.

Pups have an incredible ability to tap into that nostalgic, imaginative place that once powered our childhoods, like when I’d wholeheartedly believe I was Storm summoning rain in the shower (I can’t possibly be the only one who did this).

Stripped of all the barking, the hoods and the tail plugs, pup play is a group of people with like-minded interests supporting and caring for each other. And if you can’t get on board with that, then go fetch.

Sex Ed is back and we’re asking the age old question: Who’s a good boy?
It's Giving Gift Guide
Lifestyle

It's Giving Gift Guide

Your favorite Twitter OOMFs are here to help you shop for the holidays, or something.
8
min. read

It’s here! The gift guide you never knew you needed: where seven personalities from Gay Twitter (who you probably follow but whose last names and professions you definitely don’t know) tell you what to brave the supply chain to buy.

Why add a Gay Twitter gift guide to the thousands of others out there? Like I said in last year’s inaugural edition, we’re subverting gifting guides’ most common trope, experts selecting gifts for a niche audience, by consulting a population that has lots of recommendations, but virtually no expertise. Let the loudest voices guide you!

In this year’s edition, contributors once again selected a gift - something that’s good for a significant other, for example - and a stocking stuffer. The less expensive stocking stuffer options are perfect for someone you’ve been on three to five dates with and are currently using as a placeholder for your New Year’s Eve kiss. Keep them warm while you see who else is out there.

This year’s most common theme was skincare, and as a card-carrying member of Gay Twitter, I support the investment. One of the great risks of living much of life online (especially through a pandemic) is that when someone meets you IRL for the first time, they expect you to look like the version of you that’s displayed in perfectly-lit selfies. So here’s my tip: check out the gift recommendations below for your loved ones, but give yourself sunscreen and wear it even through winter.

Austin Bingham | @Austin_n_Austin

Gift

I was late to the trend, but I recently jumped on the “wearing several necklaces of varying sizes and styles” bandwagon. I don’t know what took so long since I’m usually up for anything that brings attention to my chest. If you’re looking for unique, affordable, queer-owned jewelry for yourself, your man, or your sidepiece(s), check out the up-and-coming brand Haus of Garçon (Price Varies). I recently purchased their Jacob Nude Pearl Pendant in gold (I’m a huge fan of pearls and gold), and I’ve received compliments everywhere I’ve worn it--from music festivals to anniversary parties.

Stocking Stuffer

I’ve been in love with Maison Margiela’s Replica cologne since one of my favorite skincare and luxury goods Instagram influencers (Sean Garrett) recommended their Jazz Club scent (it’s totally understandable if you hate me after reading that sentence, I reread it and hate me too). Their fragrances are on the expensive side, so I’d suggest gifting the Replica Discovery set ($38) as a stocking stuffer. The set comes with 10 different scents so recipients can try them all and decide which they like from there. My personal top three are Jazz Club, Bubble Bath, and Fireplace.

Dylan Adler | @DylanAdler6

Gift

Subscription gifts keep on giving long after the holidays pass, and my favorite of the bunch is a subscription to Bokksu ($135 for three months). With Bokksu, you receive a box of PREMIUM snacks from Japan every month. And when I say it’s premium... Bitch. It. Is. Premium. We’re talking yuzu lemon flavored popcorn and persimmon flavored mochi, both of which were included in my last box. All of the treats and flavors are incredible and, to be quite honest, the best part of my month is receiving this box. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if the only thing that keeps me going is my Bokksu arriving on the 20th day of the month.

Stocking Stuffer

Who says stocking stuffers have to be stuffed into a literal stocking? I think the best gift for a friend living in a major city is Venmoing them $1.99 to cover downloading the Flush app (that’s for the Pro version; there’s a free version as well, but this is a gift guide). The app that tells you which bars, hotels, restaurants, etc. allow the general public to use their bathrooms. It points out disability access, bathrooms that require keys, and allows you to rate your experience. I just started an SSRI and it’s doing a number on my bowels; this app is invaluable to me but also to anyone who poops (everyone).

Frank Costa | @feistyfrank

Gift

If you have self-diagnosed short term memory loss like myself, then you need to invest in a Tile product immediately. Their tracking devices use Bluetooth to connect with an app on your phone. Personally, I never lose track of my keys, but I always misplace my wallet. Life is too much of an anxiety roller coaster right now to add a scavenger hunt to the list. If you’re new to Tile, I recommend buying a value pack like the Mate Essentials Pack ($80), which includes one sticker, two devices with keychain holes, and one slim model (which is my favorite). The slim model is built like a credit card so it slips right into your wallet. I may be losing my mind, but I won’t be losing my wallet.

Stocking Stuffer

Let’s talk about the husband, Mrs. Claus! I work for Bravo and consume a lot of Bravo, so of course I’m going to recommend you light up the night with The Eternal Flame’s Our Lady of Hunky Dory Prayer Candle ($25). I’ve always been someone who’s thought that lighting a candle and taking a bubble bath will suddenly fix all of my problems. But also Kathy Hilton is an icon. She’s a legend. And she is the moment. Kill two reindeer with one stone on Etsy and buy a Bravo-themed holiday card ($6.50) from my friend and HollabackCards creator Danielle Peterson. ‘Tis the season to be as messy as a reality TV star trying to get their contract renewed!

Gabe Bergado | @gabebergado

Gift

I recently had the pleasure of laying down on a friend's couch under his Brooklinen weighted throw blanket ($169) and unfortunately it was so comfortable that I now also want one. They come in four gorgeous colors and if nobody is blowing your back out this winter season, let this blanket do the job.

Stocking Stuffer

As a Virgo who loves to be practical and loves a deep clean, I  highly recommend gifting the dishwasher-less in your life (and/or yourself) a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves. They'll protect delicate gay hands from scorching hot water, let you use your fingers to scrub out bits of food that sponges can't reach, and most importantly, make you look like the thicc mom from Dexter's Laboratory. You can also splurge even more and get a pair of the rubber gloves that are cotton lined ($6) – now that's luxury.

Jay Jurden | @JayJurden

Gift

A pair of New Balance sneakers make for a stylish gift, and you can’t go wrong with the XC-72s ($120), the 327s ($100), or the 990s ($185). But I also think great gifts should be a little outside the box, and so I’m recommending a hardcover copy of House of X/Powers of X ($54). It’s also a better option if you don’t know someone’s shoe size. The book is the starting point for the new X-Men era we’re in. It’s a great, ambitous story and it’s a queer story that covers everything from bigotry to polyamorous couples on the moon. It may be a book, but it’s got a lot of pictures for gay men who can’t pay attention. I’m very excited for Gay Twitter to move on from Elizabeth Oslen as Wanda Maximoff and start losing their shit about X-Men again.

Stocking Stuffer

Anything from Good Molecule, the affordable online skincare line, makes a great stocking stuffer. They have this amazing anti-blemish product - the BHA clarify gel cream - that’s only $10. While it’s super cheap, it’s super high quality. It’s one of the few things I’ve seen on Instagram and bought. And I still have a face!

Jonny Ramos | @SharkPizza

Gift

As someone who loses my wallet every time I step out, cross body bags have been a real lifesaver. The HAMMITT Levy Small Crossbody Bag ($87) is my favorite for any occasion, especially for my holiday travels. The bag is small enough to take anywhere, while still fitting everything I need (ID, credit card, keys, even chapstick). And in case you're bringing it to the beach or worried about tan lines when wearing it to a day party, the straps are removable and it can transition into a big wallet (just don't lose it).

Stocking Stuffer

It’s getting cold outside, even in Texas where I live. The cold, dry air means I have to keep my skin care routine on lock, even if I'm covering my body up a bit more than other seasons. I try to pay special attention to my face and the I'm From Honey Mask ($38), from South Korea, contains a healthy dose of real honey in order to make sure I’m moisturized and glowing for the holidays.

Matt Stopera | @mattstopera

Gift

I know, I know, unless you're anti-environment, you probably already have a water bottle. But listen, this one is elevated. I discovered the "Dopper" (€29.50) long, long ago in 2019 when we could freely travel and I was visiting Amsterdam. I noticed every Dutch person had this stylish ~European~ water bottle. I know Europe is a continent, but, like, this screamed EUROPEAN. I had to have one. It not only reminds me of something from an early 2000s futuristic music video, but it also doubles as a wine glass. Yes, the top screws off into a little wine cup. It's basically my picnic in the park party trick.

