Racism, femmephobia/transphobia, homophobia, ageism, body shaming, slut shaming, pozphobia, and general douchebagness are NOT excusable under the weak, pathetic defence of “It’s just my preference.”
ageism
So when the folks at Grindr like to talk about equality and “just a preference” we only have to look that their own self-promotion to know the truth.
As exhibited here in the App Store, gay is coded as young (20-30), muscular, semi- or completely unclothed, and white (only one black man, one possibly Asian man, no other races).
Grindr for Equality? No. No I don’t think it is. At least it only got 1 star. FAIL
It really is the white trash trailer park of online gay dating.
The first picture is my Grindr profile, the rest is a conversation I had with
some old man. I actually made that just as a joke, but internalized homophobia is nothing to joke about I guess…. As I said, I thrive on ignorance
Fantastic profile and great to see someone reading gay homophobes to filth. I wanna point out, though, that you kinda came undone the moment you wrote “some old man”. This is pretty ageist language, so if you’re gonna fight the fight against internalised homophobia, you probably should add ageism to the list as well. As an aside, assuming this man was over 40, it’s an absolute disgrace that people out of their twenties are still, after what can be assumed a very long time out of the closet, perpetuating the same heteronormative homophobia the heterosexuals have been visiting on us forever.
No, There Isn’t Someone For Everyone
LinkI’m putting this up because it’s good to see some gay guys waking up from their disneyfication. Albeit this piece is littered with ageism (apparently being single at 50, or even just being 50 in general, is the worst thing that can happen to a person). One thing he neglects to mention is just how many of those people out there who find “the one” don’t manage to keep the relationship going. I lived with a flatmate once who lost a 10 year homosexual relationship (it was a kinda sickening, heteronormative, husband and wife, lets eat take away and watch boring movies on the couch for the rest of our lives till death do we part 10 year relationship). He spent the following six months compulsively socialising, every single night of the week, and would literally go insane (literally) if he couldn’t talk to someone on the phone or go to a friends house or go to a bar/club. Seriously, 10 minutes by himself and it was crazy-land. So after 6 months of this compulsive socialising addiction, he managed to find a replica boyfriend (same star sign even) and immediately commenced the codependence ritual. Needless to say this will end badly, despite all the protests about “true love” blah blah. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in love. Just not a fantasy knight-in-shining-armour love. And not a love that lasts forever… because it sure don’t. Anyways… I thought this was piece was a decent read, despite its shortcomings.
I cried after watching Silver Linings Playbook for the first time. Hell, I cried the second time too when I showed it to my mom and sister. I cried because the morale of the story (I think) was that there’s someone for everyone. Even the mentally ill. How touching.
As much as I would love to believe that, my life experience proves that just isn’t true. Exhibit A: Lonely chap in his 50’s who frequents gay clubs hoping some youngin’ will get drunk enough for him to take home. Or for them to take him home. I’m sure he doesn’t mind either way.
It was one of the most pathetic interactions I’d ever seen, like a baby spider monkey being rejected by his mother. And I mean that in an empathetic sense, though he did actually look like a spider monkey. The drunken old man flopped around stroking every attractive gent that felt too awkward to protest. He was a regular.
As I watched the old man flounder about, a horrible thought occurred to me: what if that’s me in 30 years?!
That’s a very real possibility. Sad, but true.
The very same thought strikes me like Zeus’ lighting bolt every time a gent over 40 would hit me up on an online dating site. We manage to have a nice conversation but we both know it’s going nowhere.
Who goes on okcupid to make friends? I mean, really. People say they are just looking for friends, but that’s just their way of saying they aren’t interested in you.
I’m enjoying my singularity (“being single”) while I’m in my 20’s but eventually I’d like to settle down. Like my 401K and future house, it’s something I think about from time to time. However, unlike those, finding a match isn’t necessary something you work towards.
When you look at the numbers it’s depressing. Male to female ratios are off worldwide. Sexually incompatible gays meet all the time. It’s sheer dumb luck finding a decent match. You either get that, or you settle.
