Dating apps have become an integral aspect of urban social life this decade. In response to the lack of social interaction during the COVID-19 lockdown, the use of dating apps rose dramatically compared to the pre-pandemic era.[1] In light of the spike of active users and a decrease in urban mobility and transportation, dating apps functioned as an alternative census, with up-to-date information on a particular population during the period.

 

Grindr, a GPS-based dating app with 3 million daily users,[2] has been the most popular gay mobile app since its launch.[3] In its free version, the interface shows up to 100 nearby profiles at once in a 3-column scrollable grid. By providing a live archive sorted by measurable distance, Grindr is considered one of the most publicized dating apps for its data exposure.[4]

 

Driven by isolation like many others, I downloaded Grindr during the lockdown in March 2020. My impression of Grindr came from the thumbnail presentation of nearby users, with the distance of each profile appearing alongside their name and age. Upon tapping a headshot thumbnail, the profile expanded to include display name, age, and a brief “about me” introduction describing the user. During COVID, this space was often filled with “No mask, no sex” and a virus emoji. A list of statistical attributes from body type to sexual position, ethnicity,* relationship status, expectations, gender identity, and HIV status followed.

 

The lockdown did not last long in New York City. The Black Lives Matter movement brought protests and mass gatherings, and the city seemed to regain its life.[5]  The enduring isolation along with the rage toward social injustice inspired the Occupied City Hall protests and the Black Trans Lives Matters marches in Brooklyn. Not only were people out on the street and on Twitter,[6] but dating apps also became a platform for sharing political opinions.[7] As a foreigner who stuck in N.Y.C. and as an observer who witnessed the movement progressing, I sensed similar patterns repeating.

 

The idea for this project was borne out of checking Grindr during my regular commuting between Manhattan and Brooklyn for the George Floyd protests in the early summer of 2020. From the thumbnail display, I noticed that each neighborhood had its own spatially bounded ecology. There was a group of fit, nearly identical men in their early 30s aggregated in Williamsburg, gatekeeping their circle; mismatched individuals with varied lifestyles juxtaposed in West Harlem; young creatives with “they/them” pronouns and Telfar bags on racks huddled in Bushwick. Social divides on Grindr were not solely based on racial demographics, but included a hybrid of fashion trends, physical appearance, word choice, home interiors, and the neighborhood a user resided in. I began thinking about how dating app users might reflect or even reshape spatial identity in a condensed, diverse city like New York. Class Matters by The New York Times[8] examines the subtleties of class in twenty-first-century America with innovative interviews and analysis. I figured it could be as powerful and insightful to document people through Grindr, from a marginalized, subgroup angle to project a bigger world, or at least to camera obscura a silhouette of current society. The immense geographic spread of Grindr’s user base made it efficient for reaching out to participants and collecting users’ data. I became a researcher and algorithm designed to witness lives operating by intangible social mechanisms. How do people live behind their online profiles?  

 

Taking an investigative approach, I started inviting the users to participate by photographing their residences and collecting their profiles, based on a mass sampling method across the city. In order to approach an objective outcome and to reduce biases from my personal inclinations, I avoided any sexual relationships on Grindr during the project. With a neutral, friendly self-portrait and a brief project description on my profile, I sent the same message to thousands of people over a year, on a daily basis: “Can I photograph you and your place?”.

 

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The city is a patchwork of communities and boundaries. Grindr digitally evades certain boundaries by allowing people to encounter those they might not otherwise have in real life. It allows one to see where others live and how they live. Granular clues about neighborhoods and types of users gradually emerged throughout the iterative experience of making initial contact with Grindr users for this project, followed by subsequent discoveries and discussions on a range of topics.  

 

On the city scale, aggregating profiles by area indicates ongoing city development(s). The “gaytrification” theory explains the pattern of gays—typically from middle to upper-middle-class families—being among the first to move into a conventionally rough neighborhood and gentrify the area.[9,10] Greenwich Village, the birthplace of the modern American gay liberation movement[11] and where the radical The Death and Life of Great American Cities was written,[12] is now a quiet sanctuary for successful professionals with many fit torsos and faceless photos on Grindr profiles. “Discreet” is a common word on Grindr and refers to closeted or otherwise private gay men who do not wish to disclose much about themselves. Often self-ascribed, “discreet” narrates today’s gay residents in Greenwich Village.

