Abstract
“Grindr Studies” has emerged as an academic field and examines the cultural practices of especially gay men “on app,” including topics like self-presentation strategies, online/offline dynamics, and sexual racism. Grindr research builds upon decades of scholarly inquiries into online cultures, including studies of digital queer subcultures and online racism. In this chapter, Shield weaves together his own personal experiences in digital spaces for primarily gay men since the 1990s with the contemporaneous scholarly literature on gay sexuality and race online.
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Notes
- 1.
Grindr consistently referred to itself a network for “gay men” (“the world’s largest”) from 2009 through 2018, at which point the app broadened its recognition of and support for trans and queer users (see Chapter 1).
- 2.
Lara O’Reilly, “How Gay Hook-Up App Grindr Is Selling Itself to Major Brand Advertisers,” Business Insider Australia, 27 November 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com.au/grindr-ceo-joel-simkhai-on-advertising-pitch-deck-2014-11.
- 3.
The average daily user’s number of daily logins has reportedly doubled from 9 to 18 during this period. Grindr, “Fact Sheet [2015]”; Grindr, “Fact Sheet [2017].”
- 4.
In the episode, Jeppe then signs onto the app, only to see that the class teacher—who had not said anything about his sexual orientation—was also signed on; the two of them have a brief tryst after school in the classroom, which Rita catches.
- 5.
Isak’s relationship with the app is short-lived, as he begins to date another classmate whom he meets in an after-school activity.
- 6.
Rasmus Helmann, “‘Er du den sutteglade fyr, jeg søger?’: Efter ti år er appen Grindr mere end bare et kødkatalog” [After Ten Years: Grindr Is More Than Just a Meat Catalog], Politiken, 7 January 2019, https://politiken.dk/kultur/art6937614/Efter-ti-%C3%A5r-er-appen-Grindr-mere-end-bare-et-k%C3%B8dkatalog.
- 7.
Sharif Mowlabocus , Gaydar Culture: Gay Men, Technology and Embodiment (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 15.
- 8.
Much of this chapter also looks at the cruising possibilities via Bluetooth, though this technique (“Bluejacking”) did not develop into a major method of mobile cruising. Mowlabocus, Gaydar Culture, 186–187, 194–195.
- 9.
Aside from the literature cited below, and in the rest of this chapter, other scholarly works that informed my review of geo-social apps and gay men’s digital cultures include following: Jed R. Brubaker et al., “Departing Glances: A Sociotechnical Account of ‘Leaving’ Grindr,” New Media & Society 18, no. 3 (2014), 373–390; Kane Race, “Speculative Pragmatism and Intimate Arrangements: Online Hook-Up Devices in Gay Life,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 17, no. 4 (2014): 496–511; Kane Race, “‘Party and Play’: Online Hook-Up Devices and the Emergence of PNP Practices Among Gay Men,” Sexualities 18, no. 3 (2015): 253–275; Jean Burgess et al., “Making Digital Cultures of Gender and Sexuality With Social Media,” Social Media + Society 2, no. 4 (2016).
- 10.
Yoel Roth, “Zero Feet Away: The Digital Geography of Gay Social Media,” Journal of Homosexuality 63, no. 3 (2015): 437–442. See also David Gudelunas, “There’s an App for That: The Uses and Gratifications of Online Social Networks for Gay Men,” Sexuality & Culture 16 (2012): 347–365.
- 11.
Courtney Blackwell et al., “Seeing and Being Seen: Co-Situation and Impression Formation Using Grindr, a Location-Aware Gay Dating App,” New Media & Society, 17 (2015): 1117.
- 12.
Brett A. Bumgarner, “Mobilizing the Gay Bar: Grindr and the Layering of Spatial Context,” paper presented at the Conference of the International Communication Association, London, UK, 17–21 June 2013; cited in Blackwell et al., “Seeing and Being Seen,” 1122.
- 13.
Blackwell et al., “Seeing and Being Seen,” 1126.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Alexander Dhoest et al., “Introduction,” in LGBTQs, Media, and Culture in Europe, eds. Alexander Dhoest et al. (London: Routledge, 2017), 2.
- 16.