Stocking stuffer

I'm one of those gays that has been dying to find a scent for himself for years, but it's just too stressful and commitment of all sorts is a *life* issue for me. That said, I’ve finally found my beard scent. I use Everyday Oil ($14) for my beard and it's not only good for moisturizing the skin under my beard (which I never thought about until my barber told me it was important), but it also smells SO good. Like it's one of the things I look forward to in the morning because it makes me feel nice and hot.

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Your favorite Twitter OOMFs are here to help you shop for the holidays, or something.
#WorkItWednesday featuring Sean Patrick Henry, Product Management Director
Company Updates

#WorkItWednesday featuring Sean Patrick Henry, Product Management Director

Introducing #WorkItWednesday, Grindr's feature on employees and programs at the heart of the work we do to connect the global queer community. In our inaugural interview we sit down with Sean Patrick Henry, Product Management Director.
6
min. read

Welcome to #WorkItWednesday, Grindr's feature on employees and programs at the heart of the work we do to connect the global queer community.

Meet Sean Patrick Henry (he/him), one of our Product Management Directors!

Sean has been with Grindr for over a year and has been working in product management since 2012. His team at Grindr is in charge of our core product which is the foundation of the Grindr app. We had the chance to sit down with him to learn more about his role overseeing our core product and his team’s impact at Grindr.

Read more about Sean and his team below. Take a look at our career’s page to explore our open product job opportunities.

How did you get your start in product management?

Growing up I was always creating and building. Crafts, computers, musicals, videos, business plans, websites, web apps, startups, and more. So before I knew about the role of a product manager, I was always learning skills to be able to solve problems and create stuff. This led to an early freelance career building web apps in the entertainment industry and launching a few startups in the LGBTQIA+ travel space. I love Broadway, travel, and back then PHP+, Javascript, so I tried to combine those passions to make fun things.

What drew you to product management in the dating space?

It wasn’t until focusing on engineering that I found opportunities to work on bigger, more collaborative, and complex products. I’m a romantic, so when OkCupid invited me to join their front-end team, it felt like a match. The product team was composed of a handful of designers and front-end engineers with no established product management process or hierarchy. Each teammate had a lot of responsibility to know the community, develop data-driven decisions, and make an impact on the product.

For a while, I was the only gay-identifying engineer and became an inadvertent advocate for the broader LGBTQIA+ community around problems faced when navigating self-expression, sex, and romance in the binary tech world. Motivating designers and engineers to help solve these problems ignited a passion for a more product management-oriented approach to development.

Tell us why you joined Grindr. What do you love most about our mission and our culture?

I’m obsessed with the crossroads of sociology and data. Where else but Grindr can you have such a direct impact for the LGBTQIA+ community while also geeking out with code and passionate users? It’s humbling and rewarding to focus specifically on the queer experience while working with brilliant, fabulous, and supportive coworkers.

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What interesting problems is Grindr’s product team solving for now?

The worldwide LGBTQIA+ community is evolving and we’ll have more opportunities and challenges to connect people while allowing more ways to express themselves, find each other, and interact. We are also balancing an established, older codebase with building out exciting new features.

Grindr helps people connect to their community around them. As we have the largest community of any LGBTQIA+ app, it’s sometimes difficult to find exactly who you’re looking for. Soon we’ll be launching My Tags, which helps people create new connections around specific interests. This is a feature to help people express themselves and be found in a more inclusive and fun way.

We also always strive to provide a private, discreet experience. We’re currently working on a privacy-centric album feature to give users control over the content they’d like to share (or unshare) with other people. We see the future of Grindr as even more inclusive, private, kinder, and connected. It’ll take humility, empathy, and grit to drive the product changes our community needs and deserves.

What challenges or opportunities will Grindr’s product teams be addressing in the future?

We’re looking forward to utilizing new technologies to allow people to express who they are through media and data. Video and chat apps are evolving fast, so we have lots of areas to innovate for delightful and cutting edge chat experiences.

Grindr is a hyper-local app that changes flavor based on where our users are, so we’ll also adapt to support more localized personalities and cultures while creating more ways to connect across distance.

What are your goals for growing your team?

Our product team is focused on pursuing ideas derived and validated through user research. We aim to grow a team that’s adept at listening to and understanding people outside of our own life experiences with a variety of backgrounds in design, data, business, and technology. First and foremost, we value driven, supportive humans who champion our community.


Want to work with leaders like Sean? Explore our careers page to join our team!

Introducing #WorkItWednesday, Grindr's feature on employees and programs at the heart of the work we do to connect the global queer community. In our inaugural interview we sit down with Sean Patrick Henry, Product Management Director.
Best Practices for Gender-Inclusive Content Moderation
Company Updates

Best Practices for Gender-Inclusive Content Moderation

As Trust and Safety professionals in the social network and dating industry, we are honored to be a part of the evolution of content moderation strategies designed to have a meaningful impact on the lives of trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming users.
2
min. read

Grindr is the world’s largest dating and social networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people and anyone who wants to connect with and be a part of the Grindr community. Naturally, we are focused on creating inclusive and forward-thinking moderation policies that honor the full expression of users’ gender identity. That said, we strongly believe that having inclusive policies is necessary for all businesses – not just those that focus on LGBTQ+ people – so that all users can feel supported, included, and welcome.

As Trust and Safety professionals in the social network and dating industry, we are honored to be a part of the evolution of content moderation strategies designed to have a meaningful impact on the lives of of trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming users. We have put together a whitepaper outlining what we've learned over our decades in the industry, in the hope that it helps others create inclusive moderation policies.

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In this whitepaper, we will outline strategies and best practices for creating thoughtful, equitable, and inclusive moderation policies and practices with gender inclusion in mind. This includes policy creation, product design, moderation, training resources for the moderation team, and user-facing resources. We’ll offer insights about content moderation outside of the old-fashioned binary rules that have dominated our society and thus many platforms’ practices.

We hope that this is a useful starting point, recognizing that this is not an exhaustive effort. Even small steps can build enough momentum to be meaningful to your users.

As Trust and Safety professionals in the social network and dating industry, we are honored to be a part of the evolution of content moderation strategies designed to have a meaningful impact on the lives of trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming users.
Assessing and Mitigating Risk for the Global Grindr Community
Grindr For Equality

Assessing and Mitigating Risk for the Global Grindr Community

Grindr has always been about helping queer people connect safely, but we knew that the possibilities for connection—and the risks our users face—weren’t the same in every country.
5
min. read

The idea for Grindr was born in West Hollywood, California, where the crosswalks are permanently painted with rainbows. When I joined the Grindr team In 2015, we were rounding the corner on the company’s sixth anniversary, and the app had taken off in nearly every country on earth. Becoming so global reflected on Grindr’s incredible appeal and success but also posed challenges: most of the world wasn’t (and still isn’t) as accepting a place as West Hollywood.

Grindr for Equality

Grindr has always been about helping queer people connect, but we knew that the possibilities for connection weren’t the same in every country. That’s why I came from the LGBTQ non-profit space to build Grindr for Equality, or G4E, the company’s social justice program with the mission to help create a safer, more inclusive world for people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. Through G4E, we endeavor to support local activism and uplift the safety, health, and human rights of LGBTQ+ people around the globe.

One of the first things I did at G4E was set up a classification system for the world’s countries based on the risk LGBTQ+ people face. As a geolocation-based app, we recognized an opportunity to do good in areas of the world that have the greatest struggle towards acceptance.

The annual State-Sponsored Homophobia Report from ILGA World and ILGA Europe’s Rainbow Europe rankings proved essential in developing the classification system, but I also needed to talk to members of my personal and professional queer networks so that we could learn how we might help address difficult incidents in their region.

This work is ever-evolving, and we continue to update and refine the inputs, but here is the five-tiered system, rated from active emergency to relative safety.

Level 5

Countries whose governments have placed active bans on the use of Grindr like Indonesia and Turkey, as well as countries where we block our services like North Korea.

Even in these banned regions, I assume that some people find ways to access Grindr, even at great risk; their safety needs are often significant, so I ensure our safety resources are translated into relevant languages and made available to them.

Level 4

Countries that are experiencing active, ongoing emergencies. This might either be for LGBTQ+ people specifically, like was the case in Egypt during the winter crackdown of 2017, or for a country’s entire population, regardless of sexual orientation and/or gender identity, like the beginning of the Syrian refugee crisis.

For these countries, we disable the Show Distance feature that allows users to see how far away other users are. We also provide a set of free safety features to our users, send daily push notifications to announce known risks in the area, and share available safety resources.

