'AI? Bye!' Why I'm quitting Grindr for good

Last October, Grindr announced a new feature: an “AI wingman” to interact with users like a chatbot and help them find matches. Grindr’s CEO, George Arison, told The Wall Street Journal that over 10,000 users will be testing the “wingman” by the end of this year, and it will be available to all users — over 14 million — by 2027.

It will track users’ favorite matches and, from this data, suggest other profiles. To do this, Grindr made a 2023 deal with an AI company called Ex-human, aiming to create a chatbot trained in romantic conversation that would sound “more gay” than chatbots of the past. I can just picture it: Hey girl, this guy is 3,921 feet away, a top, and likes fisting. Shantay, you stay. All this feels very strange to me.

I’ve never done well on the apps. A friend — real, not a bot — helped me realize the problem: My photos don’t match my in-person energy, so guys always expect someone different. “It’s the tattoos,” my friend said.

Even so, after a recent breakup, I went back to Grindr, like returning to a toxic lover I swore off. When I logged back in, I saw there were now two premium membership tiers instead of one: The more expensive one cost the equivalent of a gym membership.

At this point in culture, Grindr doesn’t need explaining — its cultural impact extends well beyond queer men. In 2022, Vice called it a “24/7 merry-go-round of sex in your immediate locale.”

When Rolling Stonereported in 2023 that Grindr users had voted on Beyoncé as Mother of the Year, the magazine didn’t say votes came from “Grindr users” but rather “the gays” — the app is so synonymous with gay men that it now representative of us. With its strangely menacing hockey-mask icon and now-iconic bubbling notification sound, the app has been a lightning rod of controversy lately.

Grindr has sold user location data through ad networks for years, and the company is currently in a lawsuit in the U.K. for revealing its users’ HIV status. In Toronto and the U.K., serial killers used Grindr to lure their victims, and in several countries with antigay laws, police have used the app to find, arrest, and abuse gay and queer men. But hey, it’s OK, because now there’s an AI wingman.

Instagram must have noticed I was newly single because I quickly saw ads for Feeld — a kink- and queer-friendly app that came out in 2014, and a much newer app, Collective, which came out this year. I downloaded both. Let’s try ’em all!

Feeld and Collective are competing in a crowded field of at least 50 major dating and sex apps, including the gay ones, with more surely on the way. Feeld is an app for progressive, self-aware nontraditionalists: nonmonogamous, kinky, polyamorous, or generally playful folk who want to play with others. It feels a little precious, with an almost comical abundance of labels to categorize myself with: I struggled to decide if I was “homoflexible,” “hetero-curious,” “pansexual,” “sexually fluid,” or just “gay.”

The growth marketing lead at Feeld, Caolan Howe, told me the backstory. Feeld was created by Ana and Dimo (he did not give last names, but I found them: Bulgarian-born designer Dimo Trifonov and his girlfriend Ana Kirova). In 2014, Ana confessed to Dimo that she had feelings for a woman. Rather than ending their relationship, it was the beginning of Feeld, which was designed to be “a space where like-minded people can challenge norms around gender, sexuality, and dating.”

“It’s an independent, ad-free business,” Howe said. “All revenue from memberships cycles back into evolving the product.” He added that the people who monitor the app’s user base “find our members are looking for personal growth over growth in the context of traditional relationships.”

Feeld is very queer-friendly but not just for queer people. Collective is just for us. Launched just this year, it’s growing but still small — small enough that I managed to chat with founder Callum Smith on the app itself. (When I asked him about this piece, he said, “We don’t do any press coverage yet, but I’m trying to figure out how to change that!”) The app is a mix of Tumblr and Instagram with some of the profile-matching and chat elements of Tinder, Feeld, and others. After a short time on it, I saw it as more of a microblogging platform with some chat features thrown in. It’s super queer and cool, but I don’t imagine ever finding sex or love on it. And that’s by design.