Alan Collins and Stephen Drinkwater, “Fifty Shades of Gay: Social and Technological Change, Urban Deconcentration and Niche Enterprise,” Urban Studies 54, no. 3 (2017): 765–785.
- 17.
Michael Musto, “Gay Dance Clubs on the Wane in the Age of Grindr,” The New York Times, 26 April 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/fashion/gay-dance-clubs-grindr.html.
- 18.
Chris Staudinger, “Loading More Guys: Shining a Light on Gay Dating in the App Age,” Antigravity, May 2017, http://www.antigravitymagazine.com/2017/05/loading-more-guys-shining-a-light-on-gay-dating-in-the-app-age/.
- 19.
Ryan Centner and Martin Zebracki, “Gay Male Urban Spaces After Grindr & Gentrification,” call for papers for the Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society with Institute of British Geographers 2017, http://www.zebracki.org/cfp-rgs-ibg-2017-gay-male-urban-spaces/.
- 20.
Greggor Mattson, “Centering Provincial Gay Life,” Paper at the Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society with Institute of British Geographers 2017, http://conference.rgs.org/AC2017/338.
- 21.
Wouter Van Gent and Gerald Brugman, “Emancipation and the City: The Fragmented Spatiality of Migrant Gay Men in Amsterdam & New York,” Paper at the Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society with Institute of British Geographers 2017, http://conference.rgs.org/AC2017/306.
- 22.
Kane Race, The Gay Science: Intimate Experiments with the Problem of HIV (London: Routledge, 2018), Chapter 7 (page numbers not yet available). As the book mainly explores contemporary issues related to HIV, Race observes that people are more likely to include personal information about HIV status and safer sex practices on web-based profiles (and thus less so on apps, where people tend to check in casually).
- 23.
E.g. Brandon Miller, “‘Dude, Where’s Your Face?’ Self-Presentation, Self-Description, and Partner Preferences on a Social Networking Application for Men Who Have Sex with Men: A Content Analysis,” Sexuality & Culture 19, no. 4 (2015): 637–658; Lik Sam Chan, “How Sociocultural Context Matters in Self-Presentation: A Comparison of U.S. and Chinese Profiles on Jack’d, a Mobile Dating App for Men Who Have Sex With Men,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 6040–6059. An interesting study in Taiwan theorized Scruff (similar to Grindr) as a synopticon, where the many headless torsos observe the few who show their faces on profiles: Cheng-Nan Hou, “An Aggregated Interface of Xingtian Gods in Synopticon: Theorizing the Picture of Using Western Gay LBRTD App in a Chinese Perspective,” paper presented at the Conference of the International Communication Association, Fukuoka, Japan, 9–13 June 2016.
- 24.
Miller, “‘Dude, Where’s Your Face”; Light, “Networked Masculinities”, Light, “Introducing Masculinity Studies to Information Systems Research.”
- 25.
Chan, “How Sociocultural Context Matters in Self-Presentation”; Terri D. Conley, “Perceived Proposer Personality Characteristics and Gender Differences in Acceptance of Casual Sex Offers,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 100 (2011): 309–329.
- 26.
Lik Sam Chan, “How Sociocultural Context Matters,” 6040, 6052.
- 27.
E.g. Earl Burrell et al., “Use of the Location-Based Social Networking Application GRINDR as a Recruitment Tool in Rectal Microbicide Development Research,” AIDS and Behavior 16, no. 7 (2012): 1816–1820.
- 28.
Jesus G. Smith , “Two-Faced Racism in Gay Online Sex: Preference in the Frontstage or Racism in the Backstage?” in Sex in the Digital Age, eds. Paul Nixon and Isabel Düsterhöft (New York: Routledge, 2018), 135–136.
- 29.
Smith, “Two-Faced Racism,” 144.
- 30.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, no. 1 (1989): 139–167; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000); (in a Danish context) Dorthe Staunæs, “Where Have All the Subjects Gone? Bringing Together the Concepts of Intersectionality and Subjectification,” NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 11, no. 2 (2003): 101–110; Andrew DJ Shield, “Grindr Culture: Intersectional and Socio-Sexual,” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 18, no. 1 (2018).
- 31.
Some refer to Web 2.0 as “revolution” that sparked such as “online dating” in the early 2000s: Robert V. Kozinets, Netnography: Redefined (Los Angeles: Sage, 2015), 7.
