Abstract
The first of the three analytic chapters establishes that newcomers are optimistic about using platforms geared at gay, bi, trans, and queer people, such as Grindr, to build networks with locals. These online/offline networks can be platonic (such as for friendship) and also logistical, as newcomers search for jobs, housing, and local information via their profile texts and personal chats. Platforms like Grindr also have an undeniably sexual online culture, and sometimes the lines between social, logistical, and sexual requests (or offers) are not clear. Theories of gay cosmopolitan tourism and queer migration guide the chapter’s argument that not all newcomers experience online socio-sexual cultures equally. Many immigrants have been more successful connecting with other immigrants than with European locals, whether for friendship, sex, or logistical purposes.
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- 1.
Some material from this chapter—mostly empirics such as this quotation—was published first in Andrew DJ Shield, “New in Town: Gay Immigrants and Geosocial Dating Apps,” in LGBTQs, Media, and Culture in Europe, ed. Alexander Dhoest et al. (London: Routledge, 2017), 244.
- 2.
From Chapter 1: “Grindr might best be described as a platform for socio-sexual networking, a term which emphasizes the processes of interpersonal communication among those open to forming erotic, platonic, and practical connections, sometimes simultaneously.” This chapter expands on this definition.
- 3.
Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú, Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005), xxxiii.
- 4.
Luibhéid, xliv.
- 5.
Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art, and Homosexual Fantasy (London: Routledge, 1993).
- 6.
Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2003).
- 7.
Gregory Mitchell, “TurboConsumers™ in Paradise: Tourism, Civil Rights, and Brazil’s Gay Sex Industry,” American Ethnologist 38, no. 4 (2011): 672. He defines “pink economy” as “markets shaped by LGBT culture,” of which tourism is just a part. “Pink dollars” also relate to the idea that gay civil rights can be best achieved through economic claims.
- 8.
Further, gay tourism research draws on various other theories: Joseph Massad’s conception of the Gay International (i.e. that white, especially male activists have projected an ethnocentric idea of “gay” identity onto other cultures worldwide), and Eve Sedgwick’s assertion that competing sexual ideologies can coexist; see Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). See, for example, the use of this text by Mitchell (below).
- 9.
Mitchell; Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
- 10.
Hiram Pérez, A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 107–108.
- 11.
Fatima El-Tayeb, “‘Gays Who Cannot Properly Be Gay’: Queer Muslims in the Neoliberal European City,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19 (February 2012): 89.
- 12.
Jonathan Corpus Ong, “Queer Cosmopolitanism in the Disaster Zone: ‘My Grindr Became the United Nations’,” International Communication Gazette 79, nos. 6–7 (2017): 656–673.
- 13.
Ibid., 658.
- 14.
Ibid., 668.
- 15.
African Americans & (white) Europeans were “two of the largest constituents of their customer bases.” They represented “heroic and civilizing… paternalism,” and provided locals with money, shopping trips, dinners, or drinks at bars: Mitchell, 671.
- 16.
Grindr screens all profile photos (and prohibits those showing underwear or less) and the “seeking” menu only includes the suggestive “right now”, but most users understand this to mean “sex” (often with “no strings,” i.e. a “hook-up”).
- 17.
Christian Grov et al., “Gay and Bisexual Men’s Use of the Internet: Research from the 1990s through 2013,” Journal of Sex Research 51, no. 4 (2014): 390–409.
- 18.
Quantitative data from 2016 to 2017 show that two-thirds of users select one or more items on the “looking for” menu. The data were based on five readings with an average of N = 590 based on a four-kilometer radius from a location by the Copenhagen University Southern Campus.
- 19.
On “off-label” uses of social media, see, e.g., Stefanie Duguay, “Identity Modulation in Networked Publics: Queer Women’s Participation and Representation on Tinder, Instagram, and Vine” (PhD diss., Queensland University of Technology, 2017), 61.
- 20.