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Level 3

Countries that are not experiencing an immediate crack down but that are still extremely unsafe for LGBTQ+ people.

Similar to the level 4 countries, users logging in from these areas of the world receive free safety features, the Show Distance feature is disabled, and weekly alerts are sent concerning risks in their area.  

Level 2

Countries that generally pose relatively little risk to LGBTQ+ people. They include places like Eswatini and Singapore where sex between men is technically illegal but the laws aren’t known to be enforced and there have been relatively few violent incidents motivated by homophobia, biphobia, or transphobia in recent years.

Even in these places, heartbreaking incidents do happen, so we provide users in this region with important safety resources, but thankfully the need isn’t so great that we send out unprompted alerts to users.

Level 1

Finally, Level 1 countries are those with progressive legal and social systems that help LGBTQ+ people thrive. When I’m asked what countries I would point to that have the best laws, I often mention Malta, a relatively small country in the Mediterranean that has instituted some of the best policies for our community.

The safety features we’ve created for countries with higher risks is something that I’m particularly proud of. We’ve instituted things like screenshot blocking, disappearing photos, and the opportunity for users to unsend messages for the upper levels of the scale. We developed these features with the more dangerous countries in mind but ultimately released them to all users in recognition that even in countries with robust LGBTQ+ laws, users anywhere can become targets.

For example, we learned that as users in Beirut moved through multiple military checkpoints they experienced abuse when soldiers recognized the Grindr app on their phones. Of course, from our perspective, the Grindr icon is meant to represent connection for our community, not a trigger for harassment and discrimination. Thanks to our collaboration with the freedom of expression organization, Article 19, and the activist developers at The Guardian Project, users are now able to disguise Grindr as a notepad app, a clock app, etc.

Although the stakes are highest in the Level 4 and 5 countries where LGBTQ+ people are actively targeted simply for being who they are and loving who they love, the truth is that our community faces risks to its safety in every corner of the globe. We hope that our efforts to help address those risks serve as an affirmation that our community deserves to be safe and healthy. In solidarity with those who suffer hardship because of who they are or how they love, we as a company work hard every day to provide a platform that facilitates joy and connection.

Grindr has always been about helping queer people connect safely, but we knew that the possibilities for connection—and the risks our users face—weren’t the same in every country.
Grindr’s Commitment to Addressing Online Harms
Company Updates

Grindr’s Commitment to Addressing Online Harms

Every employee at Grindr shares the commitment to keeping our users safe, and we’re constantly working to develop, refine, and enforce the policies and procedures that relate to the safe and secure use of our platform.
6
min. read

The Grindr app was born from the desire to create a fun, open, and safe platform for the adult queer community to find each other. Grindr’s founder, Joel Simhkai, had high hopes that the app would take off, but the demand for social connection within our community exceeded anyone’s wildest expectations. That simple idea from 12+ years ago has grown into an integral part of how the LGBTQ+ community connects and thrives throughout the world.

As part of that explosive growth, some five years ago I joined Grindr as its inaugural in-house lawyer. I am proud to work at a company that connects millions of people every day wherever they are on the globe. Every employee at the company shares the commitment to keeping our users safe, but there are specific teams—legal, privacy, support, moderation, the trust and safety team and our security engineers—who work daily on ways to develop, refine, and enforce the policies and procedures that relate to the safe and secure use of our platform by adults. From day one, this has been a key area of attention for me.

How We Protect Our Community and Vulnerable Populations

Grindr is a service for adults who agree to our Terms, Community Guidelines, and Privacy Policy. In both the Google and Apple app stores, our app has the most restrictive usage category, Mature 17+, allowing parents a simple and complete way to limit access to our app. Additionally, users must affirm that they are a legal adult, agree to be bound by Grindr’s policies, and provide their date of birth.

In addition to these policies and an industry-standard age gate at account creation, Grindr takes additional steps to support platform authenticity, and user safety, and help address circumstances if any bad actors make it onto the platform. Chief among them:

  • Grindr’s moderation team reviews all user profile images before they can be seen on the service for compliance with our Community Guidelines. To eliminate any chance of misunderstanding, we do not allow images of minors, even if they are part of a family photo, for example. Additionally, images of violence, hate speech or other offensive conduct are all banned from the platform.
  • Grindr provides our users with in-app reporting tools and an online Help Center as avenues to quickly report potential misconduct. The Grindr user community provides some of our most important input to help us enforce our Community Guidelines.
  • Grindr’s Trust and Safety team promptly reviews user reports and, where appropriate, bans the offending user or removes the illicit content.
  • Grindr has developed and continues to refine the proprietary technology tools that help us proactively flag potential underage users, bad actors, and/or illicit content. We are constantly evaluating new technology to assist us with this work.
  • Our Trust & Safety team is trained to identify, escalate, and, where appropriate, report certain child endangerment scenarios to the law enforcement in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.    
  • Like many social media companies, we know the potential for misuse—and even illicit use—is real. Our team works closely with law enforcement to support heir investigations through our responses to legal processes such as subpoenas.

With the hope of supporting our community’s well-being online and off, Grindr publishes (in 5 languages) a Holistic Security Guide to help empower our users with ways to stay safe both online and when meeting someone new in person for the first time.

Our Work Is Never Done

We recognize that this work is never done. That’s why we focus on hiring smart, dedicated people who are good at what they do and have key experience working on unique platforms like ours. As just one example, Alice Hunsburger and Grindr’s Customer Experience team handle many of the types of difficult matters discussed in this blog.  In just the past year, Alice and team have refreshed our Help Center, Community Guidelines, Safety Tips and moderation policies, and implemented improvements to better and quickly address our users’ concerns as we continue to grow.

Through these and other efforts, we work every day to address the ever-evolving challenges of online life. If Grindr uncovers a violation of a term of service or community standard, we take prompt action. For example, if we suspect that an underage user has accessed our platform, the account is promptly banned. Should a parent contact Grindr via email ([email protected]) regarding their underage child, we work with the parent to identify and permanently ban the profile in question. Grindr also cooperates with law enforcement in connection with the investigation of these difficult situations, and we submit reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children if the circumstances involve child exploitation and abuse.  

Moderation in this digital age raises many challenges, especially as bad actors have become increasingly sophisticated. And we welcome the help of parents and other adults, including our users, in helping keep minors off of the platform. Grindr is made available on the Apple and Google app stores but is listed in the most restrictive category of apps. As a parent myself, I, along with the entire company, encourage you to enforce the parental controls on the app store and on your minor’s device, including to control which apps they may download. These features are designed to prevent underage access to content-restricted apps like Grindr, and they are an effective first-line of defense against underage access.    

No company policy or enforcement effort can completely eliminate the ability of a motivated individual to take an action inconsistent with our Terms. But we continue to take steps to advance our practices. For Grindr, an important next step is partnering with Thorn, an industry leader in protecting minors from online harms. Through the integration of Safer’s perceptual hashing and machine learning algorithms, we will help prevent the transmission of child sexual exploitation and abuse materials. We will also continue to explore and implement additional mechanisms to enhance the safety and security of the Grindr platform.

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Grindr’s Global Advocacy on Behalf of Our Most Vulnerable Community Members

With users in virtually every country in the world, we recognize the unique perspective and voice we can bring to these important global conversations. As part of our outreach with UK officials in connection with the Online Safety Bill, we noted that the app stores serve as the gatekeeper of age-appropriate apps and, often with the most personal information about app users, they have an opportunity to assume an enhanced leadership position by providing a single point of age verification on behalf of the thousands of downstream apps. App stores could centralize input from all apps to help the downstream app developers identify and remove underage users from adult-focused platforms, especially as more users utilize the single sign-on functionality provided by the app stores. In addition, Grindr has long supported the Voluntary Principles to Counter Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse developed by governments, NGOs, and industry leaders with the common goal of helping to mitigate online harms for minors.

Jack Harrison-Quintana (Director, Grindr For Equality) and Bill Shafton (Legal Bill) before their meeting with UK officials in September 2019

Our Commitment to the Future

The team and I draw inspiration from the countless moments of life-affirming connection that the Grindr app facilitates every day across the world. As advocates for the best of Grindr, we feel a deep responsibility to the community we serve. That’s why we do things like limit the information shared with advertisers, and that’s why we are working tirelessly every day towards a stronger community, a Safer world, and demonstrate our commitment to continually reflecting on how we can better serve our community in a secure and meaningful way. We look forward to the journey ahead.