- 32.
Nancy K. Baym, Personal Connections in the Digital Age, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015), 12 (of the digital version of Chapter 1, as downloaded from the Danish Royal Library).
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
“While the technical and business aspects of Web 2.0 are significant in and of themselves, more germane to this discussion are the cultural shifts that came with Web 2.0”: Nicole B. Ellison and danah boyd, “Sociality Through Social Network Sites,” in The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies, ed. William H. Dutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 151–172.
- 35.
Mowlabocus , 24 (and see Chapter 2 more generally). See also Jan Willem Duyvendak and Mattias Duyves, “Gai Pied After Ten Years: A Commercial Success, A Moral Bankruptcy?” Journal of Homosexuality 25, nos. 1–2 (1993): 205–213.
- 36.
Andrew DJ Shield, “‘Suriname—Seeking a Lonely, Lesbian Friend for Correspondence’: Immigration and Homo-Emancipation in the Netherlands, 1965–79,” History Workshop Journal 78, no. 1 (2014): 246–264; Andrew DJ Shield, Immigrants in the Sexual Revolution: Perceptions and Participation in Northwest Europe (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Chapter 7.
- 37.
For example, in the ways users self-identify (e.g. with regard to labels about ethnicity, coloring, masculinity, stature); the spectrum of relationships that users seek (e.g. friendship, romance, casual sex, logistical information); and the fact that users who communicate through the medium often seek to meet in person. See also: H.G. Cocks, Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column (London: Random House Books, 2009); and more generally about the relationship between historic media and social media: Lee Humphreys, The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Cataloguing of Everyday Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018).
- 38.
The Minitel was a pre-worldwide-web, closed-network videotext system that was popular particularly in France in the late 1980s and early 1990s, mainly for those seeking directories of phone numbers and addresses. See also: Anna Livia, “Public and Clandestine: Gay Men’s Pseudonyms on the French Minitel,” Sexualities 5, no. 2 (2002): 201–217; Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
- 39.
Mathias Duyves, “The Minitel: The Glittering Future of a New Invention,” Journal of Homosexuality 25, nos. 1–2 (1993): 193–203. With the Minitel, one did not need to correspond via mailed letters to home addresses; nor did one need to exchange long and personal letters and photographs. Duyves wrote that the Minitel “influenced gay communication immediately, heavily and constantly.”
- 40.
Theo van der Meer, “Sodomy and the Pursuit of a Third Sex in the Early Modern Period,” in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. Gilbert Herdt (New York: Zone Books, 1994); Randolph Trumbach, “Renaissance Sodomy, 1500–1700” and “Modern Sodomy: The Origins of Modern Homosexuality, 1700–1800,” in A Gay History of Britain, ed. Matt Cook (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007); Jeffrey Merrick, Order and Disorder Under the Ancien Régime (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).
- 41.
Wilhelm von Rosen, “A Short History of Gay Denmark 1613–1989: The Rise and the Possibly Happy End of the Danish Homosexual,” Nordisk Sexologi 12 (1994): 125–136.
- 42.
On lesbian experiences: Tamara Chaplin, “Lesbians Online: Queer Identity and Community Formation on the French Minitel,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 22, no. 3 (2014): 451–472.
- 43.
E.g. Kevin Driscoll, “Hobbyist Inter-Networking and the Popular Internet Imaginary: Forgotten Histories of Networked Personal Computing, 1978–1998” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2014); or Baym, Personal Connections in the Digital Age, 9–10 (of the digital file of Chapter 1).
- 44.
Baym, Personal Connections in the Digital Age, 9 (of the digital file of Chapter 1).
- 45.
Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 114.
- 46.
At my school, these computers arrived gradually: first one per grade, then one per classroom, then 3–4 per classroom by 1995. Non-mouse computer games in school included Oregon Trail, Word Munchers, and Number Munchers. One teacher recounted that a few years prior, there was one computer at the whole school, which he helped roll to a vaulted room at the end of every week.
- 47.
It took persistence to enter my these early chat rooms , as they tended to be “full” (at thirty users or so) and one had to mindlessly click on the chat room button repeatedly until a user left.
- 48.
