Respectable promiscuity: Digital cruising in an era of queer liberalism

Introduction

Hookup apps, unlike their web-based predecessors, use locative mobile technology to connect users based on proximity, not match potential. Grindr, the first such app, remains one of the largest and best-known gay hookup apps. In practice, Grindr serves multiple purposes, but its reputation as a hookup app comes from the fact that it functions as a digital cruising space. Sharif Mowlabocus (2010), in his London-based study of gay men’s use of technology, uses the term digital cruising to describe techno-practices that adapt mobile technology as they draw on gay subcultural histories of sexualized public recognition. Cruising traditionally occurs in bars, clubs, or public spaces such as parks and public restrooms where men generally signal sexual interest in another man through established non-verbal signals (Bérubé, 1996; Delany, 1999; Humphreys and Rainwater, 1975; Tewksbury, 2002).

Christian Licoppe and his colleagues (2015) argue that Grindr is an example of the remediation of public cruising practices through a mobile social networking app, though with dramatically different interactional and linguistic norms, including a privatization of cruising, noting that Grindr is primarily used to facilitate sex in private spaces such as the home. The layering of physical and virtual space created by mobile, location-based social networking apps opens up possibilities for identifying and connecting with other gay men in seemingly heterosexual contexts (Crooks, 2013; Mowlabocus, 2010) or in ostensibly gay spaces overrun by heterosexuals “on safari” (Orne, 2016) creating tensions for Grindr users as they navigate self-presentation on the app and attempt to ascertain other users’ intentions (Blackwell et al., 2015).

Similarly to Licoppe’s study of Grindr use in Paris, my study in Chicago found that Grindr is privatizing cruising. However, I complicate the findings on the layering of virtual and real space through Grindr use. I argue that Grindr is not a return to pre-Stonewall forms of covert signaling of sexual interest, as Crooks (2013) argues, but is a contested cultural space where publicness and privateness co-exist, creating tensions for self-presentation that are structured by contemporary sexual politics. More in line with Orne (2016), I argue that the queer potential of Grindr exists but is often not realized in actual use in actual use unless it is used as a hybrid space, incorporating a physical space that goes beyond a private one-on-one interaction. I turn to the concept of imagined affordances (Nagy and Neff, 2015) to connect the complex negotiations Grindr users engage in, and the privatizing ends to which they use the app, to broader political struggles over sexual identity politics.

The technology of Grindr plays with the boundaries of public and private, sexual and non-sexual in ways that require an analysis of the queer liberal subject. This study pushes scholarship on homonormativity and queer liberalism into the digital, linking it with new media studies. In this article, I will argue that queer liberalism limits the imagination of sexual possibilities, producing respectably promiscuous users who perceive the app to be a (semi)-public virtual space designed for the pursuit of private sexual interaction.

Cruising and gay public sex culture, thriving in the 1960s and 1980s, was cut short by responses to the AIDS epidemic that associated promiscuity, and public sex especially, with HIV transmission (Bérubé, 1996; Colter, 1996). While the AIDS epidemic sparked grassroots activism focused on government and biomedical neglect (Epstein, 1996), it also initiated a trend toward monogamy among gay men and a decline in bathhouse attendance (D’Emilio and Freedman, 2012). The stigma of promiscuity in gay male culture has roots in the respectability politics of internal responses to AIDS, as well as homophobic responses from outside the community, and continues to haunt discourses of gay male sexuality.

In the past two decades, marriage equality has been pushed to the front of LGBT organizing and with it the imperative of appearing “just like them (heterosexuals),” through sexual moderation, monogamy and the disavowal of deviant sexual subcultures. This assimilationist discourse is the foundation of homonormativity and the current politics of respectability in LGBT communities. “Homonormativity” is a term Lisa Duggan (2003) uses to describe the assimilationist politics of the contemporary gay and lesbian movement that emphasizes individualism and sexual restraint. Building on this, David Eng (2010) points to the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court ruling, which effectively legalized sodomy in the USA, as a decidedly homonormative and racialized shift to “queer liberalism,” which he sees as a rights-based LGBT politics connected to a narrow definition of individualized (white) citizenship, and to hetero- and homonormative power structures that marginalize sexual deviance. The Lawrence ruling was made based on the right to privacy, with language that signified that this privacy was for committed monogamous couples engaging in sex acts in their own home. As a key turning point in contemporary US LGBT politics, the logic and rhetoric of this decision has been used to circumscribe appropriate sexuality within the private sphere.

