For those unfamiliar with the gay “dating” app, Grindr, think of it as a classic gay cruising spot, but digitized. As with most social platforms, there’s an added hurdle or benefit (depending on who you ask) of anonymity. For those not out to their families, this is part of the appeal; perhaps there is an argument that this could even be seen as a safety precaution. However, for others, anonymity acts as a shield for hateful/predatory behaviour.
My inspiration for writing this blog post comes from my interest in how queer archives operate as evidence of a community’s collective history and ways of knowing and doing. Though much of my work thus far in the archives has provided a rich queer history, much of it has also shown the problematic side of the mainstream queer community–mainstream here refers to white gay men and lesbian women. I am struck by how much of the content in the archives seems to mirror ideologies that I have personally experienced on Grindr.
To illustrate my point further, I want to share an anecdote. The year is 2015 when I am a seventeen year-old gay teenager. I’m living my senior year of high school with a general sense of confidence and joy–I had bested the bullies of high schools past and I could now simply mind my business in the queer corner that I had carved out for myself. Nonetheless, I have a big problem weighing on me: I am still a virgin. The shallow popular girls that cling onto me lavish me in their stories of sexual escapades. They tally their sexual partners as if they are medals hanging around their necks, and I am jealous. Coming to accept my sexuality had been one thing, but what good is being open about your sexuality when you are having zero sexual experiences–I find myself on a mission to put the sex back into sexual orientation. Naturally, I go to the only other queer person in my Greater Vancouver farming town and he has no choice but to offer me advice: download Grindr. The promises of hunky men and sexual liberation are enough for me to download the app right away. Little do I know that my experience on this app will change my perspective of myself and my community for the rest of my young adult life.
Before I know it, I am on Grindr drowning in a sea of faceless profiles. I text my friend to ask where the hunky men are, but he assures me that they reside behind the grey faceless avatars that fill my screen. I hear my phone light up: a profile with the name Anon4Now has messaged me: charming. He has no picture and his bio is short and sweet: no fats and no femmes. I think about these words individually.
Fat. Long before the revolution of body-positivity had entered the mainstream cultural conversation, this word cut pretty deep for me. I have never had a copacetic relationship with my body, but I am at a point with my body where I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it either.
Femme. At this point in my identity formation, I am reckoning with the fear of presenting too feminine. Thus, I rationalize in my brain that this couldn’t possibly apply to me and I decide to respond to Anon4Now’s first message.
Our conversation goes something like this:
Anon4Now:
Hey, you femme?
Chase97:
I don’t think so, but I’m not masculine either? Can I be both, lol?
Anon4Now:
ok, you fat? Send me a body pic.
I reluctantly send a picture of myself at a lake the summer before wearing a sleeveless shirt and swim trunks. I’m proud of this photo–two years before I wouldn’t have been caught dead in a shirt exposing my arms. I await his response, but within ten seconds the profile is gone. When I ask my friend what has happened, he informs me that I’ve been blocked. These types of interactions (introduction–picture–block) happen more times than I can count–eventually, I delete the app.
The torrid tale of a queer kid trying to lose their virginity is not the reason I share this story. Rather, I want to use it to contextualize the toxic patterns of behaviour that are unabashedly housed within the Grindr platform, and which represent some historic ideologies within gay culture itself. Grindr had shaped and twisted my young brain’s value of my body, my femininity, my queerness, and my relationship to my community. Luckily, I have found loving friends, partners, and self-respect that has helped me from going into a tailspin of self-hate that Anon4Now had contributed to when I was seventeen–others are not so lucky.
No Fats, No Femmes, No Asians (sometimes substituted with No Blacks) has successfully marketed itself on Grindr for years. One historic Canadian example of debates around racism in the gay community comes from The Body Politic‘s (TBP) controversial decision to run the ad of a self-proclaimed successful white gay man looking for a “Black houseboy.” This moment marked a controversial shift for TBP and incited debates from those within and outside of the gay community. As David S. Churchill notes in his 2003 piece on these debates, TBP caused a shift “to a politics framed by… difference, power, identity, and representation” (114). More recently, at the 45th anniversary of the founding of TBP, there were more heated debates from speakers about how TBP failed Black queer people:
“For black queers, we live and love in the ruins of the aftermath of The Body Politic, not because of it, but in spite of it. The archive of The Body Politic reminds me that we are not noticed, not seen, but we are hyper-visible nonetheless in queer culture.”
Rinaldo Walcott
Director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute,
University of Toronto
As Matthew Thomas Conte notes in his piece for Feral Feminisms, the fetishization and disregard of bodies is evident in plus-size communities as well:
“Fatness is fetishized, desired, and ‘admired’ because of its bodily difference in a culture that tends to only represent and celebrate a slim and muscular queer body.”
Matthew Thomas Conte
“More Fats, More Femmes: A Critical Examination of Fatphobia and Femmephobia on Grindr”
Indeed, TBP‘s ad and Conte’s piece offer examples of the fetishization and disregard of non-white and non-thin members of the queer community; both of these problems still exist in the virtual world of Grindr–their roots are deep-seated in gay culture.
