Οι γνωστές καταστροφολογίες του Guardian ή μια προφητεία που έχει ήδη αρχίσει να εκπληρώνεται;
Walking home down Grey Street in St Kilda with my
partner recently, I noticed an entire wall around a building site was taken
over by billboards for a new gay dating app called “Squirt”. The image on the
poster depicted three muscle-bound near-naked men looking provocatively at each
other under the banner “non-stop cruising”.
Partly out of curiosity and partly out of a morbid
desire to gauge where this new crop of dating apps is taking us, I downloaded
it. Turns out Squirt is a rehash of an old online gay cruising website. What I
soon realised was that it was little more than a gateway to US gay porn sites
dressed up as a gay matchmaking site. The main discernible difference between
this one and others of its ilk such as Grindr, Hornet or Scruff, seemed to be that there were
no restrictions on having uncensored profile pics and the banner ads for sex
sites were much more in-your-face.
In other words, I’d stumbled into the sleazy end of
hook-up apps thanks to a gargantuan advertisement in my rapidly gentrifying
neighbourhood.
I know I only have myself to blame since I chose to
download the app, and my boyfriend gave me a hard time about it later. Yes, I’m
in a relationship but we don’t try to control each other’s online activities. I
know he has Grindr on his phone – but beyond that I don’t want to know.
I met my partner six years ago and we’ve been living
together ever since. We met in the middle of a hot Melbourne summer in a gay
nightclub when we randomly started chatting beside the water jug at the edge of
the dancefloor. After just a few minutes we decided to leave the place and go
for a walk in the balmy January night. We never looked back.
Advertisement
As one of our dearest friends pointed out to me recently,
this makes us pretty unusual among our peers: both that our relationship has
endured and that we met in person rather than hooking up online. To be honest,
he was one of the first guys I met who seemed to genuinely believe in love and
romance. Before that, I was a frequent user of dating apps, which were really
only useful for one thing, and it wasn’t a relationship.
Nowadays it seems like everyone is using dating apps –
whether gay or straight or somewhere in between. So much so that I’ve started
to wonder if people go out to bars anymore.
Where I live in Melbourne’s south side, an entire gay
district in Commercial Road Prahran has all but disappeared to make way for
trendy cafes and delis. I know in Sydney, also, much of the gay culture has
moved further underground, as even iconic gay bars like the Imperial Hotel in
Newtown (where The Adventure of Priscila, Queen of the Desert was filmed) have in recent years become mixed
clientele rather than gay venues.
Whatever happened to the infamous alternative queer
bars that used to be packed to the rafters every night of the week, like
Melbourne’s infamous Q&A (Queer and Alternative) where we used to dance all
night to bands like Blur, the Smiths and the Dead Kennedy’s? Places where we
used to make the effort to dress up (or dress down, depending on your taste),
get drunk on cheap beers, and form enduring friendships and relationships.
Perhaps there is simply no need for exclusively gay
venues anymore, in an age where many people simply seek connections online. No
doubt online dating apps have done wonders for connecting people more readily,
but I wonder what has been lost in the equation.
In the LGBT community, dating apps have become deeply
imbued in the new commercialism of gay culture. “Community events” such as the
Pride march in Melbourne and the Mardi Gras parade in Sydney have become places
where you find entire floats and stalls dedicated to Grindr and Manhunt. These
parades that were formed as a brave act of political rebellion are now places
where gay dating apps advertise themselves prominently, even though there is
nothing remotely subversive or liberating about their products. These sites are
not designed as a community service, their primary motivation is profit.
I get the appeal of instant gratification that people
seek with dating apps. I don’t think there is anything wrong with having safe
consensual hook-ups for fun. They can provide a temporary tonic for loneliness
and have even occasionally led to real friendships and long-term relationships.
But what of romance? My story of meeting my partner at
an actual bar now seems almost quaint and of another era. I worry that under
the addictive neon glow cast by flickering pixels of bodies on dating apps we
have inadvertently sacrificed some of the edgier aspects of our culture to be
replaced by the curse of being alone with our phones chasing superficial
titillation.
James Norman (theguardian.com, 15/7/2015)
