Grindr has a major problem: The gay hookup app is ostensibly a safe space for queer men. But it turns out that doesn’t apply to all queer men. User’s profiles are notorious for featuring laundry lists of turn-offs (“No blacks, fats, femmes, or asians!!!” “Sorry, not into blacks” and “Not big enough” are a choice few) and a few turn-ons (“Looking for an Equinox gym partner”). It’s survival of the fittest—heavy emphasis on “fittest” —and the men who look like Gus Kenworthy/Colton Haynes/Matt Bomer are usually the ones at the top (or bottom, depending on their preference). Look like anything else and you’re out of luck.
I’m tired of it, my gay friends are tired of it, and even people who work at Grindr are tired of it. The solution? The O.G. unsolicited-dick-pic app will launch its first anti-bullying initiative this month, called, appropriately enough, Kindr.
The specifics around Kindr are still opaque but Landen Zumwalt, head of communications at Grindr, promises a concerted effort to better police the app’s rampant racism and harmful behavior. How users are reported and dealt with will become stronger, Zumwalt promised, and PSA campaigns featuring well-known LGBTQ figures, like recent RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant The Vixen, will run in-app to accompany the rollout. The Vixen inadvertently became a powerful voice for drag queens of color when she spoke out against the unfair treatment she was receiving on the show. RuPaul harshly criticized The Vixen for arguing with other contestants, suggesting she had a bad attitude, but did not address white queens on the show for doing the very same. The one-sided attacks show how queer people of color are rarely, if ever, allowed to show anger and that racism can come very the same marginalized communities you are a part of.
“Kindr is not going to solve racism by any means,” Zumwalt says. “These issues have been present in our community long before Grindr, but we hope to increase conversations around it and have a dialogue about what constitutes sexual racism.”
The Grindr team knows Kindr’s stakes are high. When I ask Zumwalt if he’s experienced any bullying on Grindr, he answers with a sigh.“I have,” he says. “I’m not by any stretch of the imagination what you think the typical ‘Grindr body’ would be. I let things roll off my back, but that’s because I’ve built up the ability to not let things affect me—which is, I think, unique and definitely not something everyone is able to do.” So yes, even the people who work at Grindr have bad experiences on Grindr.
Hence Kindr, a popular app’s last-hope of sorts, an attempt to bandage a long-festering wound we all know about. It’s about time, in that it’s years late. And we might be too far gone already. But “Gay Silicon Valley” hopes we’re not.
Scrolling through the App Store in 2018 can feel like watching every gay dating app fighting to achieve “woke status.” Chappy, for instance, requires its users to take a pledge against racism. The pledge is the result of Chappy surveying hundreds of users and finding that every person of color interviewed had experienced racist comments and/or preferences on the app. “We are taking steps to protect people of color from having to even see profiles with racial ‘preferences,’” says Sam Dumas, Chappy’s head of brand.
The findings disrupt the already outdated idea that the Internet is an equal playing field. Hookup apps like Grindr first promoted themselves as possessing a distinct, peak-21st century egalitarian quality. You can have sex with anyone! Ten years later and users have finally accepted that this just isn’t true, especially for queer people of color. Social hierarchies have only become more rigid online.
It’s worth noting that dating apps are completely free to choose whether or not they want to police what users say or do on their apps. As Facebook’s inconsistent, half-hearted fight against fake news has shown us, Silicon Valley is not—legally at least—responsible for human behavior. That’s up to us. “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides broad protection in this sense,” says Jack Turban, resident child and adolescent psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, who has studied and written about the unique dangers of gay dating apps for LGBTQ teenagers. “This means people can be racist, transphobic, body-shaming, or even soliciting minors for sex, and the app has no legal responsibility to stop them.”
Nick Fager, a psychotherapist based in New York and San Francisco, thinks the real solution to toxic behavior is getting gay men off their phones. “These apps want us to have more and more surface level connections because then we will keep coming back,” Fager says. “More intimacy means less app usage. Their business feeds on newness and shallowness.”
The pop-up ads on Grindr prove Fager’s point. The app and its advertisers consciously exploit our love for unattainable (or shall we say, very timely and costly) bodies. Many in-app ads feature straight-passing men with bulging pecs and washboard abs. Don’t have washboard abs? Here’s a Grindr ad for a plastic surgeon providing “hi-def ab and chest sculpting.” Other Grindr advertisements include luxury bidets, fiber supplements, and erectile dysfunction medicine. Gay men love muscles (just look at the ripped Insta-boyfriends capitalizing on our obsession, and circuit parties advertised on Grindr even exalt the mere signifiers of a “fit” lifestyle. I’m pretty sure straight men don’t throw jockstrap-themed parties. (Feel free to @ me if I’m wrong.) Using Grindr is a circular experience, made possible through insecurity. Everything always comes back to the pursuit of sex and preparation for it. If kindness is what we’re seeking, we all need to start with being kinder to ourselves during the chase.
In 2016, Fager founded “Grindr’ed Down,” a 16-week group therapy program, to help queer men better navigate off-screen intimacy (the modern-day equivalent of the Wild Wild West). Each 90-minute session kicks off with a guided meditation and then moves on to participants discussing their week in apps, sex, and relationships. The objective is to form a more positive relationship with gay dating. “I often hear men say they initially viewed the other members of the therapy group as objects, and then as the sessions went on, they became people,” Fager says. “That to me is the goal of the groups and what our culture needs the most right now: to shift from objectification to intimacy.”
Perhaps the reason efforts towards full inclusivity are finally gaining steam is because the whole time that the LGBTQ community was busy fighting for acceptance from others, we never really fought for it from ourselves. The toxicity of modern-day Grindr only proves that point. An app’s decision to finally do the right thing and police its rampant racism is step one in the process—a very good step, sure, but a starting point that arrives way later to the game than it should’ve. Datings apps want gay men to be kinder to each other—but that can’t happen until dating apps are kinder to gay men.
