iBone - GQ Magazine Sept, 2011

iBone

Are you feeling the urgent need to hump someone in the general vicinity in the next seventeen minutes? No problem! Thanks to an ingenious GPS-based app called Grindr, gay men have been hooking up with other guys by whipping out their phones when they’re horny. Now the tech visionary who founded Grindr is launching a version for straight people. Will this change the world? Or totally fail for basic Mars-Venus reasons? In an effort to divine the answer, Marshall Sella wades into the new world of “location-based” love

I was cruising for men on my iPhone. I’d been doing this for more weeks than I could count.

The mechanics of it were simple. I’d be milling around a trendy Sunset Boulevard dive, or lounging in a French Roast restaurant about a block from where I live in Manhattan. I’d take out my device and tap on the black-and-yellow tribal-mask logo of Grindr, an app that lets guys use GPS to meet other guys who are ten steps away or a hundred. The screen would blink into a checkerboard of guys’ pictures—whole armies of men who were within a mile of me, many right next door, and I could know those distances, for I was the Lord. Thirty-eight feet away. Ninety-six feet away. Four hundred forty-seven feet away. The photos came in a few varieties: guys trying hard to look really bored though super-cool; nude, hirsute torsos; guys doing that ridiculous bathroom-mirror self-portrait in which the subject always looks surprised even though he himself has just snapped the shot. Guys calling themselves “Hard” and “Hung 2 Hang” offered cheery requests pertaining to the act of love: “Top bunk, don’t be a fuckin’ girl, 420-friendly.”

The Chat, too, was of the highest quality. Someone would message “Sup.” Without even missing a beat, I’d come back with “How are you?” (I spelled it all out, eschewing the “R U,” because, you know, classy.) This spare, Pinteresque dialogue—it’s all in what’s not being said!—would often die in a quick and merciful way, but many Chats ended with an agreed-to meeting place, which was unusually convenient for both of us since, by the very nature of this whole game, we lived within a block of each other.

Grindr would also let me stare at a tiny blue dot (which represented me) sliding here and there on a map of my neighborhood. When an interesting fellow was kind enough to send me his exact location, I could see him on a map, too, in the shape of a red pushpin. I knew to expect only one thing when our dot and pushpin met: that the guy wouldn’t look much like his tiny picture. So a whole dumb show would ensue, in which we silently gestured at each other across the café or bar—first quizzically, then in some weird, fake recognition, as if, oh, how we went back, such memories, and things like that. Then I would get to the point and ask him what in the hell this app really was.

Full disclosure: As it happens, I’m straight. No one’s fault. That’s just me. But the Grindr team, in September, was launching a new app, Blendr—which was not just for gay guys but for Everybody. It’s a mad ambition, and I had no idea if Blendr would work. Is this the way straight men and women—especially straight women—want to meet and mate? The ladies certainly wouldn’t treat Chat the same way; they’d be euphemistic and vaguely lyrical (I hoped) while the males were doing something close to grunting. But hooking up with strangers via GPS? From a female standpoint, that might be seen as one romantic step away from being spirited into a van. Less darkly, what happened to the good old dinner party, the comically bad set-up date, the meet-cute fender bender?

And so I stepped into the long night of the soul that was Grindr. I wanted to see what the rest of us could expect—hope for— from Blendr. I’d soon learn that grinders weren’t always bathroom-trysting and Rusty Tromboning and doing Japanese nose-torture on each other. Some grinders were as genteel as the ladies at a book club; some wanted true love, others new friendship. This subculture was populated with all sorts of people—like any community. Together the sex-crazed and lonely hearts and the rest were building a digital neighborhood on top of their physical one. Maybe, with Blendr, it really could grow to include Everybody.

···

To be a grinder, unlike with Match.com or eHarmony or OkCupid or any of the other doddering old iDate sites, you need register no name, no password—not even a screen name. Those other sites are proud of asking for massive detail. They actually market themselves on the thoroughness of their interrogations: What are your favorite sports, your taste in movies, your eye color? They have it all down to a science, selling their sites on that old adage, “Similars attract.” On Grindr, you are permitted to write a 120-character profile and upload a photo, and that’s pretty much all you get to spark that digital First Look Across the Room. To ensure that no user of Grindr ever felt hoodwinked, I took the name “GQ Magazine” and used as my icon a collage of covers, though I was slightly worried that grinders would think I was hawking subscriptions in some kind of seedy jailhouse telemarketing scheme.

But guys did drop me a line, at all hours and in great numbers.

