My Saturday evening began just over the road from the White House, waiting to see if Clavicular had sufficiently recovered from his overdose to make a much-heralded appearance at the Substack party along with the one Democrat whose phenotype is Chad enough to have gained the looksmaxxer-in-chief’s prospective electoral endorsement, Governor Newsom. In the end, the secret service arrived before either men-of-the-moment, sealing off the street and sending security swarming up the main stairway of the Renwick Smithsonian Gallery to place the entire party under lockdown. No leaving! we were told. No, not even to go to the Time Magazine party at the Swiss Embassy. At least for an hour or two. Commanded at gunpoint to return to the open bar — a degree of compulsion that I sensed was quite unnecessary — we did our duty and obeyed.

Before that night’s armed assault, however, the main battle of the week lay in gaining access to one party in particular: the inaugural Grindr WHCD Party in the prime-time Friday night slot. According to breathless reporting in Vanity Fair — who, one notes, have a party of their own to plug — Grindr’s was among the “most sought-after invitations of the weekend”: “the talk of the town”. A spread of “top power gays” were forecast to be in attendance. How exactly, I wondered, would this serve to differentiate it from the scores of other parties held throughout the year in the district of Columbia? There was only one way, I was repeatedly told, to find out.

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Arriving just before 10pm, thinking it best to make Grindr the last pit-stop of an overworked evening, the sight that first met the eye was a little discouraging. The venue was an unsellably large Georgetown townhouse, now re-purposed as an “event space”. Leading up to the colonnaded entrance was a club-style line of some hundred or more restless male homosexuals, and the occasional ally, showing no visible sign of forward movement. The ominous phrase “one in one out” was being thrown around. Worse still, it transpired, this was the line for people who had been invited. Mainly “circuit gays”, a chaperone who I had acquired on the way observed, deploying expert local knowledge. All the same, poor form from Grindr, I thought, to insist you can host only to leave your men begging entry from the curb.

At the business end of the line, and somewhat to the detriment of any “one in one out” principle, a more interesting sociological spectacle played out. Every 30 seconds or so a monstrous black SUV would pull up to the entrance, the doorway closely guarded by half a dozen blonde women wearing Britney-mic headsets. An entourage would emerge — “power gays”, I inferred – and either cruise straight through the doorway unopposed, or thrust an iPhone mid-call towards the chief headset-wearer, putting her in touch with a mystery speaker – identity unknown – who seemed to have the power to compel admittance faster than words could be spoken. Occasionally, there was a negotiation. “I have two of Karoline Leavitt’s boys coming from across town, I want to make sure they get let in”, one arrival barked at a headset blonde, holding her eye with an intensity seldom seen outside of an ophthalmological examination room. Unable to take the press secretary’s name in vain myself, it was clear I was going to have to rely on my ability to project a certain amount of soft power. A minute or so later, I was received indoors.

Commentators who insist the current mood of American party politics is antipathetic to gay interests might have had trouble explaining the scene inside. A Where’s-Wally panorama of half-familiar state department faces, mixed in with the younger, prettier congressional and senate staffers. Behind them all stretched a long garden, concealing many bars and hiding places. CNN’s Don Lemon was apparently somewhere on the dance floor; Scott Bessent, half-jokingly spoken of as likely to make an appearance, was apparently not. Instagram male models bussed in from New York squeezed in between the guests with buckets of oysters harnessed to their waists.

A great deal of mutual studying was taking place: is this, I wonder, what women are getting at when they refer obscurely to the “male gaze”? Every interaction was a function of two parameters: attractiveness and power. Some had both, but it seemed likely you needed at least one to get anybody’s attention. Once or twice, I was warned of an approaching young man that “she” is dangerous. But for the most part, the crowd was notably professional, conservatively dressed; there was little in the way of the modern LGBT-movement’s characteristically garish paraphernalia or costume. Intergenerational, too: the young men confident in their natural appeal, the older guests for the most part gristly bodies in over-tight suits, their faces unnaturally unlined and with an odd chemical shine. Nobody was fat. When I try to order a beer, I am practically thrown out under suspicion of being heterosexual. A harder drink is placed in my hand.  

