Every year, new dating apps, services and websites show face, making it easier for single gay men to find each other and fall in love. Therefore, even though online dating has been in the headlines for ‘hijacking modern love’ and trivialising the concept of everyday romance, we are at the dawn of a new age. And contrary to most romcoms, he’s not waiting for us at the airport.Ĭonventional ways of finding love are non-existent when it comes to the quintessential gay man of today, so we look for every opportunity, and app, that comes our way.
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See, if our next big love isn’t hidden behind a mesh of profiles on the dating app of our choice, there’s a very big chance he’s not waiting for us at the bar with free drinks (and if he is, there’s a chance he might give us chlamydia). Actually, we don’t have safe spaces at all.ĪLSO READ: Chennai’s LGBTQIA community finds a safe space at The Queering Mic We don’t have safe spaces when it comes to finding love. As a self-aware, self-loving gay man, let me tell you something. Which means that we are obsessed with the idea of finding companionship.Īnd so, we are obsessed with dating apps. Contrary to what we will tell you, gay men are obsessed with the idea of finding a sense of normalcy.
With more than 10 million users worldwide, Grindr recorded a surge from 11,000 to 69,000 active new users per month, simply within a span of four years, and that was back in 2015. Technology is revolutionising romance, and we’ve even got the numbers to prove it.
Over the past few years, we’ve sent ‘footprints’ to torsos on Romeo, favourited guys on Grindr, ‘woofed’ at hopefuls on Scruff and super-liked our way through a dozen profiles on Tinder. Get Out: The Gay Man’s Guide to Coming Out and Going Out (HarperCollins) by Aniruddha Mahale We’ve moved on from clandestine trysts in washrooms to the ones on our phones in ways that were previously unimaginable, because the dating apps of today are a reflection of what mankind has been doing for ages - creating new forms of communication and then fine-tuning them into channels for finding sex, love and long-term relationships. In many ways, this was the precursor to modern-day dating. We hid behind usernames and silhouettes, typing out our ASLs (age, sex, location) in anonymous chat rooms, slowly stepping into a world that’s very reminiscent of the one we know today. Online portals such as Yahoo Messenger provided a substitute for the magazines from the 90s, moving us from personals to chat rooms. But as we excitedly filled in our classifieds (and preferences), trends changed once again.ĪLSO READ: Food plays a central role in LGBTQIA+ culture and it deserves its place at the table The periodical welcomed men to write letters to others like them, making personals popular much before. Then the 90s happened and India saw its first LGBTQIA+ platform in the guise of Bombay Dost, a queer magazine that completely transformed how gay men met each other. Over the decades, we’ve gone past searching for each other under streetlights, signalling with colourful handkerchiefs at traffic signals, and bumping into one another at seedy, dingy bars. And they’ve been finding each other ever since. Gay, bisexual or transgendered - it’s evident that queer-identifying men have always existed. Throughout our ancient texts, there have been various descriptions of saints, gods and demi-gods breaking gender norms and myths about love being heteronormative.
So, how did men find each other before Instagram let us slide into each other’s DMs? Much before Instagram became a phenomenon and a platform for guys to leave hearts behind on other men’s profiles and complain about why they won’t flirt with each other, the queer dating landscape was a very different place: this journey from the streets to sheets has been a long one.
There’s no denying the fact that Aryan and Kiaan have had it easy.ĪLSO READ: Is online intimacy bringing us closer or driving us apart? You leave a string of strategic hearts on another man’s Instagram profile, and you’ve ‘officially’ made your first move. Somewhere between their matching flower-crown filters and millennial names, they found and added each other, and hopelessly fell in love.Īryan calls it fate Kiaan calls it public privacy settings.įinding love is that simple in 2022. Aryan, 24, and Kiaan, 20, met each other on Instagram.