My friends’ parents reacted differently to fears they had about children chatting with strangers online. At first, one friend’s father insisted on sitting with us and approving every message we sent; one time, he wouldn’t let us mention the name or even the breed of my friend’s dog (out of privacy concerns). My mother probably told me to behave cautiously in chat rooms (e.g. not providing my full name), but I don’t recall being monitored.
- 49.
In the illustrated story (entitled “Cind.E.r”), Cinderella—who was shy, and not beautiful—fantasized about marrying the Prince. The night of the Prince’s ball—when he would choose a Princess—Cinderella’s evil stepmother and stepsisters abandoned her. So Cinderella—lonely and bored—was met by her Fairy Godmother who granted her one wish: a computer; with internet.
Cinderella made the screen name “Cind.E.r” and went into a chat room . But the chat room was empty, since everyone was at the ball! Everyone, except for one other user: “Prints2”. Meanwhile, the Prince—who it turned out was also ugly and shy—had skipped his own ball so he could sit in his room and play online. That night, Cind.E.r and Prints2 chatted, bonded, fell in love, and then—just as the Prince “came out” about his true identity—the clock struck midnight and—poof!—Cinderella’s computer disappeared. The Prince’s men had to go door-to-door asking every young maiden to guess the Prince’s screen name. Cinderella was the perfect match, and they lived happily ever after. Andrew Shield, “Cind.E.r,” unpublished, 1995.
- 50.
She was able to hook it up to her university’s Ethernet, which was free to all students.
- 51.
We had to “dial up” to get online, which took anywhere from one to five minutes, and culminated in a nonsense cacophony of blips and beeps and static that somehow resembled a song that I can still sing in my head today.
- 52.
At my mother’s house, The Boston Globe was (and still is) delivered each morning, National Public Radio and local public radio was (and still is) played in the background from morning till evening, and network television was the main source for local news and entertainment (and still is, augmented by cable television and streaming services).
- 53.
As a 14- or 15-year-old, I provoked different reactions from others: most were usually polite, but some accused me of being a police officer, or told me to leave the room because I was ruining it for the adults. But I never lied about my age , mainly in the hopes of meeting another teenager like myself.
- 54.
Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993), 5.
- 55.
Scholarship on online communities has continued to develop: see e.g. Debra Ferreday, Online Belongings: Fantasy, Affect and Web Communities (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009); and on activist communities, see Thomas Poell and José van Dijck, “Social Media and Activist Communication,” in The Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media, ed. Chris Atton (London: Routledge, 2015), 527–537.
- 56.
Nancy K. Baym, “The Emergence of Community in Computer-Mediated Communication,” in CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, ed. Steven G. Jones (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 152.
- 57.
David Shaw, “Gay Men and Computer Communication: A Discourse of Sex and Identity in Cyberspace,” in Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety, ed. Steven Jones (London: Sage, 2002).
- 58.
Unfortunately, I could not link him to any photographs of myself, so I had to get his home address and snail-mail him printed photographs. This, in retrospect, is hilarious to me.
- 59.
Shaw, “Gay Men and Computer Communication,” 133.
- 60.
Ibid., 135.
- 61.
See also Daniel Tsang, “Notes on Queer ‘n Asian Virtual Sex,” Amerasia Journal 20, no. 1 (1994): 117–128; Nina Wakeford, “Cyberqueer,” in Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction, ed. Andy Medhurst and Sally R. Hunt (London: Cassell, 1997), 20–38.
- 62.
Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 49.
- 63.
Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1996), 113; see also Nakamura, Cybertypes, 115.
- 64.
“Anthem,” produced for MCI by Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schemetterer, 1997; available as “MCI TV Ad 1997,” YouTube.com, uploaded on 12 October 2010, last accessed Fall 2017 via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioVMoeCbrig. See also discussions in Nakamura, Cybertypes, 88–95, including of AT&T’s 1996 ad, “Imagine a world without limits.”
- 65.
Beth Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert Rodman, “Introduction,” in Race in Cyberspace, ed. Kolko, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 4. The anthology addressed diverse topics, such as how white schools in the U.S. had more computer access in the 1990s, which affected the demographics of online participants; or how indigenous Hawaiians worked to preserve their language and culture online.
- 66.
Kolko et al., “Introduction,” 6.
- 67.
