When I began promoting this conference on social media, I received a message on Instagram from a random user. The message, which showed the conference poster above it, bluntly stated, “Quiero vomitar.” “I want to throw up.” Ironically, the message didn’t come from a religious fanatic or a conservative Republican. It came from another gay man, another architect, who is friends with some of my friends. The discomfort the message caused me, which later turned into amusement, made me understand that I should start talking to you all tonight explaining where this topic comes from and why it’s important to talk about at a school of architecture.

1

The Project

My research project discusses architectural and urban space through a particular group of users:  queer and gay citizens. I would like to state that by 'queer', I’m referring to people who participate in practices and activities that lie outside of what we know as heterosexuality. They're practices that do not necessarily adhere to homosexuality and may not even include sexual interaction. Gay and queers are a marginalized group of citizens which have not been catered to properly in society. Furthermore, they, we, have been forgotten, hidden or disregarded from serious urban and architectural research in the island. My aim is to study, foreground and analyze queer narratives and spatial practices in Puerto Rican culture today, to think about the ways that Internet technologies have changed the way we use the city’s spaces. And tonight, I’ll do this by looking at one GPS mobile application called Grindr.

2

Hidden Spaces

Perhaps, and arguably, no subgroup of people has been bolder at pioneering the boundaries of digital spaces as gay and queer men have been. Because of complex political, social and religious circumstances, histories of gay and queer culture in Puerto Rico are fragmented, scarce, dispersed and very hard to find, particularly before the 20th Century. No sé si saben, but even up until 1974, Governor Rafael Hernández Colón’s Penal Code stated:

 “Toda persona que sostuviera relaciones sexuales con una persona de su mismo sexo o cometiere el crimen contra natura con un ser humano, será sancionada con pena de reclusión por un término fijo de diez (10) años.” 

It then makes sense that gay and queer identities, along with their 'incriminating' evidence, stories, practices and spaces needed to be hidden. Finding them now is the challenge.

Perhaps one of the most successful recent projects that has attempted to remedy this is Javier E. Laureano’s 2016 text San Juan Gay: Conquista de un espacio urbano de 1948 a 1991. As a historian tracing the spaces and events that moulded gay culture during the 20th Century, Laureano states that our history has been silent, “Somos visibles e invisibles al mismo tiempo,” he writes. 

Throughout the past months I’ve been reading on this fragmented gay history, and have of course found a number of authors that tackle the issue head on from diverse fields. But the absence of architects within the discussion has been very obvious.

3

I’ve Asked Myself ‘Why?’

This begs the question of why? Why is it important to trace, discuss, document and speculate on Puerto Rican homosexuality from an architectural perspective? Of this, I’d say three things. The first one is that, as José Joaquín Blanco observes, history helps us reinterpret our understanding of the world. It’s a tool for changing life and the spaces that unfold within them, it’s a tool for recognizing problematic processes, it’s a tool to denounce oppressive mechanisms which will in turn help create spaces in the island that are inclusive and democratic. Secondly, at a global level, much of queer theory is based on white male experience, constructed largely after a Eurocentric scope (los Europeos están en to’as). The inclusion of non-European and non-white populations is urgently needed within queer spatial theory to be able to discuss the broad spectrum of queer practices that take place in cultures, cities and spaces all around the world.

Thirdly, homosexuality and queerness, along with lesbianism and any and every other letter of the LGBTQ community, are spatial phenomenons—they do not exist in a vacuum. The very idea of “the closet” is itself entirely spatial, and it’s where we are told by patriarchy that we should inhabit. What has happened is that the Internet has provided a group of people that are forced to live alone inside this closet, to explore unconventional ways of finding each other and creating communities. In other words, because there has been a historical placelessness within the built environment for gay or queer citizens, we have been spatializing through cyberspace, making digital platforms such as Gaydar, Adam4Adam and Grindr extremely popular, globally as well as in Puerto Rico. 

4

The First Time I Heard of Grindr

Now, I realize that many of you here today may not have heard of Grindr before, and when I tell you about it, you may have your reservations. I did too, when I first heard of it. And I remember it vividly. 

I was kind of discretely—as discretely as one can be while walking along la Avenida Ponce de León, where literally everyone can see you—headed to Krash with my friends, a gay club infamous for its reggaetón music on Wednesday nights. As far as I know, nowhere else did that many gay guys get together to dance to this music genre which is 100% heterosexually-driven and 100% sexist. Dancing reggaetón is a not-so-elaborate combination of thrusting your pelvis back and forth as you either: one, pound your partner’s groin; or two, pound your partner’s ass (tú escoges). And as you perreas, you sing along to the lyrics—probably about lowering women’s panties and spanking them etcetera etcetera. 

