By now, even your grandma probably knows what it means to swipe left or right.
Straight people are finally catching up to the gay community when it comes to social dating apps after condemning the gay community for being too sexual.
In September 2012, Tinder redefined dating for the straight community. Tinder is a mobile dating app that uses people’s Facebook accounts, social graphs and geolocation to match compatible partners. Users can like or reject matches by swiping the screen either left or right. If both parties are interested in each other, it’s considered a match.
Nearly everyone uses and boasts about Tinder. More than 50 percent of Tinder users are college-aged, according to USA Today. A couple of my straight friends showed me different conversations they had on Tinder with potential partners.
The same cannot be said for Tinder’s older and gayer counterpart, Grindr, which launched in March 2009. Grindr is similar to Tinder in that people use the app for dating and hooking up, but that’s where the similarities end.
Grindr is more anonymous in nature. Users find potential men solely through geolocation. There’s no sophisticated algorithm via social graph or Facebook, and that’s because the gay hookup scene can’t be as public as the straight scene.
Straight people say things like, “I don’t have a problem with gay people as long as they keep it in the bedroom,” yet they don’t make any efforts to hide their sexuality.
Straight women unintentionally look at their gay best friends as neutered puppies — adorable, harmless and without a sex drive. Straight men generally just don’t like to think or hear about gay men’s sex lives because it makes them “uncomfortable.”
Heterosexual people then force gay people’s sex lives into the closet, which compels homosexual men to be discreet and makes their sexual practices more shady and dangerous.
Before the creation of Grindr and the explosion of the Internet, gay men had to find creative ways to discreetly meet. The only places to find men who were definitely gay in those days were gay bars, bathhouses and parks.
Gay men would go to parks in the middle of the night to search for potential partners — known as “cruising.”
All of those places were focused on sexuality and nothing more. Gay men didn’t know if they had anything in common with whomever they were meeting. Their only common ground was their interest in male genitalia.
Not much has changed today. Instead of parks and bathhouses, gay men use Grindr, but the concept remains the same. Gay men anonymously message other men nearby. Their only common ground is still their sexual orientation, so that’s usually going to be the subject of their conversations.
Gay social apps can’t use things like Facebook and social graphs to find potential partners because society still doesn’t accept that gay people have sex or even exist, so Grindr’s only option is to be anonymous.
Keeping the anonymous feature to please the straight community makes gay men ashamed of using Grindr. Anonymity is subconsciously telling gay men that what they’re doing is wrong, so most men will post pictures of their abs instead of their faces on the app. And people’s profiles will say things such as “No hookups please,” even though they are totally looking for hookups.
Compare that to heterosexual relationships. The media normalized straight relationships by plastering them everywhere. Almost every movie has some form of love triangle involving straight people. There’s never a mainstream movie involving solely gay relationships because that would be considered “shoving homosexuality down people’s throats.”
Gay men have to act like their relationships and sexual orientation only exists in their private lives and can’t intertwine their public and private lives the same way straight men can.
Unlike straight men, gay men can be legally fired in states like Louisiana for their sexual orientation. Gay men can also be kicked out of their homes for their sexual orientation.
However, because heterosexuality is so normalized, apps like Tinder can evolve into a widely popular dating app. Sure, people can use it for hookups, but generally people use it for dating. Tinder matches people based on
common interest and mutual friends so people on the app can talk about things deeper than sex.
Straight people have been forcing gay people into the closet for years, and that’s what made gay people seem perverted. We’re more sexual than straight people because that’s the only common ground we’re allowed to have with our community.
So next time you’re looking for your next date on Tinder, remember the origins of that app and remember how the straight community has silenced gay men by forcing them to meet up secretly. It’s time to allow gay dating sites and apps to come out of the online closet and set them up via Facebook and social graphs just like straight dating apps.
Cody Sibley is a 19-year-old mass communication freshman from Opelousas, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter at @CodySibley.