Via § 8.3.3 of Grindr, “Grindr Terms and Conditions of Service,” effective date: 30 March 2017, last accessed Fall 2017 via https://www.grindr.com/terms-of-service. See also § 8.3.6 in Grindr, “Terms and Conditions of Service”: “You will NOT make unsolicited offers… to other Users of the Grindr Services. This includes unsolicited advertising, promotional materials or other solicitation material, bulk mailing of commercial advertising…”.
- 21.
But to my surprise, “betale” (to pay) flagged my profile! While at a concert in Jutland, I posted on Grindr asking if anyone was driving back to Copenhagen, adding, “Jeg kan betale”—I can pay [for the ride]—but an hour later, my profile text had been deleted! I was not banned for any period of time.
- 22.
Not posted on Grindr, but a related platform. Shield, “New in Town,” 251; also cited in Brennan, 4 (below).
- 23.
Joseph Brennan, “Cruising for Cash: Prostitution on Grindr,” Discourse, Context & Media 17 (2017): 4. Brennan explores the “profit-seeking motivations” behind those who use Grindr for sex work. Brennan argues that many of those who offer transactional sex via Grindr view the act as an alternative to doing porn; in other words, they are combining sexuality and technology to make cash, without leaving the digital traces of more “traditional” pornographic endeavors like online videos.
- 24.
“While there is nothing that says that the developers of Gaydar explicitly condone escort activity, the design of the site greatly facilitates such activity and provides a source of profit for QSoft, therefore it is not unreasonable to claim that Gaydar represents a moral position that condones escort activity inscribed into its design.” Ben Light et al., “Gay Men, Gaydar and the Commodification of Difference,” Information Technology and People 21, no. 3 (2008): 307–308.
- 25.
Also a 72-year-old has a “ROOM FOR RENT IN THE CENTRE OF COPENHAGEN” at a price of 40 euro/day, which suggests that it is also for short-term visitors. The ads in this section come also from PlanetRomeo, a platform that better facilitates international contact (e.g. by potential tourists).
- 26.
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): 1128. Note that co-author Charles Abbott received his B.A. with a thesis titled, “‘Going to a Bathhouse to Meet Friends’: An Exploratory Study of Grindr, a Social Networking Application for Gay and Bisexual Men.”
- 27.
Two more examples of visitor profiles who might have sought a sexual relationship with their tour guide: in one profile, “Visiting,” the user suggested meeting someone for “coffee/drinks/dates etc.” but he also sought a fitness partner: “Anyone up for a run?” The “dates etc.” implies that the user is interested in meeting for sex, but that platonic connections are also welcome, particularly if the Grindr user shares the visitor’s interest in running. Similarly, a “Traveling photographer” writes in his profile text that he is “here 2 chat and kiss and take photos.” Like the runner, the photographer would like to connect with locals intimately, but also appears open to chatting with those who share his interest in photography.
- 28.
Shield, “New in Town,” 250–251.
- 29.
Likely to show familiarity with the Arabic dialects in both countries, and/or to clarify his immigration background.
- 30.
Shield, “New in Town,” 249–250.
- 31.
Shield, “New in Town,” 250.
- 32.
Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986 [1952]), 109.
- 33.
Fanon also analyzed the biography of a black woman married to a white man in Martinique; one evening at a dinner party, she remembered, “The [white] women kept watching me with a condescension that I found unbearable. I felt that I was wearing too much makeup, that I was not properly dressed, that I was not doing [my husband] André any credit, perhaps simply because of the color of my skin….” Although Fanon was critical of the woman—who he felt “dream[ed] of a form of salvation that consists of magically turning white” and of “whiten[ing] the race”—he excused her racial paranoia due to the prevailing context of racism and shame in the French colonies. Fanon, 44, 47; and Mayotte Capécia, Je Suis Martiniquaise, 1948, cited in Fanon, 43.
- 34.
Fanon, 117.
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Shield, A.D. (2019). “I was staying at the camp, and I met this guy on Grindr, and he asked me to move in with him”: Tourists, Immigrants, and Logistical Uses of Socio-Sexual Media. In: Immigrants on Grindr. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30394-5_4
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