Insights into a location based dating app designed to facilitate sexy times between gay men? There’s a documentary for that. Sydney filmmaker Damien Dunstan has this week released the first of an eight-part web series exploring how Sydney’s gay men are using Grindr, the international dating app and chiseled torso delivery system currently taking the world by storm.
Shot during Mardi Gras 2012 through the POV of wildly different but similarly candid Sydney users, who account for more than half of Grindr’s 250,000 Australian users and rank 4th in the world in terms of users per capita, The Grindr Guide illuminates the mindset of its users and lifts the sequined iron curtain on the revolutionary smartphone dating app, of which the heterosexual world has no equivalent, exploring grind specific social issues such as race, body image and ageism.
“Grindr has the reputation of being a hook-up app, and I wanted to see how justified that stigma is,” said Dunstan. “What we actually found is that people are using Grindr for all kinds of reasons: we followed guys who use Grindr to make friends; those who use it as a starting point for more traditional dating; and of course, there’s a significant portion that do use it purely for casual sex.”
As one interviewee puts it “As long as there’s some sort of communication, gays will work out how to use that for sex.”
We have much to learn from each other. Watch the first three episodes below…