No Fats, No Femmes, No Asians and its ability to flourish in online dating/hook-up culture specifically reflects the gay male community and how many members view fat, femme, and racialized bodies. Mainstream gay culture (circuit parties, saunas) are still displaying blatantly discriminatory behaviour. Inspired by my experience and those of my peers, I am interested in using archival research to examine and understand how far back toxic masculinity can be traced in queer archives.
In my online search of The ArQuives, formerly the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives, I stumble across an educational and pornographic magazine titled Queen’s Quarterly: the Magazine for Gay Guys with no Hangups (often shortened to QQ). Before I dissect the name and the content of these publications, here are some of the images I’ve discovered (ones that are relatively SFW):
As you can note from Figures 1-3, there is a white, euro-centric and unrealistically physically fit and muscular body that is celebrated in this magazine. Furthermore, there is an argument to be made about the predominantly hairless (other than Figure 3) men that the magazine celebrates. In Figures 1 and 2, the men featured are presented in stereotypically masculine roles–that of hero/warrior and outdoorsmen (though the practicality of either of these trades entirely nude comes into question).
Additionally, the title of this magazine piques my interest. While Queen has been a gay cultural term for decades, in recent years Queen is reserved as an effeminate term to refer to gay men who present in more “feminine” styles. Through a modern lens, the title of Queen’s Quarterly feels contradictory to the “masculine” nature of the content that they publish. I wonder if, should they exist today, QQ would reject such a title as much as many within the community reject effeminate members.
As I mentioned earlier, the celebration of hairlessness in the magazine is of interest. Much of the gay community celebrates and prefers hairlessness–unless sectioned off in ridiculously labelled “tribes” of hairy men (e.g. bears, otters, etc.). Hairlessness is so often a societal pressure that women must face, and therefore one could associate it with feminized bodies. In this vein, it is of curiosity to me why QQ, and much of gay culture, puts such a value on hairless bodies while simultaneously disregarding, fetishizing, or discriminating against gay men deemed “too feminine.”
A large aspect of QQ that concerns me is the countless articles that are marketed as educational tools for gay men–tutorials on gay sex and “typical” gay male behaviour frequent each volume. Closeted men who, at the time of publication, had no other access to learn about or explore their queer identities very well could have turned to this magazine to indulge in images of an open gay community. The risks here are that QQ, and other magazines of the same nature (Tomorrow Man, TBP, etc.), present incredibly narrow scopes of what it means to be a gay man or a queer person in general. Throughout the countless articles and covers that I have combed through, not once was a plus-size or BIPOC body featured in the magazine.
Furthermore, the presentation of such narrow gay male ideals creates a repetitive cycle that is passed down through queer generations. Young queer people internalize these ideals during imperative years of their identity formation; they learn that these presentations of a gay man are the ones that are desirable. Thus, when they search for their own partners, be it romantic or sexual, they search for the same ideals that they’ve been compared to, or against, in their own experiences. QQ may not exist today, but the standards that it has helped establish for gay men continue to dominate within the community.
It is evident through my exploration of Queen’s Quarterly that racism, femmephobia, and fatphobia are not new; rather, modern forms stem from decades of idolizing one type of queer man and rejecting anyone that differs from that idealized identity. Especially for young members of the queer community, this expectation and rejection of their bodies can cause irreparable damages to their identity formation, self-worth, and confidence. In his article detailing the closures of gay bars during the pandemic, John Garry asserts that gay bars fail queer people that are part of other marginalized communities. While Garry highlights the opening of more inclusive queer physical spaces in cities like Seattle (Queer/Bar) and Portland (Local Lounge), I can only hope that this mission of inclusivity extends to the queer digital world as well.
References
Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. Archives of Sexuality and Gender, 1971-1981.
Churchill, David S. “Personal Ad Politics: Race, Sexuality and Power at The Body Politic.” Left History, vol. 8, no. 2, https://doi.org/10.25071/1913-9632.5514.
Conte, Matthew Thomas. “More Fats, More Femmes: A Critical Examination of Fatphobia and Femmephobia on Grindr.” Feral Feminisms, vol. 7, Spring 2018, https://feralfeminisms.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/3-Matthew-Conte.pdf .
Garry, John. “What Is the Future of LGBTQ Safe Spaces?” Matador Network, May 2021, https://matadornetwork.com/read/future-lgbtq-safe-spaces/.
Ha, Vince. No Fats, No Femmes, No Asians: Reimagining Sexual and Ethnic Identities of Queer Asian Men. Master’s MRP, Ryerson University, 2017.
Mann, Arshy. “The Body Politic failed black LGBT people, symposium hears.” Xtra, June
2016, https://xtramagazine.com/power/the-body-politic-failed-black-lgbt-people-symposium-hears-71205 .
Palumbo, Jennifer “Jay.” “The Body Positive Movement Encourages Inclusion, Not Obesity.” Forbes, May 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferpalumbo/2022/05/12/how-the-body-positive-movement-doesnt-encourage-obesity-but-inclusion/?sh=4f07f3f21737.