The concept of respectable promiscuity that I put forth here plays with the mutual exclusivity of respectability and promiscuity within both hetero- and homonormative discourses, in order to draw attention to the inherent paradoxes of sexual practice, sexual subjectivity, and sexual discourse. Respectable promiscuity captures the negotiations individuals engage in as they enact stigmatized sexual practices, manage sexual reputations, and give meaning to their sexual practices within a specific socio-political context. Grindr is a rich case study for the concept of respectable promiscuity because it allows for an investigation of the role of technological affordances in these negotiations. Respectable promiscuity on Grindr describes the complex and contradictory mediated practices of users based on imagined affordances (Nagy and Neff, 2015)—an imagination limited by contemporary logics of queer liberalism as well as the social and material consequences (such as arrest or shaming) of public sex or excessive promiscuity. My argument is not nostalgia for the days of public cruising; rather, I attempt to lay out a case study for understanding how the social and historical context of users—their discursive and material conditions—affects how they perceive and use a technology.

Digital ethnography of Grindr

I began this study by asking how Grindr, as both a virtual space and a mediator of physical space, is changing the traditional spatial dynamics of gay male sexual culture. I was interested in the practices of Grindr users and the meanings they attach to those practices. Digital ethnography is well suited to answering this question. Like “traditional” ethnography, the goal is understanding the meanings people make of their lives through immersion in particular space or (sub)culture (Beneito-Montagut, 2011; Garcia et al., 2009; Hallett and Barber, 2014; Hine, 2000). My analysis is not meant to generalize to the experiences of all gay men or even all users of Grindr. Rather, my analysis draws attention to the connections between my ethnographic findings about the practices and meanings of a wide array of Grindr users, and the socio-political context in which they engage in these practices.

Data for this study come from 20 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Grindr users, four months of participant observation on the app, and dozens of informal conversations with Grindr users, including strangers, acquaintances, and friends. Interviewees had to identify as gay, bisexual or queer, identify their gender as a man and/or transman, log on to Grindr at least once a week, have had their Grindr profile at least two months, have at least one in-person experience initiated on Grindr, and live in Chicago. I began recruitment for interviews using flyers, distributing them at bars and businesses in gay neighborhoods and approaching potential participants at several large events attended by many gay men. Recruitment efforts initiated dozens of informal conversations with gay men about their own or others’ use of Grindr, the reputation of Grindr, and its role in gay men’s social worlds. Conversations were sometimes with an individual, a couple, or a group of friends. Such interactions functioned as informal focus groups, after which I took fieldnotes to record conversation and observations.

These recruitment methods produced five interviews, plus five more through snowball sampling. I decided that recruiting through the app itself might be more productive. While potential subjects I spoke with at events and in bars were happy to have informal conversations, few were willing to commit to scheduling an interview. Recruiting through the app itself had more promise than recruiting through paper fliers, as app users in particular get much of their information and keep up with their social networks through their phones, not bulletin boards or stacks of fliers and brochures. Ten participants were recruited through conversations initiated on Grindr, using a profile created for that purpose. ¹ I chose which users to message based on the goal of a diverse sample that would draw on the experiences of men of different race, ethnicity, age, and cis- and trangender men. ² I purposefully initiated conversations with users whose profiles reflected the range of sexual to non-sexual profiles. I was also purposeful in opening the app and starting conversations in a variety of neighborhoods, as the users visible to me varied by location; however interviews were done primarily with men who lived in and frequented Chicago’s northside, which is whiter and more affluent than the highly segregated predominantly black westside and southside, and home to Chicago’s “gayborhoods” Boystown and Andersonville.

