My grind with Grindr

It’s late at night. You are bored and probably alone for the evening. You may even be a little inebriated and you want something, or someone, to do. The college hookup beckons. We’ve all seen it. Most of us have probably done it.

If you, like me, are a man who identifies as gay or any other number greater than zero on the Kinsey scale chances are your resource of choice is Grindr.

For those unfamiliar with it, Grindr is an app that advertises itself as a “discrete all-male location-based social networking app.” But, real talk, it’s a way to find horny guys close to you.

It’s not fancy, sleek or in any way dignified. In fact, at times it’s barely functional. But when the need arises, so to speak, it gets the job done.

Recently I became aware of a planned update for Grindr. One of the expected new features? A way to filter potential nearby “candidates” based on their identification with one of a number of gay stereotypes. If, for instance, I was only interested in people who identified as “jocks,” I could choose to see only those people who had described themselves as such.

I have never been terribly thrilled with Grindr’s tacit philosophy, but up until now, I have accepted it as the natural progression of my community’s sexual history. What was once cruising in public restrooms has become streamlined by the internet and the smart phone into a discrete, convenient and safer process.

Like providing sterile needles to heroin addicts to curb the spread of AIDS, Grindr and apps like it offer those with a margin of common sense and the foresight to practice safe sex a less dangerous and more controlled environment in which to do so.

But what was once perhaps a badly organized take-out menu will now become a simplified and streamlined all-you-can-eat buffet. Lukewarm, overcooked men in harsh lighting wait in clearly delineated stainless steel tubs to be scooped onto a plate and taken to bed.

Asking gay men to place themselves into a box reinforces the notion that stereotypes within the gay community are our most efficient means of identifying and evaluating each other.

Furthermore, they encourage gay youth entering the community, whose first same-sex sexual encounters often occur as a result of these kind of apps, to evaluate themselves based on some notion of self-worth tied to these stereotypes.

Gay men should not consider themselves twinks, jocks or bears any more than women should consider themselves MILFs or prudes. They are, and should consider themselves, individuals above and beyond the objectification of their sexual acts.

­— drlreed@indiana.edu