My friends and I couldn’t relate to any of that; we also didn’t care, we just wanted to grind. As we walked up to Krash one of my friends mentioned in passing how there was now an app called Grindr which was used for meeting guys for dates and sex. I was a pseudo-purist, and I was absolutely appalled. That was 2009, Krash no longer exists, and I now have Grindr on my phone.

5

Way Back When

I resisted Grindr for years, until it became too popular in gay culture for me to ignore it any more, especially as a mobile app researcher studying in London—aka a gay Mecca. Since then, Grindr’s changed quite a bit, and the stigmas that were once associated with the app have slowly subsided (al menos eso pensé hasta que me dijeron ‘cafre’ cuando anuncié esta conferencia). But back in 20-11—and since it first launched in 2009—Grindr’s logo featured a black, skull-like mask over a vivid, orange background. When you tapped on the app to launch it, the logo appeared on the screen with the words ‘Get ready to Grindr’, like a cautionary disclaimer or an omen foreshadowing you were about to enter someplace evil. Era una cosa mala mala.

Also, back then, I was using Grindr on iPad so the sheer size of the screen, along with the advisory wording, the overwhelming brightness of the colour orange and the rough, black skull—was all a bit much. It was unnecessarily intimidating. The logo felt overtly masculine, it was trying way too hard. I don’t know if Grindr’s logo reminded me more of a skull you’d find on a pirate ship (a mi desde chiquito los piratas como que no me encantan), or the symbol I vividly remember seeing printed on animal poison when I was a kid (tú sabes, pa matar los renacuajos allá en el campo). Obviously, neither made me feel comfortable. They only gave me the impression that Grindr was something dirty and that I should be embarrassed about using it. As if walking up to Krash didn’t make me feel dirty enough; as if I needed to be further reminded of how dirty we non-straight men are. And by a gay app no less.

Now, though, Grindr has muted its orange colour scheme (en vez de anaranjado come-vista, es un amarillito de lo más nice). It has also redesigned its logo to make it look less like a skull and more like a contoured, stylized mask. It’s smoother and less aggressive, while still maintaining its air of mystery. 

6

I Call it Denial

Initially Grindr’s designers didn’t intend to label it as a gay app, but rather as “a tool for men to meet men”. Grindr’s creator Joel Simkhai has said, “We’re mixing people up together, a bit of a social stew. It is a little bit rough—not to mix, but to grind.” For it’s branding, he reportedly wanted something rough and masculine, so that it could be about anything, not necessarily about being gay. But Grindr proved that try as they might, it wasn’t about anything, it was an app primarily used by gay men—and not just any type of gay men.

7

There’s a Type

Grindr’s interface was designed to steer away from the glossy, flashy stereotypes of homosexuality. But it’s by no means an app that promotes the brawny, ruggedness associated with hyper-masculinity. The men who are considered most desirable on Grindr are still slightly soft. ‘Attractive’ men are usually clean, athletic, well-groomed, with soft faces. In fact, certain gay parties such as London’s Room Service, hired photographers to take pictures of their most ‘attractive’ guests, heavily airbrushing them and placing neon lights around them on Photoshop to make them look like flashy Ken dolls and glossy advertisements. These were quite often used as profile pictures on Grindr, in London at least. On the app, the most desirable men are reminiscent of the models in fashion shows and magazine ads. With this particular type of standard of beauty it makes sense to me that Grindr softened its logo, that they went from poisonous skull to alluring masquerade.

8

The Mask

And I should say that more than just a logo, the mask on Grindr is so much more. It acts as a spatial marker for the digital threshold that’s being crossed. In other words, the mask marks the boundary between a user’s physical identity and their digital one.

Floating on its own over a charcoal grey background, the mask stimulates multiple readings and interpretations to me. Firstly, it’s a disguise as the user enters a space heavily charged with non-straight sexuality. It gives the Grindr guy a shield from onlookers in a way that’s not possible in a physical space such as a gay bar (allí uno ve a to el mundo). There, on Grindr’s screen, in the privacy of this dark room, you can put on your mask and keep walking. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the mask encourages men who don’t identify as gay, bi or queer to enter Grindr and look for other men—whether for sexual purposes or others.

