All I needed was to be able to look. Early on in New York, I found navigating Grindr to be like walking through a field of landmines, tiptoeing past unfamiliar kinks and unsolicited dick pics and the guys I saw on my morning commute; using Grindr in the biggest city in the country took some adjustment.
I later got used to it, but Grindr has never felt truly comfortable to me. Dating apps are, more often than not, lonely windows into endless universes of want, most of which goes unfulfilled. Plenty of queer men use Grindr simply to talk to somebody like them, or to organize political action, or to find someone to play videogames with.
I know some men who use the Explore feature to plan hookups or hangs in soon-to-be-visited cities. But as someone who was, at the time, using Grindr almost exclusively for sex, it was hard for me to understand why the rocket was even there. When my ex-boyfriend and I broke up near the end of , Grindr became more than a way to rebound: it became a way to monitor him from afar.
It would end up lasting almost an entire year, full of cross-country visits, months without speaking, cryptic texts, and a lot of crying on my part, at least. A two-week fling turned into a lot of talking, and visiting, and eventually a relationship. He came out to his parents a few months after we first met in , about a year before I discovered the Explore feature, and had slowly been getting more comfortable in his skin as a gay man.
The relationship was my first healthy emotional experience with another guy. Seeing B. It was more than the pain of seeing him as single and no longer mine: with his profile and stats and a bashful, somewhat uncertain selfie, I saw myself, and every gay man I knew, in him. He was no doubt doing the same. Months went by, and I soon began clicking the rocket right away when logging on, disregarding the guys in my neighborhood.
