At once a corrective to the predominantly white male accounts of the AIDS crisis and an openhearted depiction of the possibilities of black gay life, Evidence of Being above all insists on the primacy of community over loneliness, and hope over despair. They created art that enriched and reimagined their lives in the face of pain and neglect, while at the same time forging a path toward bold new modes of existence. In Washington and New York during the 1980s and ’90s, gay black men banded together, using creative expression as a tool to challenge the widespread views that marked them as unworthy of grief. Darius Bost’s account of the media, poetry, and performance of this time and place reveals a stunning confluence of activism and the arts. Yet in this darkest of moments, a new vision of community and hope managed to emerge.
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But it’s difficult to know if the apps are the cause of such toxic environments, or if they’re a symptom of something that has always existed.Evidence of Being opens on a grim scene: Washington DC’s gay black community in the 1980s, ravaged by AIDS, the crack epidemic, and a series of unsolved murders, seemingly abandoned by the government and mainstream culture. Grindr seems to recognize as much in 2018, the app launched its “ #KindrGrindr” campaign. Only when people are known do they become accountable for their actions, a finding that echoes Plato’s story of the Ring of Gyges, in which the philosopher wonders if a man who became invisible would then go on to commit heinous acts.Īt the very least, the benefits from these apps aren’t experienced universally. The emerging sociology of the internet has found that, time and again, anonymity in online life brings out the worst human behaviors. However, on Grindr people are allowed to be anonymous and faceless, reduced to images of their torsos or, in some cases, no images at all. Scruff, another gay dating app, requires users to reveal more of who they are. Perhaps Grindr has become particularly fertile ground for cruelty because it allows anonymity in a way that other dating apps do not. This is true even for people of color who occupy some degree of celebrity within the LGBTQ world. As scholars such as Theo Green have unpacked elsewehere, people of color who identify as queer experience a great deal of marginalization. In practice, however, these technologies often only reproduce, if not heighten, the same problems and issues facing the LGBTQ community. Some scholars point to how these apps enable those living in rural areas to connect with one another, or how it gives those living in cities alternatives to LGBTQ spaces that are increasingly gentrified. While social media apps have dramatically altered the landscape of gay culture, the benefits from these technological tools can sometimes be difficult to see. Responses like these reinforce the idea of Grindr as a space where social niceties don’t matter and carnal desire reigns. Since Grindr has a reputation as a hookup app, bluntness should be expected, according to users like this one – even when it veers into racism.
These users would say things like, “This isn’t e-harmony, this is Grindr, get over it or block me.” The other way that I observed some gay men justifying their discrimination was by framing it in a way that put the emphasis back on the app. “My preference may offend others … I derive no satisfaction from being mean to others, unlike those who have problems with my preference.” “It was not my intent to cause distress,” another user explained. When confronted, they simply became defensive. In my study, many of the respondents seemed to have never really thought twice about the source of their preferences. Preferences may appear natural or inherent, but they’re actually shaped by larger structural forces – the media we consume, the people we know and the experiences we have. Sociologists have long been interested in the concept of preferences, whether they’re favorite foods or people we’re attracted to. Black Gay Man introduced the eloquent voice of Robert Reid-Pharr in. (During the 2020 #BLM protests in response to the murder of George Floyd, Grindr eliminated the ethnicity filter.) Both a celebration of black gay male identity as well as a powerful critique of the. His image of his ideal partner was so fixed that he would rather – as he put it – “be celibate” than be with a Black or Latino man. That user went on to explain that he had even purchased a paid version of the app that allowed him to filter out Latinos and Black men. A Grindr profile used in the study specifies interest in certain races.