Take two of my artist friends for example. In college, the guy, let’s call him Cole, had a friend who was in film school. He was desperate for one actor so he asked Cole to do it even though it wasn’t really his thing. Cole shrugged and just wanted to help a friend.
Soshana (I’ll use that name because I like HBO’s Girls) was the female lead, and she and Cole had to kiss several times throughout the filming. That was their first time meeting and now they’ve been married for over 10 years. So unfair.
I enjoy hearing true stories like this, but, unfortunately, they don’t happen to everyone. Like getting the golden ticket in Willie Wonka, it’s mere chance. Not every human being will find that one true love. How do we deal with this fact of life?
What’s the solution? Is it to stay at home, watching Netflix while eating microwavable dinners in bed? No, that might actually make things worse because I can’t help but think who I could be enjoying that with.
No, the solution is to find another passion to focus on. It’s difficult in our culture obsessed with relationships and sex. Just take a look at magazine covers. Listen to songs on the radio. That’s all we can seem to think about.
We put romantic relationships on this pedestal like it’s an Olympic gold medal. Actually earning an Olympic gold medal might be a better goal. Or becoming a published author. Or traveling to every continent. There’s so much more to our world that it’s a shame we focus so much on this one thing. It’s like if everyone only wore purple and neglected all the other colors of the rainbow. Actually, I’d be fine with that, but most people wouldn’t.
I wish I could say that at the moment it wouldn’t faze me to know I might end up single at 50. Just typing that idea makes me cringe. However, it’s something I may have to face eventually. I aspire to be happy at that age, whether I have someone by my side or not.
If I do end up 50 and single, you can find me in the club. I’ll be the sober spider monkey who parties harder than all the 20 year olds.
You’ll find me in the corner, dancing on my own. Just having a good time.
Ageism and Gaybies
StandardI think ageism is really interesting these days. Younger gay men have such utter disrespect for older gays, but they are acting from a place so similar in motivation (and blindness) as racism, homophobia, sexism, etc.
I see a lot of younger gays on Tumblr waving the flag for equality, decrying racism and homophobia, but then reacting like outraged christian bigots when confronted with an accusation of ageism.
Nothing seems to trigger more viciousness in the gaybies online. Like I’ve mentioned previously, their “age ranges” often go out the window the moment they encounter an older gay man they actually find attractive, yet when dealing with older gay men they aren’t attracted to, their behaviours becomes disgustingly contemptuous, in a manner no different to the belligerence displayed by the NO ASIANS NO FEMMES rabble when called out on their foulness.
Usually, their (weak) arguments are founded upon this idea: Older gay men are sex-addicted creeps who flash their unsolicited genitals at me online, and harass me with message after message after message.
This argument is a fallacy. There are certainly older gay men who do this to younger gay men. There are also older gay men who do this to other older gay men. There are also younger gay men who do this to older gay men, and to other younger gay men. This is a behaviour that has nothing to do with age. I don’t like this behaviour, or condone it. I’m totally adverse to slut-shaming, believing that people should be free to express their sexuality any consensual, harmless way they choose. But I also think a little respect for others is essential, and part of showing that respect is to gauge another man’s interest in seeing your bits before sending him a thousand pics of them, or harassing with message after message, despite not receiving any response.
The way gay men get so up in arms at the slightest challenge is, to me, really indicative of an over-sensitivity and “fuck you” attitude that comes from being raised in the violence of a heteronormative environment. It’s understandable, but it has to change. We can’t just shout and scream and demand equality, without being willing to see ourselves and our own faults. Those faults may be the result of living in an environment that oppresses us, but they are still faults that effect others negatively (particularly others in our own communities). Associating an age-group with a particular (negative) behaviour is stereotyping. And when it comes to ageism, this sort of stereotyping comes very close to the “older gay men = pedophile” trope. And how is it different to stereotyping people on the basis of their race, or sexuality? It is not different.
