There are now thousands of studies on how people use, experience, and are even changed by their use of dating and hookup apps (hereafter: dating apps). I read hundreds of these articles, reports, and white papers that focus on or mention lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans*, and sapphic (LBQT*S) experiences in order to design my imminently launching LBQT*S Dating and Hookup App research survey. In this research, I unsurprisingly found the following:
In fact, a recent …
In late 1999, I signed myself up for my first dating site, the now long defunct PlanetOut. I landed in New York City thinking I’d never meet anyone that I wanted to talk to at a bar or a club—primarily because I’d spent the last four years in a women’s college where I conveniently met all of my dates and girlfriends in our dorms. Within a few weeks on the site, I made a date with a queer femme who told me she was taken by my description of myself as a tall butch deeply obsessed with the poetry of Frank O’Hara. But the woman who met me out front of the Strand Book Store was not a match for me. Our politics worked; our cultural aesthetics were a fail. I was in management consultant-style non-iron Brooks Brothers (sigh, oh baby Jack); she wore mixed faux tiger-zebra-cheetah prints and had …