TUESDAY, MARCH 10, 2020, 7:30 pm. At the Comedy Bar in Toronto, people are shuffling into the small auditorium for the evening’s stand-up stage show, Gay A*F* (and funny), featuring four local LGBT comics and an MC. The audience is seated on either side of a center aisle, shoulder to shoulder, ten seats across and ten rows deep. It’s a full house. None of these people knows this will be their last face-to-face date, their last social outing of any kind, for many months. Over the next four days, such venues would be shuttered in Canada and in much of the U.S. Sports seasons would be canceled, Broadway would go dark, and several celebrities, notably Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson, would announce that they had tested positive for Covid-19.
That audience may now remember that Gay A*F* at the Comedy Bar is where they were the night before the world started shutting down. By week’s end, most were either ordered to begin working from home or facing unemployment as their workplaces closed up shop. Social life changed rapidly, too. Within four to six weeks, the LGBT community’s social life had been transformed. People no longer met up in person; everything had moved online. Comedy, drag shows, book launches, fashion shows, naked boys reading—all in-person events were suspended indefinitely, replaced with online versions. Pride celebrations around the world were canceled, though efforts were made to keep them alive as online events.
Physical human contact, or even proximity, could now be deadly. So what about dating? hooking up? sex outside the home? Surprisingly, Grindr, Scruff, and their ilk have not disappeared. In fact, reports indicate that they are as busy as ever, but in a different way. Welcome to dating without meeting, hooking up without being there, virtual Tuesday night orgies on group video. Some of the hookup and dating apps themselves have adapted, adding video links for users who are so inclined.
At the same time, for every Grindr user who’s looking for a sexual scenario, there’s a user who’s isolated at home and just looking to chat. It’s true: around half of all Grindr users appear not to be looking for sex at all, but instead for conversation. It is not uncommon now for a guy to become indignant when being pursued too aggressively—something that was once a rarity in this corner of the gay world.
How did it come to this state of affairs? Our relationships with each other have been mediated by electronic technologies for a few decades now. From the earliest online personal ads and phone lines to computer chatrooms to geolocating apps, these technologies have shaped our lives.
Forty years ago, the Saturday and Sunday editions of any large metropolitan newspaper was still a hefty affair weighing several pounds. One of the thickest sections was the classifieds, within which one of the lengthiest categories was the personal ads. Well represented among them were ads that began with initials like “GWM” (gay white man) or “GBF” (gay black female) followed by the words “looking for.” In a few brief and circumspect lines, an advertiser tried to make a pitch for hooking up or for a possible relationship. A not uncommon word was “lonely.” At first, if a person dared to reply to an ad under the anonymity promised by the newspaper, it meant composing an answer and writing it down. The ad gave each advertiser a box number at the publication’s address. It would filter any mail coming back through its own anonymous service. A reply might come in a few days, a couple of weeks, or not at all.
It was against this backdrop in the early 1980s that the first great leap into electronic, self-managed dating took place. According to a history of chat lines by Richard Leonard on chatlineguide.com, the first telephone chat line is believed to have started operating in California in 1981. Writes Leonard: “Callers used to dial a premium toll (1-900) phone number to obtain information about tarot, astrology, lucky numbers, lottery number, the weather—and erotic conversations. As soon as the business model was proven, small local chatlines were quickly run out of business by national brands with larger advertisement budgets.”
But as technological advancement at both the telephone companies and the dating line service providers continued, the phone companies retired their 1-900 services and chat-line companies began charging customers using their credit cards. It didn’t take long for private voicemail boxes and individual chat capabilities to emerge. One of the first and biggest companies in the business was First Media Group, which ran a variety of chat lines, including QuestChat and Nightline.
For a while, the newspaper classifieds survived by offering voicemail services as an option for someone replying to a personal ad. But that didn’t last long, as the specialized services took over the market. What’s more, these phone services were never great for those living outside of large cities. Not only was the volume of callers in smaller population centers lower, but there was always the danger, however small, that someone might recognize a caller’s voice.
In 1996, the queer earth shook when Gay.com was born. At the time, commonly available Internet service was in its infancy. Early adopters had home desktop computers and dial-up connections through landline telephones. Other than that, there were neighborhood cyber cafés. Usage exploded as more and more guys logged on in one way or another. As traffic warranted, the original broad-based geographic chatrooms on Gay.com became more specific. What started as rooms for whole countries gradually divided into the municipal or regional divisions, with multiple rooms for high-population areas. Thus while Gay.com began as one big cyber party, a gathering of guys chatting in a big world where the sex was largely hypothetical, connections now became more explicitly sexual. Immediate hookups were easy to arrange; chat for chat’s sake was soon gone, and the friendly atmosphere disappeared.