The floating Grindr mask on the app’s loading screen is a product of a minimalistic, sleek design decision that’s further strengthened by the fact that the mask is not solid, but outlined in grey. As the user waits for the app to load, a vivid streak of color traces the contour of the mask’s outline, becoming fully coloured once the app has finished loading. In other words, the dull, inactive mask lurking in the dark room comes to life. The mask acquires colour when a Grindr user taps on the app’s icon, and digitally puts it on. When you think about it, it really is quite beautiful—the rat poison is nowhere to be seen anymore. The rats are all dead, I think (no quedan renacuajos).

Grindr’s mask suggests two things to me: that we can put it on and be whoever we want to be on Grindr, or that we can take it off and be our true selves (hay mucha gente en el closet que usa Grindr pa experimentar). And in this sense, a problem arises: the presence of a mask is still an explicit reaffirmation that with homosexuality comes a sense of hiding, as well as a need to portray a certain appearance. In fact, the company’s official website stated in 2012, “Grindr is quick, convenient, and discreet.”

9

First Impressions

Whether Grindr’s branding is intended to take society’s negative labels and give them a positive spin them through the use of irony, I don’t know. What I do know is that the relation between discretion, secrecy and masks has strong links to the historical oppression of the community. And this is reflected spatially.

 According to architectural theorist Aaron Betsky in his book, Queer Space, in North America, the only thing that distinguished many gay bars until the 1970s was a sign that announced a name. Any name. Betsky upholds that the only way queer men often know to go into such a space is through an invisible spatial network, that of rumor and hearsay, which is sometimes published in gay travel guides. The entrance was often in the rear, to allow greater degree of anonymity. Queer bars wore a mask that only fellow wearers could read. 

This isn’t very different to how these spaces functioned in Puerto Rico, often advertised in gay publications such as Pa’Fuera. Puerto Rican queer spaces were often hidden in plain sight. Krash, which was a product of the 90s, deviated from this account in that the entrance to the club was right on la Avenida Ponce de Léon, and its signage explicitly stated it was a gay nightclub. However, from the outside, typologically, it was difficult to tell that this was a nightclub. Krash's sign wasn’t lit, nor was it bold, punchy letters. It was more like a banner which was difficult to read at night. The fact that the facade was composed of various balconies on each of its top three floors, giving the impression it was a domestic building, helped give Krash somewhat of a dual identity.

10

‘Misused’ Spaces

Queer culture has always been rooted on this back-and-forth negotiation between discretely-coded spatial boundaries. For instance, prior to the Internet, apart from visiting gay bars and clubs, finding another man to have an encounter with heavily depended on urban and architectural spaces that were ‘misused’: spaces, such as parks, restrooms and alleys (los baños de la biblioteca Lázaro son frecuentados por hombres que buscan estar con otros hombres; eso no me lo inventé yo). Centuries, and even decades ago, knowing where these spaces were and knowing that they were ‘cruising’ spots (en español se llaman, espacios de ligue) was the norm.

So if we revert to a pre-21st Century social and political reality, where being gay could get you sent to jail, it could get you fired, it could get you physically assaulted, these spaces were the lifeblood of homosexuality and queerness.

It’s very easy to judge gay culture as being amoral and sexually charged. It’s very easy to say that a conference on Grindr and Krash might make you want to throw up, but we have to think back that spontaneous, sporadic sexual encounters were one of the very limited ways to practice a homosexual identity; in-the-moment relationships were the safest way to be who you were (no era como si podías tener un novio, y aún ahora ni siquiera tienes los mismos derechos si te casas con una pareja del mismo sexo).

11

Finding Others and Being Found

Today, we’ve inherited this mode of forging relationships, and we know it as ‘hook up culture’. Grindr’s changed the way that men meet by translating this act of looking and wanting to be found in the city, onto a digital space. At the tap of an icon, Grindr subverts the heteronormative, coding of a space by overlaying a queer space over it. Secretly and discretely, we Grindr users are able to navigate back and forth between the physical and digital spaces by virtue of a mobile screen, easily finding others while also allowing ourselves to be found.

So when you consider that historically queer men have always been forced to perform our identities clandestinely— homosexuality is still a criminal offense in 74 countries (and punishable by death in Sudan, Iran, UAE, and parts of Nigeria, Somalia, Syria and Iraq, to name a few)—Grindr is, in itself, an urban marvel. Encouraged by society and forced by legislation to hide our non-normative identities—or at the best of times to not ask, not tell—the mere act of finding others like us has been a major hurdle in most of our individual processes of self-acceptance, as much as it’s been one in our history.  For centuries, queer people have always appropriated symbols to signal their identities to others in-the-know, such as through handkerchiefs, the rainbow flag or the pink triangle. There’s been immense difficulty in not just locating, but in recognizing gay men. Grindr changes this.