- Bill Shafton, VP, Business & Legal Affairs | LinkedIn

Every employee at Grindr shares the commitment to keeping our users safe, and we’re constantly working to develop, refine, and enforce the policies and procedures that relate to the safe and secure use of our platform.
Grindr logo over gray background
Company Updates

In Response To A Small Blog’s Homophobic Witch Hunt To Out A Gay Priest

A small, conservative Catholic-focused blog released a story last week that outed a US priest for being gay, in part because he appears to have used Grindr. When we learned of the story, we started an investigation into the incident.
11
min. read

Note: There are 22 linked sources in this response. For convenience, we have also listed them separately at the end of our response.

A small, conservative Catholic-focused blog released a story last week that revealed an unethical witch hunt to out a US priest for being gay, in part because he appears to have used Grindr.

The whole situation is ugly. We agree with how the incident is characterized in an editorial from Washington Post, describing the blog’s work as “unethical homophobic innuendo.” The number of ethical, moral, and legal lines the bloggers brazenly crossed in their work is astounding. All this to out a member of the clergy as gay. As UpWorthy writes on the matter, “It's a shame that Catholics such as [the target] are forced by doctrine to live their lives in the shadows.”

America: A Jesuits Review spoke with a data analytics firm that calls the data used in the blog’s investigation “alarming” and “unusually comprehensive,” going well beyond what is “available to advertising firms.” The data analytics firm estimates that the “database and deanonymization efforts” used would have “run into the hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars.”

Our Investigation

When we learned of the blog post last week, we started an investigation into the incident. We assembled a group of industry experts to assist our investigation. The first step is to try to determine what actually occurred, which is difficult as the bloggers themselves have provided vague and incomplete descriptions of their work.

What is clear is that this work involved much more than just a small blog. We get confirmation of this in two places. First, the Catholic News Agency (CNA) reported that a group motivated by “Church reform” approached them back in 2018 to peddle a surveillance method that promised to uncover church members who used “hook-up apps such as Grindr and Tinder.” We also learn that the authors of the blog worked for CNA at this time. In rejecting the offer to these “reformers,” CNA says “it is hard to make the case that [the information] was acquired in a completely legal and moral manner.”

Next, the bloggers confirm their data set comes from another group in a subsequent podcast. They say an outside party, as with the CNA, approached them with a broad data set that would let them link dating app use to priests’ phones.

We do not believe Grindr to be the source of the data, nor do we think the evidence we have seen suggests this is the case. Grindr does not sell data about its users to anyone. The contracts with our ad partners carry strong restrictions on the information we provide them such as prohibitions on attempts to reverse engineer user identity and selling or transferring our data to another entity, and they detail for which purposes our data is permitted to be used within their systems. We regularly audit these partners to ensure they are in compliance with our data protection agreements.

We get a few other clues to help guide our investigation in the CNA article. Both CNA and the bloggers say the group that approached them promised their system would expose priests on “hookup apps like Grindr or Tinder,” so whatever their method, it seems to work on more than just Grindr. Next, consider this strange sentence from the blog: “The mobile device correlated to [the target] emitted hookup app signals.” To us, this suggests the data set is at a network level (ie, mobile carrier, ISP, or WiFi network). The bloggers have resisted repeated requests to be more forthcoming about the source of their data, so we cannot yet exclude other potential sources.

Currently, we are focusing on three potential sources:

  1. Network providers: Data that may have come from network providers (mobile carriers, ISPs, or WiFi owners). It is known that carriers had sold information like this during the period of time covered by the bloggers' work. More on that here, here, and here.
  2. Location data brokers: This is a tricky space, in particular, one company called X-Mode was identified to be selling user location data gathered from developers who accepted money to provide X-Mode user location while on their apps. Grindr has never partnered with X-Mode or any of its competitors. There is potential these brokers might link to data from source 1.
  3. Ad networks: It is possible that one of our former or current partners, or one of their downstream ad partners, knowingly or unknowingly is the source of the data involved. We will investigate this possibility (potentially related to source 2) and pursue those who have violated our agreements.

In scenario 1, Grindr encrypts our app’s network communications. As a result, network providers cannot see what a user is doing on our app. They would not have access to our location data or other user activity on the app at this level. The network providers have their own access to location data from the user’s device and can see that our app is running and when it is using their network. There are ways we try to make this harder, but neither Grindr nor other developers can stop this. We are not aware of any terms of service to which a consumer has agreed that would allow this data to be sold by any of these network providers, and today all US carriers say they have stopped this practice.

Scenario 2 includes an interesting twist, as one of X-Mode’s biggest customers is the US government, via the military and other organizations. When X-Mode’s practices were exposed in 2020, both Apple and Google banned apps from providing them data in December 2020, though to this day some apps in the Google Play Store are still shown to be sending data to X-Mode. X-Mode (or any competitor) does not have access to Grindr data directly. But X-Mode says they employ other, less reliable methods to collect location information for their system. One method in particular called “bid-stream data” could be involved, but even X-Mode’s CEO admits this method yields low-quality geo data, particularly bad for uses such as tracking a specific device over a period of time.

Scenario 3 would involve a current or former ad partner, or one of their downstream ad partners,  as the source of data. An outside party may have used methods prohibited by Grindr and our partners to collect data, similar to the “bid-stream” method described in scenario 2. In 2020, we reviewed all our ad partnerships and terminated those in which we were not comfortable a partner was taking enough precautions to meet our standards for privacy and data protection. But there is another issue with this source. The group behind the system said it worked for “hookup apps like Tinder or Grindr”. The chances of a common ad platform between Tinder and Grindr is low.

Aggressive Steps

Back in April 2020, Grindr took the aggressive step to stop sharing age, gender, or location information with any of our ad partners. We did this out of an abundance of caution rather than in response to a specific incident. We also do not share any information users put in their profiles with ad partners. None. This leaves almost no data for 3rd parties to use in ad targeting on Grindr, and, as a result, our third party ads are very untargeted. The other result of this change from 2020, is that going forward the risks in scenarios 2 and 3 are massively mitigated, as none of the ad bidding process includes location data from Grindr.

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To put our decision to reduce ad targeting data in the proper context, we want to give you a comparison to a big player in the industry. Facebook announced this week that it will begin to limit advertising targeting for underage users on its properties to only: age, gender and location. The NY Times recognizes this change from Facebook as an effort to “protect teenagers,” suggesting it is in response to criticism the company had not done enough to “prevent underage users from sexual predators and bullying.” Those three data points about underage users, you will notice, are the exact ones Grindr stopped sharing more than a year ago, and our app is exclusively 18+.

One reason we can be aggressive in limiting ad targeting at Grindr is that our primary source of revenue isn’t ads. Our dominant source of revenue and growth is premium subscriptions. This makes it easier for us to cut back almost to nothing on data for ad targeting, to reduce the number of partners, and to reduce the total number of ads significantly over the past year. We will continue to reduce the ads we show to our users throughout 2021, letting us focus more on the quality of the user experience. You may have read many allegations about Grindr and ad data. Much of it is false. To learn more about our work on ads and privacy, check out this article from our Chief Privacy Officer: Ads on Grindr: Setting the Record Str8.

Propagating Hateful Stereotypes

Back to the bloggers. If their post stopped at outing their target, it would be terrible, but they aren’t done and things move from ugly to really warped, revealing their deeper agenda. Moving from their “unethical, homophobic” work to out a priest, they next begin an attempt to directly connect dating apps to pedophilia. LGBTQ Nation noted this bizarre jump and says, “The [blog] even quotes a Catholic seminary professor who said that using Grindr is ‘only a step away from sexual predation.’ The bloggers propagate hateful stereotypes of gay and bi men as rapists and child molesters.” After making this ridiculous connection, they pause for an inconvenient admission: despite the extent of their multi-year investigation, the bloggers uncovered “no evidence to suggest that [the target] was in contact with minors.” None.

Grindr For Equality

At Grindr, keeping our users safe is not just a technical or legal issue. LGBTQ+ people continue to face violence and discrimination simply for being who they are and loving who they love. To forward the cause of LGBTQ justice, in 2012 we established Grindr For Equality (G4E). G4E is led by Jack Harrison-Quintana, an unequaled expert in these issues who has spent over a decade fighting for the safety, health, and human rights of the community all over the world.