“Donald loves the gays,” a White House staffer reassures me. “They’re good workers. He lost a lot of good people in the Eighties”. Of a foreign journalist we both know, there is an exasperated flourish of the wrist: “another blonde woman”.

Why, one wonders — both in DC and in Westminster, too — do gay men seem to be so over-represented in elite politics, at least behind the scenes? While drinking with a Tory staffer on the terrace of the Stranger’s Bar in Parliament, he had only to open the Grindr app on his phone for it to start vibrating uncontrollably, overheating as the deluge of solicitations mounted up. In DC, a political monoculture on the scale of a capital city, the effect seems even more pronounced. In recent years, Grindr has crashed through overuse at Republican National Conventions. And as recounted in James Kirchick’s recent, exhaustive history of the subject, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, the paranoid notion that the gays may have fully taken control of national politics proves oddly recurrent. In 1969, J Edgar Hoover began investigating the Nixon White House, suspecting it of having been infiltrated by a “ring of homosexualists” operating at the “highest levels of the White House”. Later rings – always rings – were suspected to be in control of subsequent candidates. From the Fifties onward, a list of the 4,000 or so homosexual men estimated to be living in and around Washington DC was supposedly compiled on the grounds that these characters constituted an obvious Soviet blackmail liability. Whatever the fate of that defunct list, clearly Grindr has compiled a similar database of its own. 

Observing the partygoers on Friday, it was difficult to know whether Grindr was attempting to court the historical stereotype or dispel it. Is the aim to project an insistent normality or something more illicit? Did the event belong or stand apart from the rest? One senses the popularity of the party owed something to a confused mixture of the two. At the garden’s center a large, illuminated ice-sculpture of the Grindr mask melted gradually over the course of the evening. The bathroom – somewhat disconcertingly – was set up in a re-purposed sauna complex at the end of the garden. But few other clues would have helped distinguish it from the many other parties of the week. 

As the soirée ended, the crowd was forced out onto the street and into the fleets of circling cars that waited to power the gays away. At least, until the next evening. Perhaps there had been too many women present for things to get seriously out of hand. Or perhaps the real action was happening just off-stage, in a room yet more inaccessible: a very DC-coded fear to have. 

“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn’t say anything against the Machine.”

Grindr launched as a mobile app in 2009, the brainchild of a gay Israeli-American tech entrepreneur, Joel Simkhai. It provided a seamless tech-mediated way for gay and bisexual men to interact in their area. The app promised, and arguably delivered, a hassle-free way to screen and select casual sexual partners with none of the pitfalls of in-person conversation. It was a runaway success, earning Simkhai millions, and becoming a staple in the lives of gay men across the world. The company went public in 2022, a feat which was hailed by commentators as a sign of LGBTQ+ inclusion in the business and finance world.

On paper, being anti-Grindr seems a bit like being “anti-freedom” — the projection of prudish, old-fashioned sensibilities onto techno-sexual liberation. Even the typical propogandists of grievance, those who accuse the app of perpetuating racism or “body fascism” or “femme-phobia”, just want equal access to this clearly emancipatory tool for the gay community. Gay men, particularly young gay men, are promiscuous; it’s in our nature. We do not play by the same rules of fidelity and desire as those of more conventional taste. But Grindr, far from furthering and expanding the opportunity for gay desire, has not truly augmented this state of affairs. Instead, it has diminished it, fundamentally reducing the erotic frisson, if not the availability, of casual encounters.

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Algorithmic screening, of course, is no longer just for gay guys. In her studies Cold Intimacies and Why Love Hurts, Eva Illouz has extensively documented the pernicious effects that the rise of dating apps like Tinder and Hinge has had on heterosexual romantic love. Dating apps, by design, have led to the over-intellectualisation and rationalisation of mate-selection. Many young people are now paralysed by choice and the exhausted task of trying to dissect and screen a potential partner, applying a cold set of metrics to ensure time is not wasted on hopeless duds. What Illouz documents for straight romance is equally true of the role of apps like Grindr on gay sex.