12

Gay By Association

In Grindr, each user turns on the app anywhere, any time, to display a spatially-limited network of other men: the closest 100 users to them. So something really interesting happens when you enter the space of Grindr. Despite Simkhai’s initial apprehension at branding Grindr as a gay app the truth is that Grindr remains an app mostly used by gay and queer men who were (and are) unaware that the app was not, in fact, a gay app. For many of Grindr’s users, homosexuality is the norm, it always has been. As opposed to the vast majority of spaces in Puerto Rico, in the space of Grindr each user is boxed into the category of ‘gay’ or ‘bisexual’ due to association—a term I borrow from Erving Goffman.

In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1990), Goffman discusses ‘stigmatised’ identities, ranging from a person with a physical deformity to someone with a stammer. He doesn’t focus on sexuality, but I’ve certainly found it helpful when thinking about Grindr, particularly because Goffman claims, “the social identity of those an individual is with can be used as a source of information concerning his own social identity, the assumption being that he is what the others are.” 

In other words, who we surround ourselves with plays a part in how other people see us. In Grindr, those who aren’t queer are seen as different; it’s the men who identify as straight who are the minority.

Gay spaces in the city don’t work like this. The straight men and women who visited Krash didn’t necessarily get labeled with our sexual identity; straight people didn’t inherit Krash’s sexual coding. Because of this spatial stigma related to sexual identity, Grindr helps identify (and at times misidentify) other queer men without the need of any affirmation—such as wearing a particularly-coloured handkerchief. Instead, the spatiality of Grindr and being seen there, signify a particular intention: a desire to be found or to find others.

13

The Difference Between Walking Into Krash and Tapping Into Grindr

So let’s think about this in spatial terms. In part, misidentification occurs in the app because you don’t just accidentally walk into Grindr—even if somehow you download it by mistake, you still need to create a profile linked to an email address and password. Whether or not the user identifies as gay, queer or bi, and whether or not the user engages with other men.

Yes, queer spaces are often hidden in plain sight and kept secret, but even so, I have an easier time believing that straight men could inadvertently walk into one by mistake, particularly because from the outside queer spaces bore no indication of what they housed inside—especially in the 20th Century. From the outside of Krash, for example, there was no ominous ‘Get ready to Grindr’ equivalent. Inside was a whole different matter. While the outside provided a cloak, a disguise of domesticity, the interior space was designed to showcase the male body, for men to be looked at.

14

The Interior

You would never guess, from looking at the outside of Krash, what you could find inside. While I was doing research and going through the very, very limited pictures that show the club's interior—no doubt a product of a pre-ubiquitous-smartphone era—I came across an image of a drag contest taking place on Krash's main stage. There, all eyes on her, a drag queen dressed in bright yellow feathers and a Big Bird headpiece. As a close follower of Donna Haraway, the humor of the photograph—this was a man performing as a woman, performing as a bird that was performed by a man—was not lost on me.

The stage was of generous size, and Krash, being a double-height space, featured a mezzanine level along all its perimeter. This allowed a greater degree of visibility, where men could stare at others from above, and vice versa, creating more opportunities for men to be seen, meet and interact. It also allowed a larger crowd to congregate in the space by increasing its usable square footage area.

According to Aaron Betsky, queer spaces' interiors “facilitate social relations within the group by using mirrors and stages to allow the inhabitant to display himself or herself, but also throw together queer people in social relations that do not directly rely on sexual acts.” Architecturally speaking, mirrors are useful in spaces for a few reasons other than being decorative—they make them seem bigger and they maximize illumination, for starters. I don’t recall any mirrors in Krash, but it’s been a strategy being currently used at a gay club in Santurce called Circo. With the bright, flashing lights in the darkness of a club, mirrors allow the physical space to virtually extend itself, multiplying the amount of people inside—the reflections creating the illusion that the club is more popular, busier, livelier than it might be, while also maximizing the chances of seeing and being seen by others.

15

Digital Residue

In this same way, Grindr borrows these characteristics, arranging users within their respective profiles, displayed neatly in an orthogonal grid of the nearest 100 users in order of proximity, even when they’re not all online at the same time. Users are visible on the grid up to an hour after they've closed the app, and possibly even have left the space where the app last recorded them. In my work I call this digital residue. Like the mirrors in gay clubs, digital residue is helpful to Grindr in that it gives the impression of a saturated, competitive market—like the optical illusion of seeing a massive, gay crowd by virtue of the mirror’s virtual, reflected space.

