In the everyday lives of gay men, the app thus creates a new user experience built entirely around this proximity mediated through the smartphone screen. Does this remind you of anything? Many design features and functionalities of the app bear a very strong resemblance to the logics of historical cruising culture! More specifically, it simply recombines a pre-existing analog socio-cultural infrastructure with a new digital spatial construction. Through it, gay men can find each other, live out their own sexual identity, and initiate often unnoticed non-binding sexual encounters. To do this, Grindr provides its users with a ‘secret’ and virtual space that is invisible to most people within our heterosexualized society. Whether walking around town or working at the home office, the app is always associated with the thrill of theoretically being able to find the next sexual adventure. This means that gay men have the opportunity to find potential sex dating partners everywhere in their everyday lives via their smartphone screen. In scene jargon, it is therefore often referred to as a “gaydar” (derived from terms ‘gay’ and ‘radar’). To do this, the app uses the respective live GPS locations of its users and sorts them on the screen based on their direct proximity to each other. Since 2009, the app has allowed its users to locate, contact, and meet for sex with other gay men in their immediate vicinity from a variety of everyday situations. Design and modes of operation of the app = analog infrastructuresīut what does the dating app Grindr have to do with this gay sex dating practice? Quite simply, it added a digital twist to the ‘analog’ search practices of cruising. As a historical practice, it has survived the test of time and is still an integral part of gay culture today, of course in a modified form. ![]() This is how the cruising culture was established at the time, where gay men met for their own safety under the protection of anonymity to have sex with strange men. Of course, only insiders were aware about this, and knew how to communicate with each other using various signs, codes and tactics. They used semi-public spaces such as bars and saunas or even public places such as parks, beaches or toilets at certain times of the day as meeting places. For fear of stigmatization, many of them therefore met away from the eyes of the public. Here, gay men in Germany, for example, were still deliberately prosecuted until the 1960s. Its origins lie in the historical discrimination and persecution of homosexuality, which can be easily explained with a brief glimpse to the last century. For cruising has been a widespread practice in urban gay male communities around the world for decades. ![]() But if you now think that this is once again a special peculiarity in connection with the free spirit of Berlin, you are wrong. They can easily be found, for example, on the city map of the queer city magazine “ Siegessäule” or on the website “ “. In Berlin, gay men use many different meeting places to meet for such fleeting, sexual adventures. Have you ever heard of cruising? In gay parlance, the term is used synonymously for seeking quick and anonymous sex with strange men in public spaces, or semi-public places. How does the search for non-committal sex inscribe itself in everyday routines that homosexual men use to shape their lives in Berlin? For the Digital Society Blog, the author presents various central theses from his research. Through its GPS-based technology, the app produces a dynamic and homosexual network that gay men use to arrange casual hook-ups. ![]() In his master’s thesis, Frederik Efferenn investigated the use of the dating app Grindr in the urban space of Berlin.
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