Grindr for Equality leverages the company’s resources and global reach to support LGBTQ activists doing work in their local communities. By bridging the gap between Grindr users and advocacy organizations, G4E has fought community outbreaks from HIV to meningitis to COVID-19; it has mobilized users in the fight for global equality; and it has supported groundbreaking initiatives to find new ways to push the community forward. Working with our team, G4E provides online safety resources in more than twenty languages and sexual health information in more than fifty languages.

The world has learned that when a small group of motivated ideologues are involved, it is difficult to protect anyone against all threats. Even so, we at Grindr are fully committed to protecting our users both in our platform and through our advocacy work. We will continue with our investigation to uncover what actually occurred in this case, and we are eager to determine if we can improve how we protect our users. We will report back with an update soon.

We would love your help. If you have more information about systems or methods used by these bloggers, please contact us here. If you have information on any potential security vulnerability in our service or app, please let us know here on our HackerOne bug-bounty page. Lastly, I want to thank the millions of people who use Grindr every day to find connections, friendships, and love. All of us at Grindr are dedicated to supporting and promoting the LGBTQ+ community.

Referenced Sources

The Washington Post

The Pillar investigation of Monsignor Burrill is unethical, homophobic innuendo

A Catholic newsletter promised investigative journalism. Then it outed a priest using Grindr data

UpWorthy

Catholic bishop who tried to deny Joe Biden communion caught on Grindr

America: The Jesuit Review

What we do and don’t know about the methods used to track the Grindr habits of a top USCCB priest

Catholic News Agency

Concerns about using surveillance technology to track Catholic bishops and priests

ExpressVPN Research

ExpressVPN's Research on Phone Location Tracking

Vice.com

More Muslim Apps Worked with X-Mode, Which Sold Data to Military Contractors

MarTech.org

Pulling back the curtain on location intelligence

Facebook
Giving Young People a Safer, More Private Experience

NY Times
Instagram Introduces Changes to Protect Teenagers on Its Platform

The Verge

Google and Apple are banning technology for sharing users’ location data

Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T pledge again to close data access after location-tracking scandal

GovTech

Wireless Carriers Face $200M Fine for Selling Location Data

Vox.com

How T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T use your web browsing, app usage, and location data to serve you ads

Grindr | Blog

Ads on Grindr: Setting the Record Str8

Grindr Security

Grindr's Privacy and Cookie Policy

LGBTQ Nation

Top US priest busted looking for gay hook-ups. He ran an anti-LGBTQ group.

Grindr | G4E

Grindr for Equality

International Safety Tips

Holistic Safety Guide

International Community Resources

A small, conservative Catholic-focused blog released a story last week that outed a US priest for being gay, in part because he appears to have used Grindr. When we learned of the story, we started an investigation into the incident.
Gay Sex Ed: Glory Holes
Sex & Dating

Gay Sex Ed: Glory Hole Etiquette & History

Class is back in session and it’s time we discussed some holes in your education.
9
min. read

Art by Zach Brunner

Among glass blowers, a glory hole is a high-powered furnace that burns at over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. Its purpose is to reshape or polish unfinished glass. Among most of society, however, glory holes are recognized as fist-sized holes that folks (gay, curious, or otherwise) shove their cocks through to fuck or get sucked.

While largely considered an artifact of queer culture, glory holes have recently re-entered the zeitgeist when both New York City health officials and the BC Center for Disease Control suggested glory holes were a safer way to have sex during the pandemic since they prevent face-to-face contact.

Given its cultural renaissance, now seems as good a time as any for a modern education on glory holes. From its political past and relevance today, to proper etiquette and tips for making one in your own home, let’s pay homage to the iconic hole that’s served more men than the hungriest of power bottoms.

Bedsheets: The modern glory hole

Glory holes can still be found in most gay-friendly neighborhoods across the world, though I was surprised to find out how few people actually use them. I recently shared a poll on Instagram and found that only 15 percent of the 300 people who voted have used a glory hole in the last two years. This is especially surprising since my audience is mostly queer and sex-positive.

The majority of those who voted yes mentioned that the glory holes they used were made from bedsheets hung in people’s apartments. The remaining percentage used them in adult video stores during various stages of re-opening.

“One time I stopped by the bookstore around 2 a.m. not expecting much action,” Louie, 30, says of a recent and exhilarating experience. “I was waiting in a booth when a guy came into the adjacent one, so I looked through the hole and made eye contact. He put his cock through the hole and I started doing my thing.”

Art by Zach Brunner
Art by Zach Brunner

During this particular visit, Louie forgot to lock his door, and while he was busy servicing one patron, another entered his stall. “I ended up sucking them both together and rubbing their cock heads against each other,” he describes. “Eventually they both came and I swallowed their massive loads. It was one of the hottest times I've had at that bookstore and I hope it happens again.”

Prompted by glory hole porn, Olly, 23, installed one in his home a few months prior to the pandemic using a bed sheet and command strips. “I really enjoy servicing at a glory hole because I find my attraction (or repulsion) in men no longer matters,” he explains. “At a glory hole, I can concentrate on two things: milking a dude for all he’s worth and blowing my load.”

Olly appreciates that, with glory holes, he doesn’t have to worry about his appearance and whatever else might distract him from enjoying the experience. He’s also drawn to its no-frills nature. “Seeing a guy unzip and slide his semi-hard tool through the glory hole makes me salivate,” he says. “I love knowing that the person on the other side is only there for my throat.”

Building on this testimony, a study published in the Journal of Homosexuality in 2001 found that the anonymity of glory holes help men overcome insecurities, whereas others were just exhibitionists who liked showing off for other men.

While no longer a necessity to skirt legal prosecution (remember: being gay was a crime), people still use glory holes because the anonymity of the act is, and will always be, hot as all hell.  

A glory hole etiquette lesson

If you’re using a glory hole in a public bathroom, etiquette is especially important since you don’t want to expose yourself to somebody who is using the stall for its intended purpose. That’s why it’s important you “signal” first.

Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Spaces (which was originally published in 1970) says visitors should signal interest in one of three ways: (1) by peaking through the hole, (2) by wiggling their fingers through the hole, and (3) by sticking their tongue through the hole.

Art by Zach Brunner
Art by Zach Brunner

If you’re not interested in servicing the individual, the universal signal is to block the hole using your elbow or palm, or simply don’t interact.

It’s rarely a good idea to verbally proposition your neighbor, since someone could overhear, but these rules can be relaxed in a sexual environment like an erotic book or video store.

Some men have no qualms (and actually prefer) seeing the person they’re engaging with. In this instance, protocol is to enter the stall at the farthest end of the bathroom, close the door and, when someone enters the neighboring stall, tap your foot (which is also a popular signal for understall sex). If your neighbor recognizes the signal, they will join you in (or under) your stall.

If you want to switch from mouth-hole to asshole, the initial decision is often made by the bottom, who might present their ass at the glory hole, which their neighbor can oblige or refuse. Whatever you do, don’t force or coerce anyone into doing something they’re not interested in. As Glen, 38, expresses: “If a guy pulls back when I offer my ass, I honor that and resume sucking.”

Of course, if you plan to engage in any anal or oral activity, it’s your responsibility to bring condoms, lube, and whatever other pleasure products you may require.

Forums and websites like Grindr, Squirt, Reddit, Hole Hunter, etc. feature exhaustive descriptions on glory holes, including: the location, the best time to visit, the type of men they typically attract, and general rules for safety and discretion.

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How to make a homemade glory hole

If you’re not comfortable frequenting a public glory hole or you just can’t find one, the experience can easily be recreated at home.

Forums tend to agree that bedsheets in a doorway is the easiest way to create a glory hole. If you don’t want to damage your linens by cutting a hole, hang two sheets adjacent to one another and use the opening between them as the access point. You can use clothespins to keep the sheets together in key areas and duct tape to secure them to the doorway.

Cardboard is another popular option since it’s easily obtained and can be folded up when it’s not in use. Plywood works as well, though you’d need power tools to make the hole and a larger space or garage to store it. If you’re using a stiffer material, use duct tape to create a smooth rim around the hole and cushion the sharp edges since you don’t want to get castrated, presumably.

In my opinion, the best, most cost-efficient way to create a glory hole is using a curtain and tension rod. Here’s how:

  1. Purchase a tension rod and a curtain that has holes or tabs at the top.
  2. Hang the curtain in the doorway using the tension rod and mark where your penis would meet the curtain. (With a tension rod, you adjust how high or low the hole is by placing the tension rod higher or lower in the doorway, making it accessible to people of different heights).
  3. Trace a hole around the previously marked area using a wide cup or glass and cut. The hole should be about the size of a fist.
  4. Hang the curtain, find a cock you want to suck and have some fun!

