How Much We Don't (& Are Dying to Know) @ LBQT*S Dating & Hookup
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, in classes, or on the rugby field (yes, I had to get that in there).
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: tall preppy butch deeply obsessed with the poetry of Frank O'Hara. SWOON! I WAS SO READY!
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 (which was admittedly magic to make my doubleDDs appear as pecs in my sweet brain) and just moving to the family/les-oriented Park Slope. She wore mixed faux tiger-zebra-cheetah prints. I had a short, general haircut. She had a mohawk-like 'do to match the style and height of her hipster, Williamsburg loft squat.
FEEL FREE TO SKIP THIS EMBARRASSING-YET-DEAR PARAGRAPH. After a first date to and from the New Jersey Ikea that I invited her to to help me buy a bed (no, really, I had no idea what I was doing–oof da, bb Jack again!), and a solid but not-spark-inducing make out session, I dropped her off with the idea that I would never do online dating again.
Reader. I've been on and off those f*&$king apps ever since. So!
From 2023-4, I launched the first large-scale lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans, and sapphic dating/hookup app and site study. I want to help better understand how these apps do or don't work for us, and how we imagine they could work to better support our needs and desires. Plus, lez, gay, and bi Americans are much more likely than self-identifies straights to admit to using a dating app at 51% of all LGB people(!) vs. 28% of the straights. (Pew forgot there were queers and transes for this one.)
This research is important and needed if we are to understand how LBQTS people find and sustain themselves and their communities. A 2022 article searched for online dating and dating app academic papers for qualitative interview studies that mentioned lesbian, bisexual, or sexual minority women and found only 500 articles, of the thousands and thousands of dating app studies conducted overall. Even more shocking / not shocking, only 21 studies were focused specifically on queer women's online dating experience! Even more shocking / not shocking: there is even less work on trans people's experiences of dating/hookup apps and sites.
Right now, I'm studying the data with some amazing Smith College Data Science majors. We'll share some early findings over the year, and I'll keep sharing about the research and insights of how the hell we wound up with these apps, how they mess with us and sometimes help us, and what we may want instead.
And if anyone knows Devon, my hallos and thanks for the kisses under the Williamsburg Bridge. I didn't get how cool you or your fashion was--or who I was!--yet.
And, for everyone out there skipping and/or trudging through dating app life: here's some Frank O'Hara for all the moments of queer-trans life that give us meaning, for which we don't yet have words (or data).
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they’ve always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.
—Frank O’Hara