Being on the app provided an opportunity for participant observation. I spent four months on the app, accessing it daily, sometimes many times throughout the day. My profile clearly identified my role as a researcher, included a “face pic” of myself, and a brief description of the study. The development of my profile was part of the learning process as a participant observer on the app and my in-app recruitment strategy shifted to include a beginning conversational period, sometimes lasting days, as I picked up more of the social norms on the app. This learning process happened through interactions with other users, viewing other users’ profiles, and listening to how my interviewees described their interactions on the app.

Conversation on the app was sometimes initiated by the potential subject to request more information about the study. Sometimes other users initiated conversation with me without reading the information on my profile and, based on my masculine appearance, assumed I was a man and potentially interested in sex. Other times, I initiated conversation with Grindr users. The social norms of Grindr include frequent, unsolicited messages from other users. If further conversation is not desired, the user will ignore the message and/or block the user who sent it. My conversations, attempts at conversations, and receipt of unsolicited, sometimes sexual messages and images were an important part of the digital ethnography and informed my interview schedule and follow-up questions during the interviews.

Interviews were conducted between June 2013 and February 2014, lasted about an hour, were audio recorded, and took place either in a coffee shop convenient to a participant’s home or work, or in my office on a centrally located university campus. The two exceptions to this were one interview conducted via Skype, and another over email. Meeting in person allowed me to match the user’s physical presence—the intangible aspects of a person’s personality that all of my participants insisted mattered in their own Grindr in-person meet ups—to their in-app presence. It also allowed participants an additional method of verifying my credibility as a researcher confirming in person that I was who I portrayed myself to be, or at least see that my appearance matched my profile picture and also the picture of me on my department’s website. Two participants confessed to Google-ing me before meeting, and it is likely other participants did as well.

Interviews were transcribed and then coded in a two-step process. First, I coded for themes directly related to my research questions and themes that had emerged during participant observation and informal conversations. I went back a second time to code for additional themes that had emerged during the first phase of coding.

Looking?

Grindr has a reputation as a hookup app in part because the design of the app facilitates this purpose. Profiles consist of a picture and sparse information provided by the user. Age, height, and weight can be entered as any value. Body type, ethnicity and relationship status can be chosen from a menu. Finally, users can indicate their intentions on the app by choosing any combination of the options: Chat, Dates, Friends, Networking, Relationship, Right Now. Users can also choose not to provide any of this information, though the majority of users choose to include height, weight, ethnicity, and intentions. Users have limited space to describe themselves on their profile, beyond their physical “stats,” and what they are looking for.

Despite the design and reputation of Grindr, users engage in a wide range of sexual and non-sexual interactions on the app. Interviewees spoke to both the reputation of the app and their own use of it. As Peter (white, ³ 27) said, “People view Grindr as a hookup site, even though that's not what everybody does on there.” Jason (white, 29) found this out through trial and error,

I think one of the first mistakes I made, is that the reputation I had heard of was it was just a hookup spot, so there are a few, at least four guys who live in [my neighborhood] right now who won’t talk to me because when I first got on I was like, So I guess we’re hooking up, right? And they were like, I’m blocking you … There are actually people on there to just chat. That doesn’t necessarily get put out there very often.

Online spaces, especially newer technology such as dating apps, have less standardized norms for interaction. The fact that the intentions of users, as stated on their profiles, often do not match users’ actual practices confuses the already ambiguous rules of interaction on Grindr. However, there are some norms for communicating intentions. Some users put textual cues on their profile, such as marking the Right Now option under what they are looking for, or stating specific intentions in their About Me section such as “NSA [no strings attached] sex only,” “let’s get a drink and see where it goes,” or “not looking to hookup, friends only.” Other cues are given during one on one interaction on the app. An initial message of “looking?” indicates an interest in sex, generally right then or within the same day. An initial message of “top?” or “bottom?”, referring to a preference for penetrative or receptive sex, also indicates interest in casual sex, though not with the same implication of immediacy as “looking?”. The profile picture is another way of indicating intentions. Generally, shirtless photos suggest sexual intent. Grindr users have subtle ways of indicating their intentions, but the textual and visual cues are often contradictory or ambiguous.