So, gaybies of Tumblr and elsewhere, I really think it’s time you stop talking for a while, and wake up to yourselves. You cry about equality and oppression and discrimination, but you reproduce these things when you attack behaviour that is common to gay men of all ages as being distinct to the older group alone. You can throw your little tantrums and argue till your little fingers get sore from typing all day, you can fill my inbox with your hate mail because I had the nerve to call you out on your crap, but really, you just need to find a place to sit down a while. The language you use has power, and you’re not using that power very well.
Scruff: Providing a safe space for the words that make effemiphobia
StandardSo I thought I would write about Scruff. Not the hair, the app. It’s a bit of a problem, although it’s not all bad. Soon after I woke up this morning my phone alerted me to a knee-jerky piece of queeny bitchiness from Scruff’s owner and self-appointed community leader, Johnny. He doesn’t like being criticised. Apparently it amounts to hate. Then again, when you take a critical look at most North American discourse, it becomes apparent that anything disliked is labelled as hate and subsequently bombed to smithereens (because slaughter, as we all know, is the most efficient way to spread “freedom”).
So anyways I’m a hater apparently. Cheers Johnny. You keep raking in the gay dollars, positioning yourself as a community leader, feeding your enormous ego (what IS that compensation for, I wonder?), and acting like a general grade-A douche who can’t keep his shirt on. Sad much? But let’s have a look at your own role in all the hate, too.
Scruff, as we all probably know, is a location-based app that has basically inherited Grindr’s position (because these apps, just like the sites of the 2000’s they superseded) have lifespans of about 2-3 years before something else captures the attention of the Faggotry. So yeah, don’t blow all that cash up your nose or on thirty gym memberships, Johnny; it won’t be around forever.
Scruff is a much more robust app than Grindr. Rarely buggy, with plenty of features, although the price tag is hefty (and unjustifiable IMHO) at $13.99 per month here in Oz. It also insultingly places your account on auto-renew, which no doubt has caught out many people who thought they were buying a subscription for a month. Such underhanded sales tactics unfortunately show a clear contempt for the customers who are paying for Johnny’s lifestyle. No matter how much he might cry “hater”, just remember there’s other forms hatred can take, and deliberately attempting to rip your customers off is one of them. (A quick email to Apple results in a refund of this dishonest fee, FYI).
But let’s look at some positives too. The app does a better job than any other in providing a fairly comfortable space for older gay men, HIV positive men, and transmen. There’s no denying this, it’s obvious and it shouldn’t be ignored for the sake of proving a point. Although this doesn’t do too much to stop the ageism, pozphobia, and transphobia that rears it’s head in user profiles daily.
This leads me to the main issue (as always): the sheer volume of internalised homophobia projected onto other users as effemiphobia. Sure. Johnny “and his crew” didn’t create this problem, nor are they solely responsible for eradicating it. But if you are going to create an app and position yourself as publicly as Mr Scruff so clearly has, then you need to be doing something about the platform you created that encourages said effemiphobia. Hiding behind claims of freedom of speech doesn’t cut it. Sponsoring drag shows isn’t the solution either (unless your aim was to make people like me switch off from RuPaul altogether, in which case, SUCCESS!).
Scruff, it is claimed, was started because Johnny didn’t think there was an online space for mens like him. This idea that there’s no place in the “gay community” for hairy butches is a commonly proclaimed excuse that only thinly veils the contempt so many of these butch queens hold for the rest of the community, based purely on an insecurity surrounding their own sexuality and gender expression. It’s the same sentiment you hear from homophobic gay men who complain that pride parades are just full of glittery half naked twinks that bring shame upon all gays, a claim that is curiously blind to all the other non-twinky non-glittery gay men that ALWAYS make up the majority of a gay pride parade. Well anyway, in order to provide a “safe space” online for all these pride-trauma victims, Scruff was born. And you can’t get past more than three profiles at a time without seeing words like “straight acting”, “masc4masc”, “no femmes”, “real men only”.