There are essentially two types of casual sex. There’s the functional, “get-your-rocks-off” kind where all that’s desired is a cheap orgasm with minimal effort. And then there’s the truly erotic, where a roll in the sack leaves a lasting memory. But this kind of eroticism requires something almost external to sexuality: a degree of mystery. Like Illouz, philosopher Byung Chul-Han has noted that our overly tech-mediated “pornographic” social world has lost the art of experiencing one’s sexual partner as truly “Other”. In The Agony of Eros he writes:

“Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego. Therefore, in the inferno of the same, which contemporary society is increasingly becoming, erotic experience does not exist. Erotic experience presumes the asymmetry and exteriority of the Other.”

This lack of otherness, in turn, diminishes sexual encounters into ego-centric, utilitarian pursuits — masturbation with another person attached. Modern, tech-mediated sex is that of Nietzsche’s “last man” in Thus Spake Zarathustra who “has his little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night”, without ever realising what’s been lost. It’s no wonder that the rise of apps is correlated with the rise of various stripes of asexual identity. Why bother with sex if this is all that’s on offer?

Grindr flattens desire by design. To play the game, users must advertise themselves through curated, sexually enticing images. The notorious “headless torso” image, the brass tacks of sexual marketing, gets to the heart of what’s on offer here — not a person but a body. Metrics on height, weight, sexual position and penis size further allow users to screen each other by pre-determined criteria and preferences.

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There is then a boilerplate set of steps for organising an encounter. One man prompts “you looking?” the other “can you host?”, a brief exchange of dick pics occurs and locations are sent. One textual analysis of Grindr conversations notes, grimly, that “metaphors of consumption or ‘meat market’ are pervasive” with users said to be “on the hunt” for sexual prey. Yet before one gets to this brief transactional exchange, you first must do the necessary labour: the endless scroll. One survey found that nearly 40% of Grindr users were on the app daily, checking in over eight times and spending around 1.3 hours per day just scrolling. The inevitable result of constantly hitting refresh is not finding the perfect partner, but merely settling for whoever was “good enough” given time spent — a sexual sunk-cost fallacy.

The end result is an in-person sexual encounter, sure, but one that’s already been ruined in advance. Disappointments begin at the front door (how old is that photo?), followed by some prescribed sexual motions (one’s “intos” having been agreed in advance), and then some brief post-coital conversation as you struggle to find your pants. Contrast this tech-mediated disaster with the typical gay hook-ups of yesteryear. One didn’t have to hyper-intellectualise the screening process as encounters were determined by chance. Your options were whoever was at the bar, sauna or beat: limited of course, but liberated at least from the mental tyranny of scrolling down an endless menu.

Rather than brief transactional exchanges, men are forced to perform an intricate set of glances, touches and maybe even a little flirting. Chul-Han speaks frequently about the collapse of little rituals in modern life, seemingly silly irrational habits which in fact add an inarticulable weightiness to encounters. In-person cruising also maintains the mystery of the Other, absent the overthinking of every pixel in an image or word in a sentence. The result is real sex, a raw unmediated encounter with another person where one briefly loses oneself in the intensity of pleasure. Grindr hasn’t killed the gay bar. Yet, with all conveniences, it’s not surprising that many gay men are choosing to sit on their couch rather than go out for more meaningful pursuits. After all, rejection in-person wounds far more than being ignored on an app.

New tech deeply embeds itself, and mere criticism of its pitfalls doesn’t make it go away. While some outlets have claimed Zoomers are ditching the apps for real-life connection, the reality is far bleaker: concerns about their image and fear of rejection are putting much of Gen Z off looking for love (and sex) altogether. Cures are not so easily prescribed. Because of their pervasiveness, “getting off the apps” is just as likely to result in prolonged solitude as it is more meaningful encounters. Pernicious tech must be soldiered through, recontextualised, and made to work for the user rather than passively consumed. Yet glimmers of light can be found in Chul-Han’s recommendation for little rituals and for maintaining a certain mystique.