Zach (white, 27) explains Grindr’s reputation, while pointing out that his use of the app is different from the reputation,

I think every gay man recognizes the sound of [a new message received on] Grindr. God forbid you’re sitting at brunch and you hear that sound and everyone’s like “Oh my god, who’s the trick? ⁴ And that’s exactly where our mind goes. Rather than, “Oh who are you chatting with? Are you having a nice conversation?” Because nine out of ten times, that’s what it is for me. But you still hear that sound and everyone’s like “Ahh, we know where you’ll be later.”

So far, I have focused on interactional norms, the general reputation of Grindr, and users’ management of this reputation. Two common strategies users employed were emphasizing the multiplicity of their intentions on the app and contrasting their use to a more promiscuous theoretical user. In the next section, I will show how the use of Grindr is structured by queer liberal discourse, the success of the app relying on the affordances of the app that allow users to negotiate publicness and privacy so as to manage their respectability while digitally cruising.

Private sex and public identities

The appearance of Grindr in 2009 was at once an adaptation of available technology to existing social practices, including finding anonymous sex, and also part of a (homo)normative shift to a more private public sex culture. Like most of the internet, Grindr profiles are hardly private. Grindr profiles are public in the sense that anyone with a smartphone or ipad can sign up and see the profiles of other users around them. The management of privacy and reputation on the app is structured by the fact that messaging occurs in private. Sending and receiving explicit photos occurs through private messaging, where only a user name and the content of the messages appear on the same screen. Some users could be said to be actively “cruising” by having sexually explicit profiles or being clear about their sexual intentions on their profile, but users with non-sexual profiles—face selfies instead of naked torso selfies, for example, and stated intentions of “looking for new friends” or “just looking for gym buddies”—regularly use the private messaging feature of Grindr to find sexual partners. When pressed to describe how they decide what type of interaction to pursue with another user, interviewees tended to be non-committal. Pursuing sexual interaction depended on their “mood,” “if they felt like it,” or, “how the conversation goes.” Even those interviewees who used the app quite intentionally to find sexual partners had trouble articulating the process of attraction and desire. The ambiguous distinction between private and public space, and sexual and non-sexual space on Grindr produces a multiplicity, and often ambivalence, of user intentions.

I do not doubt that some Grindr users have used the app to facilitate public sex or semi-public sex such as at a bathhouse or backroom, however none of my data revealed this to be common or socially acceptable. None of my respondents reported engaging in public or semi-public sex with someone they met on Grindr, having another user suggest they meet for public or semi-public sex, or hearing about someone using Grindr for this purpose. Grindr users commonly meet potential sex partners in a bar, and, after a few drinks, may go to one of their homes for sex. Also common is arranging to go over to another user’s home, skipping the public meeting. This was true whether the purpose was to have anonymous one-time sex or to assess the potential for a long-term relationship. This norm was verified in informal conversations on and off the app.

Eng’s (2010) analysis of the Lawrence ruling can be extended here. Arranging to meet other men via the privacy of a personal cell phone, for sex in the privacy of one’s home, is within the rights stated in the ruling. The app itself is structured to facilitate private sexual conversations, not public ones. Profiles are small and limited, but conversation is not. Social norms and practices on the app itself allow users to maintain their privacy, even while engaging in explicit searches for sexual partners. As Jason (white, 29) said, “never show your face on any pictures where you show your naughty bits, because they make websites on that now.” Jason’s rule-of-thumb reveals user concerns about privacy and the role of visual representations of the body in both the eroticism of Grindr and the risk it presents to users’ reputation. This rule of thumb is widely followed on Grindr, as a practice that protects users’ privacy and reputation by keeping explicit photos of their body from being traced back to them. The very ambivalence of intentions that the app fosters allows for a plausible denial or minimization of sexual intention that is central to the management of the public/private boundary. Dalton (black/mixed, ⁵ 28) says,

People like to maintain a certain image of themselves, and everybody wants to appear chaste but desirable at the same time, and whatever. People will say “Oh you’re going on there and you’re trying to do that [find sex], I just talk to people and I never do anything.” I’m like “Sure, right” [sarcastic tone].