It would be fab if Johnny spent a little of his energy on attempting to educate his users AWAY from this hateful discourse (since he has such an issue with hate) instead of spending so much of his time taking off his t-shirt and embarrassing himself with naked grabs for attention anywhere he can get it (seriously I don’t need to see you and your friends professionally photographed topless bodies every time I open your damned app; glad that stopped!). I know it would be too much to place filters on this language within the app, and I would be opposed to that anyway since it doesn’t teach people a thing. But certainly he could talk about the negative impact language such as MASC4MASC has on the community in general. See, he’s created a platform that makes it very easy for homo-on-homo hate to proliferate, so he really is the last person to lecture on the subject of hate himself.
I’d have less of a problem with him personally if he didn’t attach himself to this sort of language so closely. He threw his tantrum at me because I criticised his dance party. Poor baby! But let’s remember this is a dance party that is self-described as a party for “scruffy, hot, sweaty, manly men”. If he can’t see how this language polices gender expression, then he really has no business walking his flashy, give-me-all-your-cash walk. This sort of language sits at the foundation of effemiphobia: the idea that a particular type of man is “manly” instantly creates a category of “unmanly men”, and we all know that being shoved into that category are men who don’t fit the mould Johnny Scruff is so eager to promote.
He probably would disagree with all this. They always do. But I say put down the dumb bells for five minutes and start giving some thought to how what you created is helping to perpetuate the internalised heterosexism and self-hatred our entire community (including me and yourself Johnny) have been made victims of. It isn’t hard to choose language that doesn’t divide. It won’t turn you into an effeminate queen. It won’t mean you will attract any more effeminate men than you already do. It won’t mean that you have to have sex with the types of men you find personally unattractive. All it will mean is that the language you use no longer excludes or denigrates (consciously or not) members of your own community. You know, it will mean we are all treated, by each other, with equal amounts of respect.
Sponsoring a drag show doesn’t cut it, especially when you’re running parties that exclude membership into the “men’s club” based purely on the presence of hair. And that’s coming from a big, hot, sweaty, hairy, muscular man who you’ve woofed at more than once yourself, Mr Scruff.
Bio: “here waiting for you.” Please don’t eat my soul. I’m scared. #grindr #grindrfail #gay #gayuk #perv #help #voldermort
This is the second Tumblr post in a minute I’ve seen by “younger” gay men labelling “older” gay men “perverts” (#perv). It concerns me because if someone younger tried to engage with exactly the same language, they wouldn’t be labelled as a “pervert”. I suspect this is more anti-gay propaganda that many gay men have internalised and then perpetuate. We all know that homophobes often try to connect homosexuality with pedophilia/perversion. The false stereotype that older gay men are perverted sexual predators, trying to seduce young, innocent children/teens is still disgustingly common in certain areas of the media and amongst religious lunatics. Despite the propaganda, pedophilia is still most often between men and girls, not men and boys. I think it’s high time younger gay men using hook up apps stop perpetuating these offensive stereotypes. Older gay men have a right to interact with anyone they choose on a public app like Grindr, as do younger gay men. Sexually forthright behaviour occurs in both younger and older gay men online. I know from past experience on here that the OP will probably take some stance of outraged indignation, and make up stories about how this man was “creepy” or how he constantly “harrasses” him online, or how I don’t see the whole story. But really, the fact is this person only said hello. You can respond with a “Thanks no thanks” or just ignore him, or block him if you really want. The fact you needed to shame him as much as you did says everything about your personality, and nothing about his.
Is Discrimination on Grindr Killing Gay Sex?
Standardby Mathew Rodriguez (source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mathew-rodriguez/is-discrimination-on-grindr-killing-gay-sex_b_4558989.html)
Grindr was created, according to its inventors, to make socializing easier. If you didn’t know the man across the bar, you’d simply hop onto the app and find out just enough about him to start a conversation. However, as any movie about science or technology tells us, what is a simple genius invention often runs afoul of the maker’s intent in the hands of mere mortals — and especially horny mortals.