Beth Kolko, “Erasing @race: Going White in the (Inter)Face,” in Race in Cyberspace, ed. Beth Kolko et al. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 193.
- 68.
David Silver, “Margins in the Wires: Looking for Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Blacksburg Electronic Village,” in Race in Cyberspace, ed. Kolko et al. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 143.
- 69.
“PlanetOut’s Online Personal Service Hits 150,000 Milestone,” PlanetOut.com, 9 August 2000, last accessed Fall 2017 via Wayback Machine.
- 70.
Mowlabocus , 7.
- 71.
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Hand-Book of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J.G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 2011 [1985]), 241–258. With some attention to this topic in the context of gay men’s dating websites: David Gudelunas, “Online Personal Ads: Community and Sex, Virtually,” Journal of Homosexuality 49, no. 1 (2005): 62–87.
- 72.
Danah boyd, “Why Youth < 3 Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life,” in Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, ed. David Buckingham (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 127.
- 73.
The colorful, glossy periodical resembled the teen magazines my female friends read, like YM, which were filled with photos of cute teen guys, quizzes, and confessions. The XY profile was very basic: one photo, and a box of open text.
- 74.
Ellison and boyd, “Sociality Through Social Network Sites,” 157.
- 75.
Marion Wasserbauer, “‘I Think I’m Quite Fluid with Those Kinds of Things’: Exploring Music and Non-Heterosexual Women’s Identities,” in LGBTQs, Media, and Culture in Europe, ed. Alexander Dhoest et al. (London: Routledge, 2017), 80–97.
- 76.
It is important to link the concept of “passing” to the history of light-skinned Americans of African descent “passing” as white in order to access certain privileges afforded only to whites, e.g. in the antebellum and Jim-Crow-era U.S.
- 77.
Nakamura, Cybertypes, 139.
- 78.
Ibid., xv–xvi, 5, 32–47.
- 79.
Tsang.
- 80.
Or as Mowlabocus summarized: “Text-based representations of the self allow cultural specificities to come to the fore, bypassing the essentialising category of ‘asian-american’ and providing users with a greater sense of cultural identity.” Mowlabocus , Gaydar Culture, 11–12.
- 81.
Voon Chin Phua and Gayle Kaufman, “The Crossroads of Race and Sexuality: Date Selection Among Men in Internet ‘Personal’ Ads,” Journal of Family Issues 8 (November 2003): 984.
- 82.
E.g. Denton Callander et al., “Is Sexual Racism Really Racism? Distinguishing Attitudes Toward Sexual Racism and Generic Racism Among Gay and Bisexual Men,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 44 (2015): 1991–2000.
- 83.
Andil Gosine, “Brown to Blonde at Gay.com: Passing White in Queer Cyberspace,” in Queer Online: Media Technology and Sexuality, ed. Kate O’Riordan et al. (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), “Brown to Blonde,” 141.
- 84.
Gosine, “Brown to Blonde,” 147.
- 85.
Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 4.
- 86.
Gosine, “Brown to Blonde,” 150.
- 87.
The first thing I ever searched was “Andrew Shield,” and I found a professional sports photographer in Australia with a beautiful, colorful website filled with surfers and wind boarders. He’s still at it: andrewshield.com.au and on Instagram as andrewshield.
- 88.
In the 1990s, most porn sites illegally circulated scanned images from printed magazines. For a mediocre film depicting this early era of internet porn: Middle Men, dir. George Gallo (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 2009). See also Jeffrey Escoffier, Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2009).
- 89.
This education was augmented by my public-school health classes and the syndicated radio show Love Line. On the sensitive topic of how and what young teenagers (might) learn from watching porn—and note that I have some concerns with the conclusions in this study—see Ine Beyens et al., “Early Adolescent Boys’ Exposure to Internet Pornography: Relationships to Pubertal Timing, Sensation Seeking, and Academic Performance,” The Journal of Early Adolescence 35, no. 8 (2015). Beyens’ research has asserted that teenagers learn from the porn they watch; but she measured for banal factors, like the idea that both partners should climax, or that partners need to change positions multiple times during a sexual encounter.
- 90.
Richard Dyer, “Male Gay Porn: Coming to Terms,” Jump Cut (A Review of Contemporary Media), no. 30 (March 1985), https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC30folder/GayPornDyer.html.