Homonormativity, like heteronormativity, privileges whiteness. Homonormativity produces a systemic policing of sexuality and gender, in part through a politics of representation that erases queers of color, poor and working-class queers, and gender non-conforming queers. Guided by an “ethics of sexual shame” (Warner, 2000) the contemporary LGBT movement distances itself from sexual deviants, and more generally from sex itself (Duggan, 2003; Robinson, 2005; Rubin, 1993). There is a long history of racial exclusion in lesbian and gay organizations, representations, and public spaces. The discriminatory practices of gay bars in the 1960s and 1970s included requiring men of color to provide multiple forms of identification to get in (Han, 2007). In the current “colorblind” era, racism is often more implicit than explicit and plays out in contemporary gay bars through the differential distribution of erotic capital (Green, 2008) and a politics of visibility that renders Asian men invisible (Han, 2007) and hypersexualizes black men.

In a colorblind era, in-person statements of explicit racial discrimination, particularly in mixed-race situations, are socially inappropriate. Race is supposed to go unnoticed, or stripped of its salience. Declarations of a “post-racial America” are often accompanied by predictions of dramatic increases in mixed-race coupling, as race loses its importance to social interaction and, apparently, attraction. Some Grindr users include statements on their profile indicating the race(s) they will or will not message and presumably consider as potential sex partners. The frequency of blatant statements of racial exclusion on Grindr can be jarring, given current “post-racial” discourse. The technology of Grindr allows for statements of racial preference to be made with less risk of negative social repercussions because the app mediates interaction, creating a climate on the app that is alienating for men of color (McCune, 2014; McGlotten, 2013; Nguyen, 2014).

The racial hierarchy on Grindr is not a separate social phenomenon from the privatizing of public sexual culture or the construction of queer liberal subjects. Rather, it is a central part of these. Whether or not writing “no femmes, no fats, no Asians,” or “whites to the front of the line” on one’s profile is racist or just a sexual preference is debated in online gay forums and community discourse, but much of the racism on Grindr extends beyond profiles.

In Dalton’s (black/mixed, 28) experience, the racial hierarchy was most prominent when people looked for relationships.

R: There are plenty of people who are still down to earth and they’ll be open to a lot, at least racially speaking they’ll be open to different things, but even within guys—because specifically since you’re saying dating—I’ve gone out with a lot of guys on dates, who maybe would hang out with me and want to sleep with me, but when they dated somebody it was a white guy.

J: So there’s a distinction between who people will hookup with and who they’ll date?

R: Right. That’s why I say it’s like a status thing. You can be their dirty little secret behind closed doors, but the person they want to be seen with is somebody that they think—I think they’re looking for somebody that they think will reflect well on them, if that makes sense.

Shifting cruising to private spaces—both actual sex acts and the practices associated with finding a sexual partner in a public space, furthers the sanitation of gay physical spaces. Users can meet sexual partners without ever leaving home, and public gay spaces become sites for platonic socializing. Gay men go to the bars with their friends to hang out, not to cruise. This was reiterated in my interviews, and in my informal conversations with men in gay bars. Jim (white, 55), reflecting on the differences between gay culture now and when he was in his 20s, said, “People don’t go out to the bars to meet up as much as they used to.” Most of Jim’s friends were partnered and not interested in joining him at a bar. He found going to bars alone uncomfortable and less productive than Grindr, in part because he found that, while the type of men he was attracted to, mostly in their 20s, went to the bars, “younger guys in bars tend to travel in packs it seems like, and they often just stick in circles, rather than when they’re at home on their phone, one on one reaching out to somebody.” Some men saw a connection between the changes in bar culture and the use of Grindr and other hookup apps. Victor (Latino 26), who was interviewed together with his boyfriend, Kevin (white 30) ⁶ felt, “some people don’t know how to hail someone at a bar anymore, or have a normal conversation at a bar anymore, with a random stranger, because of the apps.”