Chat is the gateway drug on Grindr. Though it is 96 percent inane, it’s not all sexting and Weinering pics to people. Many guys started a conversation with the aforementioned “Sup?” or the even more unforgivable “Wassup?” I admit, I looked down on them, as one would on “mole people” or Michael “The Situation” Sorrentino. My deep misunderstanding of Chat was that it was meant to be witty, an actual conversation. But eventually I realized that the “Sup” people were not cavemen. They were efficient. They were men in a rush to achieve, and that’s what men like to think they do.

Grinding is less a pastime than a palm-sized addiction. It is iHeroin. Grinders spend an average of ninety minutes on the app every day—and not just in one session. They’re online eight or nine times. In my experience, that’s an unrealistic number. It should be ten times that. I never wanted to get to the neurotic stage where I logged on while walking around, so I made a point of doing less walking around. And I checked in on my boys several times an hour. What were they up to, or at least where? The iPhone simply had to be checked.

Over the months, I learned the mysteries of this strange realm: its customs, its argot, and its social hierarchies. For instance, in my countless conversations with countless guys, only one man who ever identified himself on his page as a Bottom ever responded to me; Tops almost always did. My theory was that Tops took it as a challenge, whereas Bottoms seemed to feel they’d already come up short in our imagined duel of wits, and that was good enough for them.

It is also standard practice among grinders to steer clear of certain red flags. As any grinder knows, someone who doesn’t supply even a fake or a ridiculously old pic is to be shunned at all costs. And whoever hooks up with a guy who spends his 120 profile characters praising his own hunky looks or demanding “Whites only” gets what he deserves.

The Grindr users I knew and know had impeccable straight-dar. Even in Chats, almost everyone eventually asked me if I was gay. I was honest, yet some men still treated me like a trespasser. One guy spent a pleasant half hour at a restaurant regaling me with stories—then, learning I wasn’t gay, very politely stood, silently folded his cloth napkin, and exited the building. Another took the time to text just one remark: “My bf will beat the shit out of me if he knows I’m talking to you.” Which I found refreshingly concise, if vaguely unnecessary. Others offered interviews in exchange for a quaint variety of carnal favors, which I graciously declined, as far as you know.

I met my fellow grinders in restaurants, in bars, in coffee shops, and on park benches; we had drinks in sunshine, tea at night. There were the bland guys; the guys who made endless plans, then stood me up; the guys who met up with me just to see if I really was a reporter, then stared as if I were a penguin at the Central Park Zoo. (You know who you are.) The whole thing was confusing, mainly because one’s brain isn’t built to process hundreds of stories in a few months. I have to say, it is genuinely unnerving to wake up in a Los Angeles hotel room at 3 A.M. and read that a man calling himself “Bear 4 U” is eleven feet away from you right now, when even the walls aren’t eleven feet away.

···

The first time I met Joel Simkhai, the 35-year-old founder of Grindr and Blendr, he had kindly offered to pick me up at my L.A. hotel, take me to breakfast somewhere. He strolled into the lobby and swiveled his head twice quickly. This place had a perfectly fine restaurant—why move?—so we walked a few steps to a table. “I like things that are close,” he explained to me, pointedly. “Why do we drive ourselves crazy, getting in a car, doing all this travel? There are so many good things near us. Better things. We just don’t know about them.”

Get this image out of your head: that Simkhai is some kind of tech-geek recluse, spurred to create software in order to find make-believe friends who loved Star Trek as much as he did. He is not any of those things. He’s sleek and sociable. In the realm of iDating, he’s a bit of a rock star. At the NYC Pride pier dance, everyone seemed to know him, and he strode through the crowd turning heads; Grindr T-shirts, in their instantly recognizable taxicab yellow, mingled all around him.

Life wasn’t always so sunny. Simkhai was an isolated boy in Mamaroneck, New York, still halfheartedly dating girls when he started using CompuServe’s lone gay channel. It was a revelation: “I could type that I was gay! And that was part of my acceptance.”

In June 2008, when Apple unveiled the iPhone 3G, it blew the mind of every techie in this country. The app store meant that there was suddenly a new industry out there—a thousand new industries. Simkhai, then selling online magazine subscriptions, had long thought there had to be a way to use GPS to help people meet each other. “Maybe I was just selfish,”he says. “Maybe I just wanted to meet guys this way.”

Read More http://www.gq.com/news-politics/mens-lives/201110/blendr-straight-grindr-app-review#ixzz1f4ls8uum