Perhaps the solution is less getting off the apps entirely and more about taking a risk on what constitutes a “match” — leaving final judgements to an in-face encounter, and meeting at a bar first before the bedroom. Perhaps placing your bets on irrational, unpredictable physical “chemistry” over hyper-rationalised profiles can carve out some heterotopic space for homoerotic desire. One must not lose hope of aiming higher — of not settling for junk food sex when more refined erotic experiences await the patient and brave. Forster’s story ultimately ends with mother and son perishing as the machine crumbles around them. But just before their demise they share a single moment in which they feel the real presence of one another for the first time:

She crawled over the bodies of the dead. His blood spurted over her hands. “Quicker,” he gasped, “I am dying — but we touch, we talk, not through the Machine.”

One such example was in 2018, when one of the housemates, India Willoughby, a TV journalist who was once a man but had transitioned into a transwoman, asked her fellow housemates whether they would go out with a transwoman.

“I believe it’s your choice… I would choose not to,” replied the RnB singer Ginuwine. Willoughby then asked: “You would go out with a woman?” “Yes,” Ginuwine replied. “But you wouldn’t go out with a transsexual woman?” Willoughby hit back. “No,” replied Ginuwine. As the awkward conversation rumbled on, Willoughby suggested that Ginuwine give her a kiss, but he leaned back and said “no”.

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This encounter provoked a social media storm at the time. Some believed Ginuwine was transphobic for rejecting Willoughby. Others insisted he had a right to his preferences. Some even suggested that Willoughby was sexually harassing Ginuwine, by stepping over boundaries he made clear.

Unfortunately, two years on, the ethics of refusing transsexual people as dating partners remains a fraught subject: questions such as “Is it transphobic for lesbians not to date trans women?” are being discussed online. Again, they tend to arouse strong reactions. Some lesbians, for instance, have expressed concerns that raising the question of whether they ‘should’ be attracted to trans women is a surreptitious attempt to pressure, manipulate and guilt trip them into shifting their sexual boundaries into unwanted sex in the name of being more ‘open’.

Of course, there are lesbians who are reluctant to date trans women because they believe they are not actually women (or at least not women in the same way biologically born women are) . But it’s worth remembering that lesbians have endured a long history of attempts to control their sexuality, whether through hideous practices such as religious indoctrination, conversion therapy or ‘corrective’ rape to “make them straight”. And why focus the attack on lesbians, when many straight men would also reject trans women as a potential mate?

This obviously provokes a wider question: when does a preference become a convenient cover for bigotry and prejudice? On some level, as this tweet declares, “dating is discrimination”. But the question provoked by that Big Brother episode was: when is discrimination acceptable, and when is it unacceptable?

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No one should dictate to others who they can or can’t date, love or sleep with. Historic attempts to do so  —  whether through slavery, arcane patriarchal customs or socially and religiously enforced ‘lifelong’ monogamous marriage  —  have led to oppression, trauma, unhappiness and neurosis. Think of the countless unhappy marriages many closeted gay people have had to endure — because they could not be honest about who they really wanted to love, because of the intense social stigma and shame attached to their sexuality. Without the freedom to choose who you date, the modern achievements of personal autonomy and individual liberty are negated.

That said, the question must be asked: are our dating and sexual preferences innocent? Where do they come from? Attraction is a biological impulse, but what lies behind it? Darwinists would say they grow out of our evolutionary origins. Since women are supposedly the ‘choosier’ of the sexes, they choose men who can ‘provide’ for them and protect them. Freudians would say our preferences originate from our childhood. According to the Oedipus complex, men unconsciously choose partners who reflect the most attractive qualities of their mothers (the Electra complex makes the same case about women and fathers.)

Frantz Fanon, meanwhile, would say that forces such as racism and colonialism play a big part in influencing people’s desires and attraction. A racist society constructs certain standards of beauty based on ‘whiteness’, which racial subordinates must conform to if they want to be respected as having any erotic worth. Whiteness equals desirability, so blacks must assimilate to gain recognition and respect. Historically, black women have bleached their skin and relaxed their hair to fit a Eurocentric image — which black men, in turn, have coveted it. As Fanon wrote in Black Skin White Masks:

I want to be recognized not as Black but as White. … who better than the white woman to bring this about? By loving me she proves to me that I am worthy of a white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man…Between these white breasts that my wandering hands fondle, white civilization and worthiness become mine.