A little glory hole history

In 1707, glory holes as gay slang made its first recorded debut in the court document case: “Tryals of Thomas Vaughan and Thomas Davis.” As it’s written in the original text: “a Boy in the adjoining vault put his Privy-member through a Hole.”

The case ultimately exposes a notorious blackmail ring in 18th century England, but also gives us a general timeline of the glory hole’s origin, though they weren’t recognized as “glory holes” until 1949, in the anonymously published pamphlet: Swasarnt Nerf’s Gay Girl’s Guide.

Queer author and playwright Felice Picano, who updated the third edition of the renowned gay guide The Joy of Gay Sex, tells Grindr that the term “glory hole” is derived from the plumbing and oil drilling industries.

An article published by Slate says the term described “large cavernous openings” (insert joke here). Picano suspects the correlation began as a joke that caught on as coded language among gay and closeted  men.

As bathroom stalls became more common in society, glory holes did as well, reaching their apex during the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Since homosexuality was criminal and the advent of the internet was still decades away, location details were primarily spread by word of mouth and other crafty means.

“In NYC, for example, there was a system of men's rooms all over the subway line system,” Picano says. “Friends had maps of the entire system, along with notations like times of day they were most active.

Restrooms were ideal for anonymous sex because they were divided by gender and offered anonymity as no physical features could be identified. It was one of the few spaces queer and questioning men could explore their authentic desires without fear of being caught by the law.

Eventually, the gradual decriminalization of homosexuality, the onset of the HIV/AIDS crisis as well as the introduction of harder, impenetrable stall walls, collectively prompted the decline of glory holes, and by the late 90s, they were comparatively scarce. Most existed in bathhouses and gay bars, where their usage was (and is) still quite popular.

No gays allowed

Glory holes would eventually find their home in adult cinema and book stores since bathhouses were subject to regular and well-documented raids, while strip clubs, which offered similar services for straight men, were able to operate without interference.

These new spaces became the birthplace of “buddy booths,” which were similar to glory holes, except you could see the other person if you chose to. When a button was pressed on either side of the closet-sized booth, a curtain blocking the view of your neighbour would lift. If both buttons were pressed by neighbouring patrons, both curtains would lift and they’d be able to watch each other through a clear partition. Some booths were modified with glory holes so individuals could see and touch each other.

Art by Zach Brunner
Art by Zach Brunner

However, the regulars in these stores were straight men, and they weren’t fond of gay people frequenting their spaces, so they decided to make buddy booths and glory holes their culture.

Notably, a line of adult magazines, videos and DVDs titled GLORYHOLE put a decidedly heterosexual spin on the queer tradition, depicting women servicing large, disembodied cocks through glory holes and buddy booths.

With supposed press kits advertising that glory holes are “not just for fags anymore,” queer folks felt less safe in these spaces and many abandoned the tradition they helped create.

Despite these efforts, glory holes have and always will be remembered as a queer invention of necessity at a time that our existence was considered an abomination. Albeit a simple concept, glory holes have and will always be a symbol of sexual revolution among the queer community. A physical barrier that managed to bring people closer together.

Class is back in session and it’s time we discussed some holes in your education.
Can Porn Be Art?
Sex & Dating

Can Porn Be Art?

Two new books look at hardcore as high art.
8
min. read

In respective new releases, two authors apply journalistic rigor to what most of us consume with a one-track mind, furiously skipping Semenax ads. Indeed, writer-lecturer Jeffrey Escoffier’s Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography and photographer Kenneth Gruenholtz’s Uncensored are all about gay porn.      

Jeffrey Escoffier - Cover.jpg

Though they come from relatively SFW fields, both Escoffier and Gruenholtz uphold porn’s prurient essence. Throughout his research, Escoffier emphasizes hardcore – footage of “oral, vaginal, or anal” insertion – as being of particular epistemological value. (“Only with the advent of gay hardcore movies...were gay audiences able to see gay men as active agents of homosexual desire,” he writes.) Gruenholtz's B&W portraits, though fashioned after the idealized glamour shots of early Hollywood, incur Instagram censure so often that he’s decamped to OnlyFans.  

Gruenholtz’s photo book – also the basis of a recent ClampArt solo show – never shies from...insertion. But the catalyst for the series – a year embedded with globetrotting gay porn studio Lucas Entertainment – was something of a fluke. “I met [founder] Michael [Lucas] when he messaged me out of the blue, asking if I’d shoot him at the Belvedere on Fire Island,” Gruenholtz recalls. “[Afterwards] he asked if I’d [do] some work for his company, Lucas Entertainment. I said no [Laughs] – not because I look down on pornography...I just said, ‘I’m not interested in doing that.’ On the way home, I thought, Ken, why’d you say no so quickly?

Having initially turned down the opportunity, Gruenholtz agreed on the condition of creative privileges and access to talent. “We all know what the models do on camera,” says Gruenholtz, who concentrates in environmental photography – capturing real people at home or work. “The primary purpose was not to titillate but to create something beautiful...What appealed to me was [the question of], what do they do when it stops?”

Photo by Kenneth Gruenholtz
Photo by Kenneth Gruenholtz

On a string of destination porn sets, from Puerto Vallarta to Barcelona, the answer could come as a surprise. “I would’ve thought that when cameras stop, you pull out, relax, chat, whatever...But sometimes that didn’t happen,” he says. “Sometimes the cameras stop, but the actors decide they want to continue having sex. [Albeit] in a different, more relaxed kind of way. The sex during breaks was very different from the sex during the video shoot, which I found interesting.”

To know Lucas Entertainment is to know its production value. Shadowing Lucas (who directs and acts in his films) and a semi-rotating cast of porn stars, Gruenholtz saw the insides of Spanish villas and five-star suites. But chemistry proved a key ingredient in his level of access. “I learned a tremendous amount,” he recalls, “in terms of interacting with models, what people do and don’t respond to...Those things take experience, and I was able to get a very heavy dose of experience.”

Of course, Lucas’s sets may reflect an above-average mise en scène – both in terms of location and on-set hedonism. So much so that several months into the project Gruenholtz had real doubts about finding a publisher or gallery willing to market the photos. Ironically, one decidedly pre-coital snapshot whelmed him to continue.

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Photo by Kenneth Gruenholtz
Photo by Kenneth Gruenholtz

“After a shoot in this really luxurious condominium overlooking the water – all white and glass, like a James Bond film – Michael and the model [Jackson Radiz] went into the bathroom,” he says. “There was definitely a connection between them...Michael was in the bathtub, and [Radiz] was leaning over him, and Michael had an erection pointing straight up. When I looked at it later, I didn’t see pornography. [I saw] an interaction between two people that...just so happened to include an erection.”

In some strange way, Gruenholtz’s time on set reflects Escoffier’s porno-social theory in overdrive. The luxury condo, for instance, exemplifies what the author calls the “erotic gestalt,” or the mise-en-scène: the “the physical setup (the set), decor, costumes, props, lighting, positions of the camera. Arousal...‘is stimulated by the scenario of presentation, by the mise-en-scene and the implied narrative.’” Escoffier also examines intangible dynamics, like sociological scripts, and how porn uses these to construct fantasy and fulfillment.

One episode Gruenholtz recalls – a regrettable misstep in which he inquired after one model’s sexual identity – indirectly evokes such scripts. “I could tell it made him turn inward, which is the last thing I wanted...But his reply was really smart – he said, ‘I mean different things to different people, so why spoil an illusion for anyone?’ That was the last time I asked anyone that question.”

Though the model’s rejoinder sufficed, he might just as well have pointed Gruenholtz to these lines in Escoffier’s text, had there been a copy on set:  

The actor’s porn persona consists of a hodgepodge of beliefs about gender, sexuality, identity, acceptable sexual scripts that he may engage in, and his repertoire of acceptable sexual acts...Thus the actor’s porn persona is a “situational sexual identity” that is constructed to be used within the confines of a porn career and the gay porno business.

Published as a collection in February, Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography reflects some 25 years’ worth of interviewing on-and behind-camera talent. “I’m more interested in the ‘making of’ [aspect], because frankly I personally can’t imagine making a porn movie myself,” Escoffier, 78, says on a call to discuss the book. “I can’t imagine being in one, for sure. So [my question was], How does it get made? And a lot of my themes emerge from there.”