The privacy of digital cruising facilitates this split in functionality between bars and apps. Men can use their phone to connect with a sexual partner without appearing to do anything different than if they were scrolling through Facebook, texting a friend who was late, checking email, or playing a game on their phone. The performance of cruising is desexualized by the plausible deniability of using a phone app and the plausible deniability of Grindr itself, as discussed earlier. It is not just public sex that is disappearing, so too is the public pursuit of sex.

This is not to say that gay bars have been completely desexualized. Bawdy drag queen hosts, sexual banter, and drink specials named after sex acts have not disappeared. However, as Orne (2016) shows in his ethnography of Chicago’s Boystown, they are the cultural markers that make the neighborhood a popular place for bachelorette parties “on safari”. They are not the same as a visible collective practice of searching for and choosing a sexual partner for the night, regardless of where the sex occurs later. Orne argues that Grindr is used by gay men to subvert the appropriation of space in Boystown, but when app use is disconnected from physical community spaces, it loses its queer potential.

Visibility

In a special issue of First Monday on the layering of space, Roderic Crooks (2013) contends that Grindr is a “throw back to the time before gay villages, when men used signs and symbols to make themselves visible … to one another and to one another only,” and more akin to pre-Stonewall cruising than the more contemporary age of identity politics. The use of Grindr, he argues, allows for this incognito occupation of urban space, or what others have talked about as a queering of heterosexual space through gay men’s use of mobile technology for digital cruising (Mowlabocus, 2010).

I take a different position here. I fully agree with Crooks’ (2013) assertion that Grindr is a site for the negotiation of what it means to be a gay man in a still heterosexist but increasingly accepting cultural context. However, I argue that Grindr occupies a contested cultural space that is very much about identity politics and the “gay village,” (Crooks, 2013). Grindr allows for a layering of digital and physical space that can at times queer an otherwise straight space but it is neither as subculturally specific as these pre-Stonewall symbols nor is it understood by all of its users to be a discreet method of signaling their sexuality. Furthermore, these earlier forms of signaling occurred in cultural contexts in which the very concept of sexuality as an identity or a defining feature of an individual was still developing. Declarations on Grindr profiles such as “Have a face [picture] it’s 2016” suggest that part of the negotiations occurring on the app are connected to discourses of progress and rights, with a clear rejection of earlier modes of (in)visibility.

A central feature of gay politics post-Stonewall, and especially after the AIDS crisis, has been a demand to be “out and proud.” The more contemporary variant of LGBT politics, especially the marriage equality movement, has shifted the meaning of visibility away from the politics of sexual liberation and towards an essentialist and assimilationist mode of being out. This creates a tension between the imperative to be visible as a sexual minority yet be sexually discreet, and it is this tension I am attempting to capture with the concept of respectable promiscuity.

There is another reason for viewing Grindr as a contested cultural space instead of an updated hankie code. With the increasing mainstream acceptance of gays and lesbians, and the increasing visibility of LGBT folks more generally, gay space and straight space, gay sociality and straight sociality, are increasingly blended (Dean, 2014). The commodification of gayness is only one example of this. Zach’s observation quoted earlier that “every gay man knows the sound of Grindr” may be specific to gay male communities, but the phenomenon of Grindr is more widely recognized.

I’ve got a bunch of married straight guys who are friends with me. They live vicariously through me, for sure. My straight friends are like, “Did you hook up this week?” And I’m like, “Yeah, did you?” And they’re like, “Nope, my wife wouldn’t do it with me.” (Matt, white 37)

Significantly, straight men’s jealousy of the ease with which some gay men pursue casual sex, in contrast to their perceptions of women’s willingness to engage in similar arrangements, has been a feature of the discourse around the dating app industry more broadly. The primarily heterosexual hookup app Tinder did not come out until 2012 and did not achieve broad popularity and attention until 2013. It was the first successful attempt to make a “straight Grindr.” The closest to success prior to Tinder was Blendr, whose name even more obviously references Grindr. If Grindr began as a secret code, it is safe to say that the code has been cracked.