Few people would need to read these theories to know that many of us have a ‘type’. You might prefer partners of a certain height, status, hair colour, body shape, and so on (there is even data to suggest that some people are attracted to those who look similar to them.) Such preferences may be oddly specific, and rather superficial, but they are mostly innocuous.

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Some people seek a partner from a similar religious or cultural background — in the hope that this will make it easier for them to relate to one another, or out of a desire to pass on their heritage, traditions and values to future children. This is technically exclusionary for potential partners who lay outside this category — and may even be narrow minded — but such preference is not especially egregious. Still, can predilections mutate into something more sinister?

Because of globalisation, migration, social liberalisation and the rise of online dating, interracial dating has never been more prevalent; the stigma attached to it has mostly dissipated. In 2011 —  the last time such statistics were recorded — it was found that nearly 9% of people in England and Wales were living as part of an interracial relationship (up from 7% in 2001). Moreover, there is data to suggest a correlation between the rise of online dating apps and an increase in interracial relationships.

Yet, there is a paradox. Christian Rudder, co-founder of the dating site OkCupid and author of the 2014 book Dataclysm, which uses data trends to analyse human behaviour, has argued people’s use of online apps doesn’t match up with their professed attitudes. Most people will say, when surveyed, that they are open to dating someone from a different ‘race’; in reality, they tend not to be. According to Rudder’s data, collected between 2009 and 2014 from DateHookup ‘Let’s Meet scores’, women in particular generally preferred men of their own ‘race’.

More brazen are those who, on dating apps such as Grindr, Tinder and Bumble, nonchalantly state their racial preferences on their profile. It’s not uncommon to see caveats like, “Not attracted to Asian men”, “ I don’t date black women”, “I only date white girls” — and it’s difficult to argue that this has nothing to do with racism, which has historically played a role in influencing ideas of who is desirable and who is not.

White women  —  or a particular image of white women  —  have been placed at the top of this aesthetic hierarchy as the paragon of human beauty, with black women languishing at the bottom, portrayed as ugly, unattractive and overweight, and Asian men stereotyped as ‘sexless’, meek and less endowed compared to other ‘races’. American research seems to confirm this, indicating that Asian men and black women are more likely to be excluded than their opposite-sex counterparts as potential dating partners on dating apps.

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Herein lies the uncomfortable truth about our so called ‘dating economy’: discrimination is the name of the game. If you are considered attractive or ‘high value’ according to dating market logic, then you have myriad opportunities to meet new people, pursue novel erotic experiences and find romantic fulfilment. You don’t have to be restricted to people within your ‘community’. You can make your own choices and exercise your sexual autonomy to the fullest extent you desire.

But if you are considered unattractive and ‘low value’ then you will be excluded from what Henry Miller called ‘The World of Sex”, a place of freedom and adventure, erotic fufillment and pleasure, and love and companionship. To be deemed undesireable and ‘unfuckable’, of having no erotic worth at all is painful and soul crushing. This shouldn’t merely be sneered at as the delusional whining of losers drunk on entitlement. Human beings need to be loved by others, to pleasure and be pleasured by others, to develop intimate connections with others, to have fun with others. Being the social species we are it demands it. People are not wrong to want it and feel alienated when it proves extremely hard to achieve, because they are not desired by others for being who they are.

In modern society, our erotic selves and sexuality and our innate need for companionship are so intertwined with our personality that to not have the opportunity to fulfil them because you are a sexual minority rejected by the dominant culture, a racially stereotyped, or a socially awkward person is immensely alienating. These conditions will only be heightened even more with the economic decline and further atomisation resulting from Covid-19 and the restrictions meant to contain it.

Yet, discrimination is simply a fact of dating. It doesn’t matter if you are solidly monogamous, polyamorous or a promiscuous nymphomaniac: distinctions are made between those they are attracted to and those they are not attracted to. Dating is not a democracy and nor should it be. This is because choosing potential romantic and sexual partners is rather different from making friends or acquaintances, since these are people who become part of our intimate space, who we may share our bodies and the most personal aspect of our lives with. But, while we have a right to our preferences, we should also be able to critically reflect on why we desire what we desire and what influences it.