MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In 2009, the location-based social media application Grindr was created, allowing gay men to find one another through their mobile phones. This article examines the role of location-based gay meet-up applications such as Grindr in blurring the boundary between public and private. Looking at the history of personal ad use by gay men, and then examining the use of apps such as Grindr today, this article reconsiders the meanings, signs, and indicators of public sex. This article also argues that queer uses of media technologies have reframed structures of meeting in the public sphere.

Since the second half of the 20th Century, queer individuals have relied on media technologies to meet one another. Prior to the 1970s, personal advertisements used coded language, suggesting platonic meetings, even if the intentions were sexual encounters. By the 1980s, gay men wrote personal ads that were more sexually explicit, particularly those published in gay and lesbian publications, making homosexual identity and sex publicly visible. With location-based social media applications such as Grindr, discussions about and involving sex are taking place in public, since mobile phones can be accessed almost anywhere as long as the user has access to cellular data or a Wifi connection. Mobile phones create small “bubbles” of private space, even if users are in public.

In addition to rethinking public sex, this article closes with examining how a queer counterpublic has changed methods of meeting in the public sphere. With the introduction of gay marriage, popular press and academics claimed that same-sex relationships can possibly be “normal,” yet there are still few social structures that formally facilitate queer relationships. Queer networks still largely rely on media technologies to help LGBTQ folks find one another. The article closes by considering how social media apps commoditize and capitalize queer identities and relationships.