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I’ll never forget where I was when I first discovered the magic of Grindr. A gay male friend and I were hanging out at my dad’s apartment the summer after our sophomore year of college, watching Friends reruns and quaffing Mike’s Hard Lemonade, when a buzz came from the front pocket of his backpack. He took out his phone, navigated to a mysterious app I’d never seen before, and pulled up a profile that showed that the call was quite literally coming from inside the house—or at least the building, as the guy who’d messaged him was writing from a mere 50 feet away and thus had to be a neighbor of my father’s.
As my friend went off to consummate his match, I stayed behind, pensively sipping foul sugar-saturated alcohol and wondering whether such a magical, local-singles-in-your-area-forward invention might exist for girls who liked girls. I wouldn’t officially come out for another six years, but I already knew without knowing—as so many LGBTQ+ people do—and as I grew up, came into my bisexual identity, and actually started dating people of all different gender identities, I kept waiting for a Grindr (or Scruff, or Sniffies)–equivalent for queer women. It’s been over a decade now, and I’m still waiting. But why?
“I think it’s as simple as capitalism and patriarchy continuing to make assumptions about queer women’s behaviors, interests, and spending habits,” explains Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, a Florida-based writer and the managing editor of Autostraddle. “It feels somewhat connected to the reason people think lesbian bars aren’t financially viable. There’s a perception queer women aren’t interested in casual hookup culture, but that simply isn’t true!”
Upadhyaya goes on: “In my work at Autostraddle, I answer a lot of advice questions, and a recurring one is about this exact thing; people are wondering what apps to use if they just want to hook up casually or explore kink or even asking about how to go about IRL cruising these days as lesbians. There’s a hunger for it.”
There have been some attempts to fill the queer-girl hookup-app void, most notably via the queer-focused dating app Lex, which bills itself as a platform for pretty much everyone except cis, straight men, and grew out of the 2017 queer missed-connection Instagram page @_personals_. I used Lex consistently (if not always successfully) for years prior to my last monogamous relationship. But when I recently hit the queer singles’ open market once again and checked out the app, I was a little crestfallen to find that what was once at least nominally a sex-focused platform now seemed more like a good place to find someone to petsit your elderly rescue Maltipoo. A win for LGBTQ+ community-building at large, to be sure (who among us doesn’t need more queer friends and/or favor-doers?), but what of my semi-anon, casual-sex-meetup-app dreams?
Of course, there’s always the “Sapphic dating app” Her, founded back in 2013—but anecdotally speaking, I’ve found that it’s not quite the in-every-town, at-all-hours enterprise that Grindr and its peers continue to be. Upadhyaya agrees, recalling of her time using a similar app, called Scissr, in Chicago in 2015 during her single era: “There weren’t really enough people on it. I got the impression the founders didn’t even really understand the appeal of their own product. I remember one of the founders said she wanted to make a lesbian version of Grindr, but ‘classier.’ I was like, classy?! Just let it be a hookup app! It can be filthy! It doesn’t need to be dressed up in some way just because it’s for women, femmes, et cetera.”
Maybe there’s no great mystery to the question of why no Grindr equivalent exists for the girlies; conventional, clichéd wisdom has it that we all inevitably settle down, adopt the above-mentioned elderly rescue Maltipoos, lock in on donor-sperm sourcing, and stop going out. But I know lots—and I really mean lots—of queer and trans people all over the country and the world who don’t identify as men and would like to get it on with the help of an app specifically created to help them do that.
As LGBTQ+ identification in the United States rises, shouldn’t our hookup options rise with it? Please, if anyone with angel-investor money and a kind heart is out there reading this: my kingdom for a good, non-glitchy, not-too-niche hookup app to meet other newly single lesbians and bisexuals on! It’s all I want for Christmas!
