Hookup
Casual sex with someone you are not dating, usually arranged on an app: you meet, you have sex, and that is the whole plan.
A hookup is casual sex with someone you are not dating: you meet, usually through an app, you have sex, and that is the whole plan. "Looking for a hookup" means looking for sex now, not a boyfriend later, and among gay men it is said without embarrassment, as plainly as "looking for a coffee".
A hookup can be a one-time thing or a regular arrangement, it can be warm and friendly or a quick in-and-out, but it is not a date. If dinner happens, it is because someone got hungry.
Where it comes from
To hook up has meant to meet or to get together for well over a century, and the verb shows up for forming a relationship as early as the 1870s. The sexual sense, anything from kissing to sex, is recorded in the US from 1972, and by the 1990s it was common campus slang, deliberately vague about how far things went. The noun hookup followed. In straight speech the word still keeps some of that vagueness; in gay speech it almost always means sex.
On the apps
The apps made the hookup the default setting of gay life. Grindr and its rivals show you the nearest men by distance, which is perfect for the "now" part, and a whole vocabulary grew around it:
- NSA: no strings attached, the hookup's terms and conditions.
- Can host / can travel: whose place.
- Discreet and DL: the hookup that must stay secret.
- Into: the list of what you like, from top and bottom to kinks.
- Pics?: the question that opens most conversations.
Before the apps the same thing happened through cruising, in bars, in bathhouses and in personal ads, only slower.
The gay take
Gay men have never been very good at being ashamed of hooking up, and that is mostly a strength: sex can be friendly, honest and fun without being the start of a relationship. Plenty of friendships, and some boyfriends, began as hookups. The flip side is app fatigue, the feeling that every conversation is a negotiation and nobody stays for breakfast.
Tell a friend where you're going, meet somewhere you can leave, and know your status: PrEP, condoms and regular testing are what make a busy hookup life a healthy one.
Related terms
Sources 1
- Green, Jonathon. "hook up (with), v." Green's Dictionary of Slang, online edition. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/2dvzaua