Since it entered our gay little world in 2009, Grindr has been the glue keeping queer hookup culture from completely falling apart. Gone are the days of personal ads in glossy magazines and chance encounters under dim bar lights. Now, you can have your phone in one hand and your dick in the other, fire off a few messages, and call it “effort” when someone actually shows up. In just over 15 years, Grindr has singlehandedly made gay hookups easier than brushing your teeth in the morning.
I can’t say I’ve been on the app since the beginning, but I have been on and off for quite a while. In 2015, I was 18 years old and living in my freshman dorm at Pratt Institute in New York City. It was my second semester, and I’d made a number of connections at that point — both platonic and sexual. Classes, frat parties, campus run-ins, you get the gist. One weekend, my roommate flew to Miami for a date with his sugar daddy, who he’d met on Grindr, leaving me with the dorm room all to myself. I thought, hell, if he can get a sugar daddy to take him on a tropical vacation, why can’t I? I downloaded Grindr from my lofted dorm-room bed on a Friday night. And, well, the rest is history. Grindr is now the undisputed king of queer hookup apps.
You can now view Grindr’s original (and uncensored) content right in the app
I’ve been using Grindr in some fashion for 10 years, toying with every feature the app has to offer. Some Grindr features have changed a lot since I was a baby gay at Pratt, while others have remained relatively the same. After so much change, competition from other gay dating apps, and shifts in how we connect online, is Grindr still worth it in 2026?
Support authors and subscribe to content
This is premium stuff. Subscribe to read the entire article.