The chief, principal characteristic of 20th Century queer spaces is their ephemerality. True of Grindr as well, the queer space as Betsky writes, “appears for a moment, then is gone, only to reappear when the circumstances are right.” But differing to Grindr, men who visit queer spaces in the city are able to leave whenever they please, and with their departure, any trace of their presence goes too in a way that’s just not possible on the app. There, users can’t leave undetected, their green light may be off, but their urban history is recorded by the app, exposed and displayed on the interface for a significant amount of time: in a given hour, there are scores upon scores of users that might be able to see, favourite, contact or block a profile without the user ever being aware of it—goodbye, privacy.

16

They Will Know, When He Does not Know They Know

Because the gaze on Grindr is unidirectional, a user has no way of knowing when they’ve been seen or identified on the screen. And although digital residue benefits some, it’s a violation of privacy to others, leaving them vulnerably exposed to unwanted stigma. Along these lines, Goffman uses the example of a known (and stigmatised) ex-mental patient being recognisable on the street, even when his stigma’s no longer visible or perceptible. He writes:

 “More importantly, perhaps, he must face the unknown-about knowing, that is, persons who can personally identify him and will know, when he does not know they know, that he is ‘really’ an ex-mental patient.” 

Talk to anyone who’s ever used Grindr, and they’ll tell you about the amount of headless torsos on the screen’s grid. They’re men who for very, many reasons choose not to show their face. They choose to put the Grindr mask on: they’re married, in relationships, closeted, discrete, worried about being seen by coworkers, they want to appear more sexually mysterious, they live in homophobic places or they simply just don’t want their face to be seen, screenshot and plastered over the internet. Faceless profiles are annoying, they are, but I get it; Grindr, for all its virtues, is notorious for how horribly men treat each other, especially if you don’t look like a model, and especially if you’re not white and masculine.

17

Not My Preference

Patriarchy still reeks in Grindr; the gay community’s not exempt from it, no matter how queer we get. Even today, both online and offline, we remain a group of people whose sexual preferences and desires actively marginalise others. Throughout all our lives, our patriarchal societies have regurgitated over and over again how unnatural and repulsive us men-who-have-sex-with-men are, and we’ve gobbled it up, no matter how immune we think we are.

These cases of racism and marginalisation can be seen in a surprising number of profiles, in which men write things like “no asians”, “no older” or “no fems”. “Not racist,” a disclaimer will often read, “just not my preference.” This has brought a lot of people to ask, is there a difference? 

A few years ago, Grindr added a ‘tribe’ function on the app. It allows users to taxonomise themselves within categories of gay culture—bear, clean-cut, daddy, discreet, geek, jock, leather, otter, poz, rugged, trans or twink. These labels are dependent on body type and sexual interests, not of common values; on aesthetics rather than substance. I’m sure Grindr has a perfectly utopic, marketable reason for this—i.e. it helps men meet the type of men they want to meet. But through its tribes feature, Grindr’s guilty of reinforcing marginalisation on the app, enabling the active separation of queer men. In an already invisible space, tribes further hide any user falling outside the margins of what they each deem desirable—and valuable.

Originally, Grindr simply displayed the nearest 100 users in order of proximity. That’s it. In its attempt to “not to mix, but to grind” people together, it provided an honest and inclusive mapping of queer bodies, in which users were forced to come in contact with each other, even if only visually. The screen displayed all types of users, regardless of tribe, in a way that the unlikeliest types of men might be able to meet (or simply just chat), even if they were outside of each other’s ideals of desirability, like the many different types of guys I saw, talked to or danced with at Krash. There were effeminate guys, muscular guys, older guys, caco guys, geeky guys, guys who were high, guys who were sober, you name it. The point is, they weren’t invisible—they were there, they were equal, and they weren’t threatening.

The erasure of bodies that fall outside certain social standards of beauty or desirability does nothing but actively divide the queer community by creating a digital extermination of the subject for an already marginalised group. Grindr didn’t create the problem, but it certainly made it evident, and it certainly perpetuated it by creating more alienating boundaries for us to cross in the fight for equality and acceptance: this time among ourselves.

I can’t help but think of feminist theorist Sara Ahmed’s ideas on how the closeness of objects and bodies play a part in the construction of identity (2006). For Ahmed:

“the orientations we have toward others shape the contours of space by affecting relations of proximity and distance between bodies. Importantly, even what is kept at a distance must still be proximate enough if it is to make an impression.”

I have to say, I agree with her: throw us all together in the same space, and whether it’s in Grindr or at Krash, just let us grind.