Imagined affordances

Central to my argument is the irony of a mobile technology facilitating sexual interactions that occur primarily in users’ homes. The app itself need not lead to sex in private. The technology could just as easily be used to reinvigorate public sex culture. Being able to find interested sexual partners nearby through a mobile technology could, in a different socio-political context or historical moment, lead to a proliferation of public and semi-public sex. Grindr could just as easily be used to circumvent the increased policing of known cruising spaces. A user looking for a quick semi-anonymous sexual encounter could go to a public space known for cruising, but appear to be passing the time on their phone instead, arranging a meeting location nearby with another user that will be out of the way of any visible or suspected police surveillance. The technological affordances of the app are just as well suited to evading surveillance in public as they are to arranging a meeting elsewhere.

In this instance, arguments about the decline of gay public sex culture being related to an increased acceptance of gays in mainstream culture may be accurate. As the Lawrence ruling and the LGBT movement’s focus on marriage equality suggest, mainstream acceptance of gays and lesbians has thus far hinged on the sanctity of domestic privacy and the legitimacy of monogamous relationships. The success of this political strategy has brought about a dramatic shift in public opinion and legal recognition for same-sex couples in the USA, culminating in the Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) Supreme Court decision that extended marriage rights to same-sex couples throughout the country.

This acceptance, though, is conditioned on creating a public image of group maturation where being gay is no longer associated with a sexual culture of promiscuity, bathhouses, outdoor cruising areas, and porn theatres. Language of sexual autonomy or sexual freedom has been replaced with the conventional wisdom that “what you do in the privacy of your own home is your business.” Grindr is successful because users can manage the porous public–private boundary of the app, secure in the political legitimacy of their public sexual identity as well as their right to a private sex life.

Nagy and Neff’s (2015) concept of “imagined affordances” may be helpful in understanding why users do not make use of Grindr to have public sex. According to Nagy and Neff, users’ perception of the affordances of a technology matter most. They contend that “the phrase affordances and constraints in communication and media studies almost always refers back to how human users are afforded or constrained in their seemingly conscious and rational actions,” (2015: 2 emphasis in original) and call for greater attention to users’ perception of what a technology is for, beyond conscious or rational thought. “The point is not solely what people think technology can do or what designers say technology is for, but what people imagine a tool is for,” (2015: 5 emphasis in original).

Messaging other users is a universally recognized affordance of Grindr. The goal of messaging other users can vary widely, as discussed earlier, but varies within culturally proscribed limits. The imagination of technology users is not limitless. In this regard, the fact that Grindr could allow for the reinvigoration of public sex culture via circumventing policing and surveillance efforts, is less relevant to its actual use than the fact that when users imagine it as a means of arranging for casual sex they imagine sex as something that one does in private. Grindr users make conscious rational decisions to manage their reputations vis-à-vis the app—a set of practices and negotiations I have referred to here as respectable promiscuity—but for most users the possibility of using Grindr for public sex does not enter into these negotiations. In short, I am arguing that public sex is beyond the queer liberal imagination. The (re)mediation of cruising through Grindr and similar apps is a move toward privatization not because users are making individual or collective decisions to reject earlier scripts for public sex, but because this possibility is not perceived in the technology.

I have focused on Grindr users’ negotiation of public and private space on and off the app, arguing that the political discourse of queer liberalism structures the meaning and use of these apps, and users’ need for reputation management. However, the fact that these apps facilitate casual sex, private or public, in spite of a political and cultural climate that is increasingly hostile to promiscuity and the open pursuit of (homo)sexual pleasure, cannot be overlooked. In such a political and cultural climate, insisting on sex as constitutive of sexual identity is dissident. Grindr users flirt with this dissidence, some purposefully and others warily. The reputation of the app is well known and must be actively managed by those users concerned with distancing themselves from the stigma of promiscuity, yet these users are willing to risk it. Some users openly use Grindr for finding sexual partners, resisting the constraints of homonormativity but perceiving the app as a means of private sexual encounters. Users do not shed their social locations at the log-on screen, nor is there a definitive boundary between the space of Grindr and the non-digital spaces of users’ lives. The logics of queer liberalism structure both users’ rational choices about how to use the app as well as their perceptions about what the app is for.