 

In comparison, Bushwick, a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood offering cheap rent, attracts many young queers to settle, create, and throw parties. It has now become the center of a new counterculture. The ethos can be easily spotted both on the street and on Grindr. “Bushwick is too rough to gentrify,” I heard at a Japanese restaurant in Greenwich Village. But the same forces that changed now-luxe neighborhoods in Manhattan are unstoppable even in further-out regions of Brooklyn and Queens. NYC Construction Dashboard shows that new building permit activity is much higher in Bushwick from 2018 to 2020 than in Manhattan on average;[13] also, many of my participants living in new buildings along Myrtle Avenue all indicate the Bushick placemaking is undergoing. The normalization of queer culture seems to lost the role of sheltering marginalized groups and has become a price boost for real-estate investment.[14]

 

On a residential scale, different lifestyles can be perceived both on online profiles and in in-person encounters. A monolithic way of living often appears in single-race-dominated neighborhoods: the “gaymers” in Hell’s Kitchen with ubiquitous rainbow flags fluttering on balconies; the sophistication of the West Village with splendid decorations and art collections. Books, music instruments, frames, and wine are organically ornamented in Park Slope’s apartments. Contemporary and pop Asian culture is in vogue in Long Island City. Meanwhile, a transition or a contradiction of living standards in a neighborhood is also quite noticeable. Harlem, near Morningside Park, for example, nurtures generations of Black New Yorkers and a flock of white newcomers nowadays. Longtime residents feel the center of African culture as in danger of being replaced with a reinvented idea: “SoHa.”[15] An elevator brought me to an Architectural Digest-type apartment, with a view of Columbia University over the hill. “Harlem is getting safer in recent years. You wouldn't be able to see two guys holding hands on the street 10 years ago; now they’re everywhere,” a participant told me. The next block stood a five-story walk-up with no direct sunlight, and the laundry piled in front of the entrance once I entered the apartment. “There’re so many white people nowadays,” a participant who was born and raised in Harlem complained. The reality is a dichotomy of two disparate living standards co-occupying the same area, often in mixed neighborhoods.

 

On a more personal level, Grindr profiles reflect sex preferences, political opinions, and self-identification below the surface. Predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods tend to have more users who uphold traditional norms of a penetrative, “top” masculinity.[16] Concourse and Central Harlem, for example, are neighborhoods where the most users define themselves as “man” and “top” by relative proportion. Interestingly, Concourse also has the most faceless profiles: 60 percent of the neighborhood. (For more on extremification of masculine identity, see Payne’s (2016)  “I Am a Man Too!” in Meaning-Making, Internalized Racism, and African American Identity, where he discusses how social deprivation and expectation in community-based neighborhoods lead to hyper-masculinity.[17]) Grindr reflects this phenomenon. Additionally, half of the users identified themselves as “man or cis man” (49%) or declined to self-ID (46%), in spite of the recent expansion of gender identification options. On the other hand, Hell’s Kitchen (43%), Lower East Side (42%), West Village (41%), and Williamsburg (41%) are the top four for shirtless profiles at over 40 percent. West Village and Williamsburg are both high on faceless (49%) and shirtless (41%) profiles. In the sexual position category—“top,” “vers top,” “versatile,” “vers bottom,” and “bottom”—about 41 percent of users declined to show their position, which outweighs the most popular “versatile” option (17%).

 

In the 255 character limit* “About Me” bio, political commentary is a recurring theme on Grindr profiles and serves as an important magnet before any interactions. Black Lives Matter, comments on the 2020 presidential election, and Free Palestine hashtags appeared many times among participants.

 

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The project aims to examine the complexity of Grindr, to experiment using the strength of technology, and to uncover the real lives behind online dating profiles. As a photographer and a user myself, I wanted to know the reasons and forces that bring people together on this platform. I am not a social science researcher from an accredited authority; this project would be considered methodologically imperfect from a clinical social research perspective. Also, my background as a Taiwanese photographer exists outside the arena of Western art tradition. Nonetheless, I believe that photography can holistically address the empirical gaps that arise from the decoupling of art from social science.

 

It would be a stretch to come to unequivocal conclusions about a given neighborhood based upon the data collected. This project seeks to look at the queer community as its members present to one another internally, not for outside perception and study. The complexity of queer life and New York City is still beyond my (and most people's) comprehension. The role of Grindr Profiles is more of a demonstration than a representation.

 

Dating apps mirror society. The existence of Grindr profiles evidences a dimensional urban landscape: a looking glass that reveals thumbnails on smartphone screens, the users behind them, the places where love happens, the neighborhoods where the profiles populate, altogether. The year-long observation documented the intricacies of human movement, lifestyles, and virtual representations in New York City’s Grindr population. How do people live behind their online profiles? This project offers an answer.

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