The “Making of...” in the title refers to behind-the-scenes insights (“As one porn actor after another iterates...making porn is hard work”) as well as a post-Boys in the Sand historiography of hardcore. Just as the former (see: on-camera sexual performance being hard work) may serve to challenge porn’s low rank in the pop-cultural hierarchy, so may the latter. For instance, Escoffier describes a brief “porn-chic” era, in which standard movie houses would show gay as well as straight porn, and Variety would publish reviews of both. As to why, then, the industry has largely evolved in the margins, he says that after 1973 – when porno hits like Deep Throat out-earned mainstream cinema – Hollywood changed the MPAA ratings in order to hobble the competition.  

It’s a shame, too, when one considers gay porn’s early potential as a sort of backchannel PSA. “For gay men, the transition from beefcake to hardcore was extremely important,” Escoffier writes – referring to the late-60s, early-70s paradigm shift from male-order physique magazines to triple-X film. “Not only because homosexuality had been a stigmatized form of behavior but also because historically there were so few homoerotic representations of any kind.”

Basic representation aside, early hardcore productions, such as Wakefield Poole’s beachside phantasmagoria Boys in the Sand (1971), “[often] adopted some sort of high-concept, psychological angle or plot.” Escoffier also cites true-to-life narratives, à la Jack Deveau’s Fire Island Fever (1979), as formative to the burgeoning queer hive-mind. “All [Deveau’s] films had narratives,” he says. “[Fever] is about a couple who try to be open and go to Fire Island to test their policy. And, of course, they can’t do it...So [narrative] was another way in which porn could disseminate knowledge.”      

50-plus years on, are we due for a “porn-chic” renaissance? The sudden OnlyFans boom, not to mention the micro-trend of self-styled influencers recasting sex work in their own outré image, suggests as much. But in Escoffier’s view, perceived chicness is no substitute for what he calls “reality effects.”

“Porn is a very weird cultural form [in that] it requires proof of actual sex, [via] erections, ejaculations, and so on,” he explains. “We don’t hold any other medium to the same standard as porn; in true crime, we don’t need to see a murder to believe the story...I don’t know if that makes [porn] ‘high brow,’ but I do think it should be taken seriously.”      

Our perceptions of porn – as being “fake,” i.e. false, or that its hardcore-ness imparts some lesser net value – are deep-seated. As a kind of corrective contrast, Escoffier and Gruenholtz focus on the real – not so as to dilute our fantasy, but rather to illuminate its subsurface. For his next book Gruenholtz plans to focus on that central “reality effect” – the erection. “It’s not about sex, per se,” he says of the forthcoming book – inspired in part by Rudolf Nureyev’s indelible hard-on as seen by Avedon. “Avedon describes it as one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen in his life: [Nuryev] took off his clothes, and as he raised his arms, so did his dick go straight up...What I find fascinating is [capturing] the excitement in getting naked.”  

Photo by Kenneth Gruenholtz
Photo by Kenneth Gruenholtz

They also, however, agree on a balance between connoisseurship with temperance. “Porn may be becoming more a part of our everyday discourse about sex,” observes Escoffier. “[But] do I really want people to know that I love Broke Straight Boys? I don’t know.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with pornography,” Gruenholtz reiterates – asked if life with Lucas Entertainment altered his at-home viewing habits. “But I will say there was a period when I didn’t want to look at [it]...For a while, I did take a break.”

Two new books look at hardcore as high art.
Gay Sex Ed: Cruising
Lifestyle

Gay Cruising: A Trusty Guide on Sleeping Around

We’re leaving the classroom and going public.
10
min. read

Admittedly, my experience with cruising is limited. But then again, I came out in the era of Grindr, where dick is delivered to your door quicker than pizza. The first man I dated out of the closet was older than me, and took it upon himself to give me a lesson in gay culture by taking me to a popular cruising spot in the middle of the night.

My heart was pounding through my chest when we pulled up to the hill. I was excited, but also incredibly nervous. He took my hand as I exited the car, and then led me into a dense forest laced with skinny trails pointing in every direction. My arms were crossed the entire time, something I often do when I’m uncomfortable. I’d only been out of the closet for a few short months and this was like nothing I’d ever known.  

As soon as we spotted somebody in the distance, he excitedly dropped to his knees, pulled down my pants and started sucking my cock. As the figure drew closer, I pulled my pants up. I don’t know if it was overexcitement or overstimulation but I wasn’t ready yet. Not the craziest cruising story in the world, but we did watch Cruising (1980)—a film starring Al Pacino that’s been largely scrutinized for stigmatizing gay men—later that night.

Given that we’re now a full year into the pandemic (can you believe it’s been a fucking year?!), there’s been a notable resurgence in the classic act of cruising. “I think that there’s fatigue in the social and physical distancing,” sex and relationship therapist, Dr. Joe Kort, Ph.D., explains. “Cruising offers the opportunity to have physical connection, but from a distance, so it’s a perfect fit for the current pandemic situation.”  

Cruising through Covid

Queer people have always found creative ways to have our physical needs met (often out of necessity since law and society condemned us to an existence in the closet) and, evidently, the pandemic is no different. This time though, we didn’t reinvent the wheel, we just recycled a rustier one.

But before we discuss how cruising has joined Kathryn Hahn in the cultural zeitgeist of pandemic life, consult the image below for safer cruising practices.

Art by @heybeefcake
Art by @heybeefcake

It would be easy (and ignorant) to say that you shouldn’t cruise and to instead abstain during the pandemic, but this approach isn’t effective, as clearly evidenced by the AIDS epidemic. So rather than condemn the behavior, it’s important we think about reducing risk and create understanding and openness.  

In September, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation posted guidelines for safer cruising during the pandemic utilizing information shared by the  San Francisco Department of Public Health and the BC Centre for Disease Control. See graphic below.

Art by @heybeefcake
Art by @heybeefcake

Cases studies in cruising

Curious what the gays were up to in the bushes, I spoke with a number of cruising hobbyists on Grindr and Twitter, who all insisted they remain anonymous.

“I did a couple of rounds earlier this year, ended up sucking one guy off for a bit, then gagged on this ‘straight’ guy's dick,” Jake, 33, shares. “He kept saying that his girlfriend never could get him off the same way guys could. I’m not sure if it was just roleplay or legit, but his dick smelled like fresh laundry, which was nice.”

No stranger to cruising, Jake says the hot spots in his area are still quite busy. However, he noted that the few individuals who bothered to wear masks at all wore them around their necks. Another individual I spoke to shared that they remove their mask from a safe distance because cruising largely relies on non-verbal communication.

Photo by @Birk Thomassen

“Cruising already has a risk to it and the fact that we're in a pandemic has added to that risk, but behaviors really haven’t changed much,” Jakes observes. “With all the closures and restrictions on indoor spaces (combined with the colder weather), friends of mine have noticed a resurgence of cruising in washrooms. However, the city (Toronto) took notice and either closed them entirely, or reduced the hours and increased security.”

For some, cruising is still too risky, so they get creative. “I was chatting with a guy who really wanted to hook up, so he begged to  peek in my window and watch me jerk off on my bed, so I let him, and he played with himself outside and came on my window,” says Jesse, 33. “Before we did it I thought it would be weird and creepy but it was actually kind of hot.”

Most of the people I spoke with said they’ve been using apps and websites like Squirt (which has its own Cruise feature), Sniffies (a website specifically for cruising) and Grindr to find the cruisiest areas nearby.

Some, like Cameron, 24, found Twitter particularly useful. Through the app, he’d heard that the Ramble section of Central Park was a popular place to cruise and decided to check it out one evening. After wandering aimlessly for half an hour, he happened upon a circle jerk, but was too afraid to join. A decision he regretted.

A few days later, Cameron returned to the location, this time wearing his favorite jockstrap and a pair of tight-fitting shorts. “This time, I knew what I wanted, and I intended to get it,” he shares. “As soon as I got there I set my sights on a handsome guy stroking his dick and dropped to my knees and started sucking him off.”

Photo by @Birk Thomassen
Photo by @Birk Thomassen

His boldness attracted attention, and soon 10 men swarmed around Cameron, each waiting for their turn. After a couple minutes, one of the men slipped his shorts off and began fingering him. “Eventually, I got tired of kneeling, so I stood up and made my way over to a tree, motioning to one of the guys in the group,” Cameron continues. “He fucked me until he came and much to my pleasure another guy quickly took his place.”

Three loads later, Cameron felt satisfied and left the park, taking one last load before heading home. It was one of the best sexual experiences he’d ever had in his life, and it might not have happened if it weren’t for the pandemic.