Seeing the competition, the old phone dating services added online versions of their voice ads. Post your particulars and a photo and start surfing the site for the person or people you want. One of the largest was Manhunt.net. Its founders, Larry Basile and Jonathan Crutchley, had started out in the gay phone chat line business but noticed a downturn in business in 2000. Crutchley is quoted by Ethan Jacobs in a 2008 Edge Media Network story as saying of the change: “We decided if the business was going to continue in the long run we needed to create a website, have guys use the website, and get them pay to use the website.” Manhunt online started in 2002 as a free service in the greater Boston area. The business model easily survived the change to a pay service, and the company grew rapidly across the continent. Manhunt’s marketing director, Phil Henricks, told Jacobs that “most web traffic tracking services listed Manhunt as the largest or second largest, neck and neck with Gay.com and the hook-up site Adam4Adam.com.” By 2008, Manhunt had added video chat and had accumulated more subscribers outside the U.S. than within.
It was in June of that that year that the earth shook again when Apple released its first iPhone. GPS locating was part of its software. On March 25, 2009, Grindr went live. Based in the U.S., the geolocating app quickly gained worldwide popularity through marketing and word of mouth. In 2012, Grindr announced that it had hit four million users in 192 countries across the globe. Geolocating mediated our relationships in a whole new way. The magic of Grindr was described by gay psychiatrist Jack Turban in this way (on Vox.com, April 2018): “When I open the Grindr app on my smartphone, I see there’s a 26-year-old man with tanned abs just 200 feet away. He’s called ‘looking4now,’ and his profile explains that he wants sex at his place as soon as possible. … Scrolling down, I find 100 similar profiles within a one-mile radius of my apartment in Boston. I can filter them by body type, sexual position (top, bottom, or versatile), and HIV status.” Grindr and similar geolocating services are still the state of the art in gay dating or hooking up. (Not to be left behind, Manhunt acquired Jack’d, one of Grindr’s competitors, in 2013.)
Grindr, Scruff, and their competitors have been blamed for emptying out the gay bars, clubs, and bookstores that for so many decades had been our meeting places, our community centers. But is this charge justified? In reality, there continued to be lots of young people in bars on a Friday or Saturday night. The difference was that now they were all looking at their smartphones. Remarked Grindr founder Joel Simkhai in a 2016 article in Huffington Post: “I think our users are still socializing in bars and clubs very well. And even if you’re in these places and too shy to come up to someone, at the bar you can still use Grindr.”
Last year was Grindr’s tenth anniversary. With it came a flood of articles, surveys, and studies on one substantial question: how have apps like Grindr changed gay dating? One consistent finding was that a dark underside had emerged. Jack Turban, the gay psychiatrist, told Vox.com in 2019 that he wasn’t reassured by the results of a survey he conducted among Grindr users. His key findings were that Grindr could be highly addictive for many users; that any relief it offered for anxiety and depression was temporary at best; and that compulsive Grindr use was keeping many gay men from finding long-lasting relationships. (Of course, some men have found their true love on Grindr, but they seem to be the exception.) In a March 2019 BBC.com article, technology reporter Chris Fox quoted British author and blogger Andrew Lyndon as saying: “Previously men of all ages, backgrounds and body types would meet in bars and spend time together. But today, people can select their friends from the online catalogue instead.” Lyndon finds that we are objectifying and dehumanizing each other in this way: “We don’t think of it as an individual who is reaching out to me. They have a mother and a father, they probably have siblings, they work, they want to be happy. But we just view them as a picture. If you view them only as a picture, they’re easily disposed of.”
Then came Covid-19 in March of this year. It has changed so many fundamental aspects of our daily lives, and done so with such rapidity, it’s hard to remember what life was like in February. Because sex with strangers through Grindr-induced meet-ups has become literally toxic, gay men have adapted both in the way we relate to each other, and how we use the apps in those relationships. “I’m just here to chat” could now be taken at face value. Anecdotal evidence suggests that as many as half of all Grindr users are in fact there just to chat. Others have found new ways to make an initial connection on the apps and then take it elsewhere in the online world, perhaps for some a steamier kind of online fun, albeit without any physical contact.
But for those who stay for the chat, it may just be that they use Grindr to mitigate feelings of loneliness and desperation rather than to look for a quick hookup. Observed Canadian cultural commentator Meera Estrada: “We are forced to be apart, so new relationships must actually go through an extended ‘courting’ phase of phone calls, video chats, maybe even a meeting in a park two meters apart. This has markedly slowed the pace from the casual swipe right, meet up, move on.”
In a March 2020 story on them.com, U.S. culture writer and editor Naveen Kumar wrote of his conversations with app users: “There was also a sense that pushing pause on the carousel of casual sex could be a unique opportunity to invest sexual energy in uncommon and perhaps more meaningful ways. ‘I’ve found a sense of freedom knowing that (hopefully) most guys are not down for ‘right now!’ which opens up more room for a conversation,’ wrote Corey, 37, over Scruff. ‘I fantasize that I have all this time to get to know someone,’ he said, ‘and that maybe sex won’t be the common denominator after this isolation.’”
Bruce Skeaff is an ex-newspaper reporter and longtime communications expert and college instructor. He currently lives in Toronto.
