Grindr

The gay hookup and dating app with the yellow mask and the grid of nearby men, launched in 2009 and now a byword for gay hookups.

Grindr is the gay hookup and dating app with the yellow mask logo and the grid: a wall of square photos of the men nearest to you, sorted by distance. It is a brand name, but among gay men it works as a verb, a place and a state of mind. You go on Grindr, you are on Grindr, you met him on Grindr, and everyone knows what that usually means.

It is not the only app, and for some of us it is not even the favorite one, but it is the one that changed gay life. Before it, finding a man meant a bar, a website or a cruising ground. After it, the bar was in your pocket.

Where it comes from

Grindr launched in March 2009, about nine months after the iPhone got GPS. Its founder, Joel Simkhai, started it with less than $5,000 and one simple wish: to walk into any room or any city and see who is gay. He and his friend Scott Lewallen came up with the name, a nod to grinding people together like a coffee grinder, and the mask logo, inspired by African and Polynesian tribal masks and meant to look masculine and memorable.

It spread fast. When Stephen Fry mentioned it on Top Gear it got about 10,000 downloads overnight, and by early 2011 it had some 1.65 million downloads and users in 180 countries. In 2013 it added tribes, a menu of types such as bear, twink and jock, so users could filter the grid by what they were looking for.

On the apps

Grindr has its own dialect, and half of this dictionary turns up in it. A typical profile mixes position (top, bottom, vers), intentions (NSA, hookup, "right now") and a few rules that say more about the man than the photo does.

• Headless torso: a profile picture showing abs and no face, the trademark of the discreet guy.
• Blank profile: no photo, no text, just a distance. Usually DL, sometimes a married man, occasionally the guy next door.
• Masc4masc: a filter written in words, and one that has drawn plenty of criticism (see masc).

Love it or hate it

Grindr gets blamed for everything from the death of gay bars to the rise of rudeness, and some of it sticks. It also gave men in small towns, closeted men and men in countries where being gay is dangerous a way to find each other. For better and worse, it is the closest thing we have to a village square, with the shutters half closed.

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