“Cruising and public sex is a kink. It’s taboo, and the risk of getting caught and/or watched can really charge folks’ erotic energy,” licensed therapist, Todd Baratz, tells Grindr. “Depending on the environment, cruising can be about the chase, or the variation of emotional transformation from ambivalence to resolution (for example: being confused and experiencing anxiety regarding their interest, to clarity and excitement in finding out they desire you). This transformation of emotion can cause a spike in erotic energy, creating a powerful effect.”

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Cruising into history

Before we continue, a quick lesson in gay history. According to Alex Espinoza, author of Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime, the origins of cruising trace way back to Ancient Greece, though it looked a lot different than it does today.

Espinoza believes the concept of cruising is borne from “paiderastia” (pederasty), which was a romantic/mentor relationship between younger boys and older men. “Only those who occupied the upper tiers of society were permitted to have lovers or male sex slaves,” says Espinoza. “Also, these men could never assume the passive role in the relationship, they had to be the top.”

Pederasty was consensual and acknowledged by society, but was often carried out in secret. As is true of cruising today, through pederasty, we see the formation of rules governing the practice, rules that, in one form or another, exist to ensure the secrecy of the act.

It wasn’t until Ancient Rome, and the development of a more urbanized city, that cruising began to take on recognizable characteristics, especially among society’s aristocracy. Men would search for sailors (it was believed that, because they’d been at sea for months, sailors likely engaged in sex with other men) in areas near the Tiber, where there was plenty of shrubbery and a number of public bathhouses, where people would clean themselves before the advent of individual bathrooms.

These public spaces became prime hunting grounds. Since these areas were public, the need to offer ‘clues’ to signal someone that they were interested became common practice. “Men often scratched their heads with one finger to identify that they were cruising; many men use similar forms of signaling today,” Espinoza says.

Cruising hot spots were mostly communicated through word of mouth. “In some instances, if men caught wind that arrests involving men engaging in lewd acts had been made at a certain location, they’d visit them on the off chance that they’d find another ‘curious’ individual,” Espinoza says. “Yes, this meant risking arrest, but police weren’t prone to hitting the same location repeatedly.”

In the ‘60s and ‘70s, a slim, portable guide called the ADDRESS BOOK by Bob Damron became popular among queer and curious men. The tome was something of a Yellow Pages that listed, state by state, queer-owned bars, clubs, bathhouses and cruising spots across the United States. Each listing would feature a set of elaborate codes that identified what types of crowds the place attracted as well as the kind of sex one could expect to find there.

The ‘90s brought about the internet and forever evolved cruising with websites like gay.com and cruisingforsex.com. Eventually, these early websites evolved to become portable apps like Grindr.

When queerness was criminal

The queer community has historically been unfairly targeted by the law, and their approach to cruising was (and is) no different. In the past, the police went as far as creating a special unit, called “moral divisions,” whose primary job was to entrap and arrest queer men in cruising spaces.

“These officers were often young, good looking, and would expose themselves at a urinal or start flirting with you on a park bench,” author of The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, Eric Servini, Ph.D., tells Grindr. “As soon as you agreed to go home with them or made reference to sexual behavior, you were arrested. In effect, police departments were the entities most responsible for conferring second-class status on queer American citizens.”

Art by @heybeefcake
Art by @heybeefcake

When found guilty of sodomy (a blanket term used for most all homosexual behavior), these people would often plead guilty, pay a fine, and were released from jail the following morning. However, these arrests were often reported in local newspapers and included their full name and address, effectively outing these individuals to everybody they knew.

“Police departments called up your family, employer, or landlord to let them know that you were a sexual deviant, so you would lose your job or housing,” Servini explains. “By the mid-century, the FBI was informed, so you were forever barred from government employment.”

What’s just as unfathomable is that sodomy (which was known to target gay men) did not become completely legal in the US until a 2003 Supreme Court decision. “Even now, the state has found ways of criminalizing trans and queer identity, even though it's technically legal. Look no further than New York's ‘Walking While Trans’ policy, which was only discontinued this month.”

What authorities never considered was that their own treatment of queer people (paired with simply existing among a judgemental and homophic society) is what led us queers to cruising in the first place.

“For many men, closeted or otherwise, cruising and anonymous sex proved the only way to find solace and a real, true sense of connection with another man,” Espinoza says. “Thus, an unassuming bathroom stall or an outcropping of shrubs became a space of fleeting intimacy and powerful sexual gratification. What’s so criminal about that?”

For some, cruising is still about that same search for acceptance, whereas for others, it’s simply a place to hook up when options aren’t viable. Some find the allure of public sex and/or the risk of getting caught is most alluring. Whatever your reason, know that you are taking part in an unapologetically queer tradition, one many may even consider revolutionary. Just be smart, be discreet and always practice safer sex.

Class dismissed.

We’re leaving the classroom and going public.
Trans Enough
Pop Culture

Trans Enough

How I learned to own being “a chick with a dick."
4
min. read

It’s 2019 and I’m on-set for an editorial photoshoot in the heart of New York City. I’m surrounded by queer folks who are just like me, but feel so different from me — this is my first time being named a “queer voice” in the New York scene, and I’m too shy to approach the other people on set even though some of them are my friends. The bigger names in the queer scene are getting their makeup done before me, and are being rushed to have their photos taken because they’re just — too busy — to do this shoot today. But this project mattered so much to me that I’d taken the whole day off. I’m petrified but I have to keep my cool.

In the corner of this massive, sunlight-filled room, someone exclaims “there’s just something so hot about a chick with a dick!” I whip my head around from the makeup chair that I waited hours, really years, to be in. Maybe they’re talking about me, but there’s no way they could be, I’m just trying to lay low. I’m a girl with a dick, like they said, but had never heard someone say that girls like me are hot. I’ve only known that my body needs to be as cis-assumed as possible. Whatever that even means.

I recognize that moment, two years ago, as an introduction to my trans experience and as a new perception of my body. There is something so gorgeous about a woman with genitalia that cis-het communities standardize as ‘masculine.’ It’s the definition of queer, which at its root just means “different or other.” It’s taken me a lot of work to get here, but we need to normalize women with penises.

Phew, it feels good to say that.

“Trans women are taught to accept love scraps,” my beautiful friend Cassandra, a trans woman with a wildly successful acting career, shared with me in intimate conversation. She’s right: I’ve been a secret hookup, a subject to fetishization even on the Grindr app, and a test-drive for men who really like me until they’re confused about their sexual orientation. They tell me it’s my fault. At the end of the day, trans women are left to process transphobia (casual or purposeful) and find ways to still be OK.

My platform on social media is built on empowering other trans folks to understand they’re more than just OK — they are sacred, worthy, and deserve to feel sexy. On Instagram, I’m a self-proclaimed “chick with a dick” who is powerfully feminine. I use the space for infographic posts that advocate for trans lives; for example, I recently shared a post about how surgery (and therefore genitalia) does not define identity.

I often seek guidance from another trans sister of mine, who’s chosen to stay anonymous, for drafting the words in my posts.

“I think it’s important for trans kids to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” she says. “When I was growing up, I didn’t really see a blueprint for what my career or future could look like.” She’s referencing a lack of trans folks with platforms she could look up to when she began transitioning. “Seeing someone you identify with succeed and thrive carries the most impact.”

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Social media is our generation’s most powerful tool. While developing a platform, it’s necessary to be sensitive to the feelings my friend mentioned. Trans kids deserve to look up to someone who understands that every trans experience is unique and special — there is no one way to be transgender. That’s something I wish I knew two years ago during that New York City photoshoot. My choice to have bottom surgery does not dictate if I’m “trans enough.” Bottom surgery is a major life decision that I’m not prepared to make just yet.

When I didn’t have other trans folks to look up to, I used my own Instagram as a transition diary. I’d post a new photo after learning a makeup technique, or purchasing my first handbag, and then look backward at my progress. It’s how I kept track of what worked for me, what didn’t, and where I was headed. It helped me feel less alone. To be honest, I became a little embarrassed at how personally I took my Instagram account compared to how my cis friends used theirs.

Now, as I celebrated my 5-year anniversary on hormones, I’m continuing my reflection as a “chick with a dick.”

I have reclaimed the slur to ignite confidence in being a trans woman. I deserve to feel sexy on social media and on apps like Grindr. Every trans person is beautiful and worthy of safe, accessible spaces to find themselves in.

How I learned to own being “a chick with a dick."
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