Tom Roach's Screen Love is a questing, academic deep-dive into queer intimacies in the Grindr era

Grindr is notorious for being an online meat market where gay men seek dates, hookups and companionship. However, this description captures only a fraction of what the digital app offers users. Some myths need to be shattered at the outset. Grindr is not a gay version of Tinder. It is not used only by men. The company claims to serve gay, bi, trans and queer people. In reality, the app also benefits those who do not go by these identity markers. The criticism directed at Grindr often comes from those who place a high premium on monogamy, long-term partnership and same-sex marriage. They like to call out the app for threatening relationships and killing romance. It is debatable whether technology guides people to make choices, or if it merely mirrors what is already happening in society. Perhaps the debate will never end, and maybe it should not so that we engage with messy questions. People who use Grindr often share a love-hate relationship with it. It is not uncommon for users to install, uninstall and reinstall it on their smartphones, based on the experiences they have on the platform. The easy access to pleasure is rooted in a consumerist logic that reduces people to their body parts, sexual repertoire, and suitability for erotic exchange. Therefore, racism, misogyny, body shaming, casteism, ageism and classism thrive on the app. Participation in this sexual economy generates risk, excitement and guilt depending on people’s self-perception and the societal attitudes they are influenced by. Whether the mixed feelings about forms of intimacy enabled by Grindr come from political ideology, aversion to technology, morality, internalised homophobia, or a desire to court the approval of those who practice a normative heterosexuality – at least in the public eye – is unclear. If you are curious to interrogate and investigate, read Tom Roach’s new book Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era (2021). Published by the State University of New York Press, it provides a variety of refreshing perspectives on what Grindr can do for us, and what we can do with Grindr. Roach is a Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant University in the US, and the book owes a lot to inputs from students taking his courses. Roach does not want to build up high expectations, so he warns readers in advance. He writes, “Screen Love is not an ethnographic account of Grindr user experience. Nobody was interviewed for this project and no salacious tales of mind-blowing hookups or love at first dick pic are recounted herein…the book is not particularly sexy or scandalous – at least not in the conventional sense…this study is more what if than what is: it’s a speculative philosophical inquiry grounded in humanities-based textual and visual analysis.” [caption id=“attachment_9468551” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Screen Love is not an ethnographic account of Grindr user experience, Roach writes.[/caption] The book hopes to be useful to academics and non-academics alike but it also expects familiarity with theory and scholarship. Without that background knowledge, it can be difficult to sustain interest in a book that is so dense with citation. The author does not seem personally invested in gatekeeping but he does bow to the demands of convention. Those who do stay the course will find that the book is excellent and deserves multiple readings. Roach seems to find anti-Grindr polemic tiring and unnecessary. Although he does show how Grindr reflects and sustains neoliberal ideas, he does not stop there. He builds on that critique to muse about “new communicative and relational practices” that can emerge from observing how Grindr is designed and the uses it is put to. He calls his study “a measured attempt to glean ethical and political strategies from queer networked experiences”. The book is informed by the author’s own experience of using geosocial apps including Grindr, academic research, and informal conversations with peers. He invites readers to think about how Grindr unsettles the online/offline binary by alerting users to the presence of other users in the vicinity, thus creating the possibility of turning any space into a queer space. It also helps them disentangle erotic desire from social identity. Users may identify as heterosexual in public but they can use the app to explore non-normative desires. While Tinder shows only one profile at a time, Grindr shows profiles in a grid-like formation where users always get to see multiple options at once. Roach acknowledges that this design feature promotes the idea that individuals are disposable and substitutable; however, he does not condemn it. He suggests that here is an opportunity for users to loosen the grip of a static and secure selfhood and let themselves discover new aesthetic and sensual practices. This proposition can be scary because online identities are curated to present a certain image, and attract others to fulfill personal needs. Rejection causes pain. On Grindr, people are free to ghost or block each other if they are not keen to continue an interaction. Users can end up with poor self-esteem or they can learn to take themselves less seriously and enjoy the ride. Roach believes that Grindr is an online avatar of older public cruising cultures that teach us “how to respectfully navigate foreignness in an increasingly polarised world”. Since registering for Grindr is a voluntary act, the author encourages users to examine what they are signing up for in the present economic and political context. According to him, the experience of being evaluated as a catch or match on Grindr is no different from being evaluated as an employee interviewing for different jobs in the neoliberal marketplace that works not with people but human resources with skill sets. The comparison is meant to drive home the point that lovers, like workers, might be replaceable in this sexual economy. When spelt out in this manner, it can sound disgusting if one’s imagined selfhood is a pristine canvas that tolerates no complexities. However, Roach is not making any moral judgements here. In fact, he wonders whether it might be possible for users to approach online cruising as an activity that is similar to “perusing artworks in a museum.” Moving on is expected, and no one feels bad about it. There is connection but of a different kind. Can we learn to respect the transient along with the transcendental, even if it is not a choice we make? Let’s try. Chintan Girish Modi is a writer, educator and researcher who tweets @chintan_connect