- 91.
The Face Book was also made available online, which facilitated searching if one knew the first name of a classmate; but students had no ability to change their photo or update personal information.
- 92.
danah boyd, and Nicole B. Ellison, “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 2 (2007): 216.
- 93.
For an interesting dramatization of Facebook’s foundation in the context of printed “face books” and early social networking and dating sites, see the first third of the 2010 film The Social Network. David Fincher et al., The Social Network (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2011).
- 94.
Most heard about it immediately through word-of-mouth, but some knew about it already from friends at other Ivy League schools. For many years, one’ Facebook URL was actually the number that the user joined at a university. A few of my friends resisted joining, either because they declared loyalty to Friendster (or other websites), or because they were hesitant to share their face and other personal information on the internet. Upon making my profile, I amassed over a hundred “friends” in one day.
- 95.
Finally, students could link to their classes, which had the effect of transforming the physical bodies seated in a lecture hall into a digital page through which one could browse one’s classmates’ profiles.
- 96.
Prior to Facebook , I had three options for figuring out if someone was openly gay: ask the person directly; ask someone who knew the person; or guess, based on behavior, dress, or eye contact. This changed with Facebook , as this anecdote shows: On my first day on Facebook , I stumbled across a friend of a friend of a friend who I recognized immediately: my mailroom crush! Before the arrival of Facebook , the best that I could hope for was that I would run into him at a party and strike up a conversation. But now, I could learn his name (Zach), his class year (’06), his relationship status (Single), and his avowed sexual orientation: “Interested in: Women.” Damn! A brief moment of heartbreak. But maybe I could find someone else?
- 97.
During orientation week, I began to meet members of the LGBT student group to make gay friends or a boyfriend, and I gradually stopped checking my XY and PlanetOut profiles. Over the next years, I browsed a few new gay websites, which in many ways resembled PlanetOut, except that (at least it felt like) there were more users exchanging more messages and more digital photos than before. I learned about a few websites that were more “cruise-y,” like Manhunt.net (f. 2001), Gay.com’s chatrooms, and Cragislist’s personal ads. When I traveled to Europe for the first time, I also used Gaydar (f. 1999).
- 98.
boyd and Ellison, “Social Network Sites,” 220. MySpace also allowed for more individualization with colors and fonts (via basic HTML) than Facebook , and did not require a university affiliation (as Facebook did at the time).
- 99.
Ben Light, “Introducing Masculinity Studies to Information Systems Research: The Case of Gaydar,” European Journal of Information Systems 16, no. 5 (2007): 658–665; and Ben Light, “Networked Masculinities and Social Networking Sites: A Call for the Analysis of Men and Contemporary Digital Media,” Masculinities and Social Change 2, no. 3 (2013): 245–265.
- 100.
Ben Light et al., “Gay men, Gaydar and the Commodification of Difference,” Information Technology and People 21, no. 3 (2008): 300–314. For example, p. 304: “Through the use of Gaydar.co.uk individuals write a version of themselves and of this gay community into being. However, because of the desire to commodify ‘the difference’ that is gay, predominantly white men, online and offline, such inscriptions become monolithic caricatures that are obdurate and enrol even those who do not participate in such arrangements at all or only by proxy.”
- 101.
These terms generally relate to anal sex (i.e. penetrator and recipient) but also sometimes relate to sexual personality more generally. In Europe, it is also common to hear “active” and “passive.”
- 102.
In contrast to the experiments performed by Tsang and Gosine, Robinson engaged with a platform that was highly visual, and where most users expected to see at least one photograph. Thus, in order to control the variables on his eight profiles, Robinson needed to select a photograph of a racially ambiguous man who could pass as white, Latino, Asian, and Black. Russell Robinson, “Structural Dimensions of Romantic Preferences,” Fordham Law Review 76 (2008): 2786–2820.
- 103.
Ibid. See also Shaka McGlotten, Virtual Intimacy. Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014), 73.
- 104.
E.g. “Mandingo: The Stereotyped Hypersexual Black Male ‘Buck’”; in McGlotten, 68.
- 105.
S. Bartoş et al., “Differences in Romanian Men’s Online Personals by Sexualities,” The Journal of Men’s Studies 17 (2009): 153.
