On the Grindr

When smartphones were just becoming popular—and I realize that already this story sounds like the creaky tale of an old-timer who just doesn’t understand why whippersnappers these days don’t appreciate the velocipede or the Edison cylinder phonograph—Grindr was the first sex app that really took advantage of geolocation features. But that doesn’t mean I liked it.

One of the reasons I avoided Grindr for so many years is that its most popular use, back in the midwest when it first launched, was for currying scorn. I’d go into a gay bar and see gaggles of guys clustered around someone with a brand-new iPhone 3G to peer at the tiny screen running Grindr; as they flipped through the photos, they’d play Fuck/Marry/Kill for each profile bold enough to post on the new service, only occasionally glancing up from their merriment to make sure the person in question wasn’t actually standing nearby. In the Midwest, at least, my impression had always been that Grindr was less about actually cruising for encounters, and more about weaponizing people’s unfortunate profile shots either for amusement or outright derision.

When I did download Grindr and gave it a try for a few days, I could watch my phone’s battery icon basically drain from full to empty right before my eyes. That was the nail in the coffin; the app didn’t last very long on my phone. I tried Growlr for a while (never met anyone from it who would actually meet), and Jackd (ditto, nor would I really want to meet anyone from it) before settling on Scruff for my geolocation needs.

Scruff has its share of irritations, mostly minor. The one that bugs me most is how, seemingly upon every login, the app asks me if I’d mind taking a ten-second survey of how they can improve their services. You can improve your services by stop asking me to take constant ten-second surveys of how to improve your services, I’ll reply in the comment box. Then later that day I’ll open the app to find it asking once again if I’m willing to take another ten-second survey of how to improve its services.  Jesus Christ, Johnny Scruff, stop with the nagging already.

Scruff also suffers from a peculiar kind of bloat as it attempts to be all things to all gays; it’s got a travel section that neither I nor anyone else I know uses. It allows people to designated themselves as ‘ambassadors’ of their home cities, and it seems to me that while some men consider their ambassador status (in New York City, at least) to mean that out-of-towners should feel free to message them with tourism-related questions, there are a handful of self-appointed ambassadors who seem to think their diplomatic duties should take place naked and on all fours, with a welcoming hole open to all visitors.

If only U.N. ambassadors were so outgoing.

No, but Scruff has a flexible and straightforward profile system. It makes searching and filtering fairly accessible, albeit with a lot of finger-jabbing at the screen. I like Scruff’s Tinder-like Match system, in which men who swipe right on each other’s photos are notified of their mutual interest. The system’s guys, by and large, are friendly and less twinkish than the alternatives. It doesn’t hurt that my face has been deemed pretty enough that I land on the front page with some regularity.

I’ve had some good hookups from the service. And every now and then a reader tracks me down there, to say hello. (Hello, readers!) Yet when I travel, and even in a densely-populated metropolitan area, Scruff is still not used by as many people as Grindr. And since I have occasional moods when I grumble about why do I have to have Chipotle’s limited selection of five items when I could go to Cheesecake Factory with its thirty-page menu, I have to admit there have been times through the years I’ve had Grindr envy.

Over the summer my spouse took me (as arm candy, naturally) to a fancy-schmancy business dinner function. I was off in the exile corner along with a small group of other wives and accessories sharing a bowl of tortilla chips and some incredibly bad salsa, while all the big shots talked business together on the other side of the room. Then an effete older gentleman, a vision in striped seersucker, wafted over from the big-shots group. I say he was an older gentleman; he was probably about my age. And very likely gay. Guilty by virtue of the matched seersucker and tasseled loafers, really. “Ladies,” he announced, tapping his fingertips together, “and gentleman,” he added, pointedly looking me over. “I’ve made it my mission tonight to bring you up to speed on what’s what . . . and who’s who.”

The man then proceeded to spill all kinds of innocuous dirt about various people attending the function that evening. There was one fellow, for example, who had spent bags and bags of money renovating his summer home in the months before, only to find that it had some irreparable flaw in its foundation. Now it likely needed to be completely demolished. Another fellow was going through a nasty divorce from someone who used to be a backup singer for someone I’d never heard of. This other man had been forced into a lateral transfer from one branch to another; everyone was terribly worried about that one over there, since he’d had a reoccurrence of a cancer scare.

“And that fellow,” said Mr. Seersucker, relishing his own gossip as he nodded in the direction of a square-jawed, dark-haired fellow with the clean-cut good looks of an extra from Mad Men, “that fellow is on The Grindr.” For the benefit of the straight women in his audience, which was basically everyone but me, he added, “The Grindr is like Tinder for the gays.” Finally, he added, “And his profile has plenty of scandalous photos!”

Well. You can probably guess who quietly excused himself to go get a drink while he pulled out his phone and surreptitiously downloaded Grindr for the first time in about eight years. Yes, I really did. My purpose wasn’t to hook up immediately with the fellow in question; I was just curious to see if he would show up as ten feet away from me. With a shirtless profile pic. And with ‘LOOKING 4’ followed by an eggplant emoji as his user name. You know. All the things a little gay boy grows up dreaming of.

The upshot of that story is that I never did see the square-jawed fellow (or his scandalous photos) on Grindr that evening. But this time around, the app has remained on my phone.

When I got home, I opened up Grindr to see who was in my immediate vicinity. I recognized a face or two from Scruff, but while on Scruff they might’ve been the photos closest to mine, on Grindr they were further down the list. Way further down, in fact. Where on Scruff there might’ve been perhaps three or four guys in a mile radius from me, out here in the bland white heart of suburbia, on Grindr there were dozens. A score or more, even.

I left my profile blank for a while. I didn’t really intend to use it. But after a week, once I’d confirmed the app wasn’t actually slurping my phone’s battery with the avidity of a vampire denied blood for a century or two, I felt emboldened enough to slap up my face pic and a few stats on here.
Boom. Almost immediately I felt my phone vibrate. Hola papi, some Latin twink was writing. Hi daddy, wrote another. You looking? wrote a third. Then another buzz. Que chulo!
Part of it was being new meat on an old service, of course. But now that I’ve been on Grindr for a couple of months, I haven’t exactly noticed the frequency of guys hitting me up declining any.
And you know what’s most curious? Of all the guys wanting to get together for sex on the app, about two-thirds of them send me messages like, Let me breed that hole or I wanna fuck that sexy daddy ass. When I received the first half-dozen of those in rapid succession, I was a little baffled. Did my photo look more bottom-y than usual, or something?

But then I realized that in my profile, I’d simply never specified I was a top. I’m so used to guys reading my online profiles and knowing from the get-go that I’m usually looking to fuck and breed a hole that being seen by new guys as a potential bottom is sheer novelty. Every time I get a new offer from a top assuming I want to get my hole stretched, I giggle like a shy geisha.

I still haven’t put my positional preference on there. But I haven’t taken anyone up on the offer, though. Yet.

So, here’s the TL;DR version for those of you with short attention spans: I’m on The Grindr now. And yeah. There are plenty of scandalous photos. Hit me up when I’m within 75 feet of you, would ya?