But even within Grindr’s multidimensionality, the rocket felt impractical to me, especially considering that most users don’t choose to pay for it. I know some men who use the Explore feature to plan hookups or hangs in soon-to-be-visited cities. But as someone who was, at the time, using Grindr almost exclusively for sex, it was hard for me to understand why the rocket was even there.
When my ex-boyfriend and I broke up near the end of 2017, Grindr became more than a way to rebound: it became a way to monitor him from afar. I didn’t know it at the time, but our break-up was just beginning. It would end up lasting almost an entire year, full of cross-country visits, months without speaking, cryptic texts, and a lot of crying (on my part, at least). We couldn’t seem to get rid of one another. Watching him on Grindr certainly didn’t help.
B. and I had first met in Los Angeles when he moved there for grad school, right before I moved to New York. A two-week fling turned into a lot of talking, and visiting, and eventually a relationship. He came out to his parents a few months after we first met in 2016, about a year before I discovered the Explore feature, and had slowly been getting more comfortable in his skin as a gay man. The relationship was my first healthy emotional experience with another guy. We’d keep each other company on FaceTime, share our favorite clothes, and send each other love letters for the simple purpose of reminding the other that he wasn’t alone.
Seeing B. on Grindr — which, of course, I did when I searched his middle-of-nowhere hometown on the Explore feature the first time — felt like a punch to the face, stomach, and throat simultaneously. It was more than the pain of seeing him as single and no longer mine: with his profile and stats and a bashful, somewhat uncertain selfie, I saw myself, and every gay man I knew, in him. While I couldn’t talk to him, I was looking at the same boys he was looking at it, deciding which ones I’d fuck, which ones seemed nice. He was no doubt doing the same. Despite our differences in queerness and experience throughout the year I’d known him, we were suddenly, devastatingly, looking at the same men on Grindr.
It was an act of self-destructive voyeurism I’d never experienced or anticipated. Months went by, and I soon began clicking the rocket right away when logging on, disregarding the guys in my neighborhood. Over the next year, I checked in more and more, following B. from his hometown back to Los Angeles to, as of a few months ago, Brooklyn. Maybe he was doing it to me, too. The Explore feature allowed me to compulsively fixate on B. for far longer than I wanted to, but it also let me travel further and further in an effort to escape him.