- 106.
André Brock, “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56, no. 4 (2012): 529–549. See also “Who Said What, When About Black Twitter Part 1–2009–2012,” last accessed Fall 2017 via, https://raceandict4d.wordpress.com/2013/11/15/who-said-what-when-about-black-twitter-part-1-2009-2012/.
- 107.
danah boyd, “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook ,” in Race After the Internet, ed. Lisa Nakamura et al. (London: Routledge, 2011), 203–222.
- 108.
boyd, “White Flight,” 203–204.
- 109.
Lisa Nakamura, “Race and Identity in Digital Media”, in Mass Media and Society, 5th ed., ed. James Curran (Sage, 2010), i.e. the specific roles that some Chinese players assumed (e.g. “gold miners”) and the racist invectives hurled at these players. See also Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
- 110.
Gavan Titley, “No Apologies for Cross-Posting: European Trans-Media Space and the Digital Circuitries of Racism,” Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture 5, no. 1 (2014): 51.
- 111.
Chris Berry et al., eds. Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
- 112.
Joyce Y.M. Nip, “The Queer Sisters and its Electronic Bulletin Board: A Study of the Internet for Social Movement Mobilization,” Information, Communication and Society 7, no. 1 (2004): 23–49.
- 113.
D.C. Lin, “Sissies Online: Taiwanese Male Queers Performing Sissinesses in Cyberspaces,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2006): 270–288.
- 114.
See also Mowlabocus , Gaydar Culture, 12; Lukasz Szulc, “The Geography of LGBTQ Internet Studies,” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014).
- 115.
Collins, Rodney, “Efféminés, Gigolos, and MSMs in the Cyber-Networks, Coffeehouses, and ‘Secret Gardens’ of Contemporary Tunis,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 8, no. 3 (2012): 89–112.
- 116.
Matthew Gagné, “Queer Beirut Online: The Participation of Men in Gayromeo.com,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 8, no. 3 (2012): 113–137.
- 117.
See also the other articles in the special issue on “Queering Middle Eastern Cyberscapes,” ed. Adi Kuntsman and Noor Al-Qasimi; Adi Kuntsman et al., “Introduction,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 8, no. 3 (2012): 1–13.
- 118.
Akhil Katyal, “Playing a Double Game: Idioms of Same Sex Desire in India” (PhD diss., University of London, 2009). See also Rahul Mitra and Radhika Gajjala, “Queer Blogging in Indian Digital Diasporas: A Dialogic Encounter,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 32, no. 4 (2008): 400–423.
- 119.
Grindr’s geo-social feature—while novel—was also a limitation. Limited to viewing only the 100 closest users (on my free version), I could seldom view people in another neighborhood of dense Manhattan, let alone another borough of New York.
- 120.
McGlotten, 2. Emphasis added.
- 121.
These and other works showed “depressing evidence of antiblack racism in online dating”: Ibid., 147.
- 122.
Ibid., 63.
- 123.
Ibid., 66, 76.
- 124.
Elija Cassidy and Wilfred Yang Wang, “Gay Men’s Digital Cultures Beyond Gaydar and Grindr: LINE Use in the Gay Chinese Diaspora of Australia,” Information, Communication & Society, 2018.
- 125.
Chan, 6054.
- 126.
Ibid., 6054, 6047.
- 127.
Kristian Møller Jørgensen, “The Media Go-Along: Researching Mobilities with Media at Hand,” MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research 32, no. 60 (2016): 41.
- 128.
Ibid., 47. See also: Kristian Møller et al., “Bleeding Boundaries: Domesticating Gay Hook-Up Apps,” in Mediated Intimacies: Connectivities, Relationalities and Proximities, ed. Rikke Andreassen et al. (London: Routledge, 2017), 213: “All participants in the sample are… white and cis-gendered men.”
- 129.
Wim Peumans, “‘No Asians, Please’: Same-Sex Sexualities and Ethnic Minorities in Europe,” in Hand Picked: Stimulus Respond, ed. Jack Boulton (London: Pavement Books, 2014), 128–139.
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Shield, A.D. (2019). “The glittering future of a new invention”: Historicizing Grindr Culture. In: Immigrants on Grindr. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30394-5_2
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