“Collective is not a hookup app or another platform to build a following,” Smith said. “Its focus is on meeting new people.”

His “manifesto” on the info page mentions the alarming data around queer loneliness and depression. Like me, Smith grew up in a small town with “one traffic light and more churches than people.” Feeling isolated was part of his queer reality — and mine — so years later, he made “an app-based community space” for people who live far from the nearest gay bar. It’s an honorable mission — it’s essentially the same mission that made me start writing — that leaves me feeling dissatisfied.

After all, there is something to the classic queer experience of hopping on a bus and going to the closest big-city gay bar. That can’t be replaced online or on-app, because profiles aren’t people. A bar, a club, or even a gay coffee shop — that’s real. That’s human.

After trying these new contenders, I still felt ready to give up apps for good. Instagram must have sensed this too because soon I saw an ad for a book by queer author Leo Herrera — someone whose name I had heard around New York but never met. Published in October, the book is called (analog) Cruising — a slim, baby-pink guide to cruising the old-school way. It is an ode to lost cruising spaces and a love letter to those that remain. Herrera mixes funny (and hot) stories from his life with useful, actionable tips on how to cruise in bars, in bathhouses, on the street, and so on.

The book is filled with gems like this: “If you listen closely, the most common words in a cruising area tend to be ‘thank you.’ If someone gifts you an orgasm, express gratitude! Even if you’ll never see them again — or can’t even see them now.”

And this: “Pleasure is not binary. It exists alongside fear, sadness, and politics. That is the history of Queer pleasure. We tend to tell one side of our history — of riots and martyrs — but ignore how much sex is a root of that liberation.”

He also expresses my problem with apps better than I ever could: “Everyone on the apps arrived for a different party…. There was no way to gauge interest — whether someone was just bored and horny, looking for a little connection to jerk off, or really wanted to meet up…. Communication was instant or chats were over the span of days. After all these years, there seemed to be no common etiquette.”

After reading this, I had to talk to this guy. First, I asked him why he wrote it. “I’ve never heard a gay man say they love Grindr, whereas I’ve heard thousands of times that someone picked up a guy at a bar and had a great time,” Herrera said. “I only do analog cruising, and as I got older, I realized this wasn’t second nature to a generation of people who grew up only using apps for sex.”

He stressed that his book was not the first guide of its kind — it followed a long line of cruising guides and articles in the ’70s and ’80s — but he hoped it would make a difference now because of what he perceived as community-wide app fatigue. Most of the book is dedicated to tips on analog cruising — only the epilogue mentions the apps. But the epilogue is so fiery and well-written that it makes the whole book a kind of treatise against them.

Herrera stressed that apps are still useful for trans folks, disabled folks, those who live in remote areas, and people who have difficulty disclosing their HIV status. But Herrera has chosen to reject apps. “What we know now about privacy and social media addiction also went into this decision,” he said.

I pressed him on this: Surely it was inevitable that queer dating would go digital? One of the earliest uses of the internet was to replace newspaper classifieds. “Oh, definitely,” Herrera said. “I came out on websites like gay.com and planetout.com. Queers have always used the most advanced technology to communicate. But social media supercharged it, and Grindr is a social media platform. Now we know the limits and dangers of social media.” Herrera even met a past boyfriend on Scruff, so he could admit that surprises do happen on apps. “But now there are shareholders involved,” he said. “These apps must grow from our data, and that’s the most sensitive data queer people have.”

After talking to him, I sat for a moment, then deleted each profile, canceled every subscription, and removed the apps from my phone. I was better in person. Maybe everyone else was, too.

Alexander Cheves is a writer, sex educator, and author of My Love Is a Beast: Confessions from Unbound Edition Press. @badalexcheves

Need dating advice? Email your question to Cheves at askbeastly@gmail.com — you may get an answer in a future column!

This article is part of the Out January/February issue, which hits newsstands February 4. Support queer media and subscribe— or download the issue through Apple News, Zinio, Nook, or PressReader starting January 23.