As a queer Latino gay man of size, logging on to Grindr is a casual masochistic reminder that, in the mainstream gay male community, my body is not welcome. Messages like “NO ASIANS,” “NEG U B 2,” and “MASC ONLY” invalidate gay men like me daily. How did a tool that was meant to facilitate conversation become the prime example of the gay community’s — like the rest of humanity’s — worst tendencies, like racism, sexism, misogyny, ageism, ableism, fat shaming, elitism, transphobia, homophobia and serophobia?
What does someone in the 1 percent of Grindr’s sexual economy look like? He has white skin, he has a weight that begins with “1,” he is cisgender, in his 20s, completely able-bodied, has a full head of hair, has either slightly defined or very defined abs, has a dusting of body hair, is masculine and is HIV-negative. These men are what you might call “sexual gatekeepers.” Just as the 1 percent of America’s economy has unlimited access to the services and privileges they need, Grindr’s 1 percent has the privilege of determining who has access to them and when and where they will get serviced.
In literary studies or fiction writing, “round” characters are fully realized characters who jump off the page, while “flat” characters are 2-D, and stand out for the qualities they lack. In the world of Grindr, a landscape dominated by a 2-D square interface, everybody is a victim of personality “flattening,” and, by extension, becomes more and more defined by that which society says they lack. While people used to look into the future and see technology as making fantasies come true — flying cars! teleporters! — the truth of technology in the 21st century is that it doesn’t deal in fantasy. It heightens reality — racism, misogyny, etc. — in all its grotesqueness.
People often confuse “having a type” with taking the freedom to shoot other people down. When one person lists the communities he won’t have sex with in his online profile, he fails to see the person on the other screen who has to read a digital invalidation, written in 1s and 0s. Cyberbullying thrives because it alleviates the executor of any guilt. They don’t have to see the rejection, the shame, the trauma on someone else’s face. Why, in a profile meant to discuss you, do you take the time to talk about the people who can’t have access to your body? Many people would say the very definition of privilege is when you have the luxury of not having to think about something or have it affect you — the luxury of having free and open access to sexual partners is no different.
Many people, gay men included, cling to false notions — “I can’t help it! It’s just what I prefer!” — when discussing their sexual preferences. However, preferences are always socially constructed. The list of characteristics of Grindr’s 1 percent is also a fairly representative list of many of Hollywood’s hottest celebrities, its most powerful men with the most cultural and social capital. These are characteristics we’re told to desire. I don’t know about you, but I hate being told how to think. Sex on Grindr is often sex between sheep. But, sex can be an act of resistance and meaningful exchange — if you make it one.
As more apps that serve more “niche” audiences appear, and the death of sex and intimacy through categorization looms, is there still hope for an online sexual playground that can act as a place of fun and liberation? Many of my older queer activist friends often tell me about sex from an earlier era, sex that had potential, sex that was organic and intimate. If our generation prefers Chipotle to McDonalds, then why are we settling for a sexual terrain that boasts sex as fast food and men as value menu options?
The gay community is only starting to feel its way through the digital era’s sexual landscape, but as we do, I encourage us to use more than just our thumbs. We must be more interested in touching each other than touching our screens. Gay men have a history of being social pariahs, but as some in our community gain “mainstream” acceptance, we can’t repeat history and microaggress those who are deemed to be on a lower rung of society’s ladder. We can have sex that’s more about questions than answers, embraces exploring more than finishing and doesn’t rely on litmus tests for genuine connections.
GET A GRIP! Is he talking to us or to himself? I’m not going into much detail here as there’s so much material to work with and not enough “usable” [sic] hours in a day to fit it all in. But a highlight for me is where he tells people not to be old and ugly otherwise they can expect him to be a total bastard towards them, but at the same time demands that people treat him with respect and tell him of they’re not interested. The other good bit is finding out he turned his last boyfriend straight. Douche of the Week Award.
End Racism and Homophobia in the Gay Community 
You must be logged in to post a comment.