I was on the Upper West Side running errands I’d been putting off for weeks. I stepped inside a stationary store, took off my gloves, then instinctually pulled out my hand sanitizer. Eighteen months into the pandemic and I still hadn’t kicked the habit.

Somewhere between the birthday cards and the wedding cards, I opened Grindr.

He messaged fast. Said his name was Henry. Lived close. Asked if I wanted to come by.

I did.

Read more

It was the Thursday night before Thanksgiving, and the city was pumping with pre-holiday hormones.

I was at a bar near my apartment, but I decided to pull a Cinderella and close my tab just before midnight.

While I waited for my card, I caught eyes with a guy standing nearby. I’d seen this moment in movies but had never experienced it first-hand. The movies had taught me what came next: look away, then slowly look back.

So I glanced over.

And he did, too.

We both giggled like shy school girls… until the bartender interrupted our meet-cute with my tab. I quickly signed the receipt and looked back.

The Handsome was gone.

This wasn’t how the movie was supposed to end.

I deflated for a moment, then shook it off and started walking home.

Entered apartment. Took off shoes. Collapsed on bed. Opened Grindr.

My evolving post-bar ritual.

Then - Buzz.

A potential suitor!

I opened the profile to see a familiar face smiling at me - the Handsome from the bar.

“found u,” he wrote. “i need u to fuck me.”

Read more

“Third floor. 
Right off the elevator. 
Right again.
End of the hallway.
The one with the door cracked open.”

I followed their instructions like a treasure map.
At the X, instead of buried gold:
a topless couple in bed. 

“Join us,” they said.  

They started kissing,
and two became one.

I stood there watching,
the mental gymnastics commencing: 
How do three people kiss?
What are the angles?
The physics? 
Is there an instruction manual?

I shut my eyes
and gently added my tongue 
to the mix.

When I opened them,
they were giving each other a look
that said:  
Heavens to Betsy, 
we’ve made a mistake.

One went to the bathroom.
Then the other.
They turned on the sink,
as if water pressure
could drown out rejection.

It couldn’t. 

“I’m not into him,”
one of them whispered. 

I was putting on my shoes 
by the time they reemerged. 

I will think about this every night
for the rest of my life, I thought.

“It’s fine,” I said.

I shut the door behind me.
End of the hallway.
Left.
Left again.
Down the elevator,
out the front doors,
and into the night.

Up Next:

November 19, 2021 (ft. “I’m Pregnant”)

It was the Thursday night before Thanksgiving, and the city was pumping with pre-holiday hormones.

I was at a bar near my apartment, but I’d decided it was going to be a Cinderella evening. So, like a good princess, I closed my tab just before midnight.

His face had the kind of symmetry that told me that he’d never sent a face pic to someone and been instantly blocked. A face that said: “Hi there. Hello. I dare you to resist my perfectly symmetrical face.”

And resist, I could not. I was rendered powerless. Weak. Helpless.

I messaged him - a simple “hey there.”

To my surprise, he responded seconds later - “hi, you have beautiful eyes.”

I was his, in perpetuity.

He explained that he was from Germany but was in the city studying. A semester abroad that he was hoping to turn into more than a semester. His family back in Germany wasn’t thrilled that he was hoping to build a life on another continent.

After messaging for over forty-five minutes, it started to feel less like the typical Grindr transaction and more like an actual human conversation.

He mentioned that money was tight. With tuition mercilessly eating his funds, he had no choice but to resort to the gig economy - dog walking, babysitting, whatever came up.

I’d spent my twenties cobbling rent together, telling people I was “fine” when I was anything but. I told him this, in hopes it would strengthen the invisible tie between us.

It did.

He said he’d love to come over, but there was one snag - he was low on cash (pay day was at the end of the week) and needed some for an Uber.

“could you paypal me?”

Read more

It was 3:30 a.m. - one of those late night/early morning moments when your brain’s reward circuitry narrows your attention down to one thought: GET OFF.

His profile said “Looking Now.” No face pic or bio or stats. Just a horny man broadcasting his desires into the virtual universe at 3:30 a.m.

He wanted to jerk off. Said he could come to me.

Then, a twist: he was also chatting with another guy nearby, and that guy wanted to jerk off, too. “What if we all jerked together?” Looking Now asked.

I considered being the kind of person who has boundaries at 3:30 a.m and chooses to go to sleep.

I accepted and put on my shoes.

Read more

“u kinky?”

I’d seen his face on the grid and thought he was handsome, but I’d already put him in my “Out of My League” box. (The box was very full.)

I clicked on his profile picture again - that was, in fact, him. The Handsome around the corner.

“u kinky?” I re-read.

I didn’t know exactly what qualified as “kinky.” I once rolled off the bed to avoid the stream of spit that my ex-boyfriend sent toward my face. I also once drank regular Coke instead of Caffeine Free Diet Coke.

“I could be convinced,” I responded.

He said he wanted to be tied up. I flashed back to my youth, when I’d hide under the table at family dinners and tie my relatives’ shoelaces together, convinced they were unaware of the prank I was so ingeniously executing. (They were fully aware.)

I wrote back, explaining that I’d be “down to explore.”

Fourteen minutes later, he knocked on my door. So tan. So toned. So handsome.

Read more

It’s a very tall, extremely narrow cupboard with a floor space of only ten inches square, designed so that its inhabitants cannot sit down or squat. Sharp spikes, rusty nails, and broken glass stick out of the walls and door, meaning any wobble or lean results in getting cut.

That’s a description of the Chokey from Matilda - but also a subjective illustration of every gay bar in Manhattan. Which is why, when I found myself at Industry on a Saturday night, I was sweating as soon as I walked through the door. It was the kind of crowd that spills out onto the sidewalk - everyone still pandemic-cautious enough to want the outdoor air, not quite cautious enough to stay home.

I clocked him from across the patio: shorter, dark hair, a face that read as Adrien Brody-esque. There was something in how he was standing - some noticeable kind of ease - that kept pulling my eyes back to him.

We started talking near the bar. Good talker. Better listener, which is rarer. I asked his name.

“Noah.”

Of course it was.

I didn’t explain why that landed the way it did - uncouth to bring up the ex-boyfriend within the first five minutes of meeting someone - and he didn’t ask. I just filed it away as one of those small cosmic jokes the Universe likes to make at your expense.

At some point, we migrated toward the bathroom line together.

I’ve never felt comfortable peeing at a urinal. I haven’t since I was a kid, so the prospect of peeing at a urinal next to a guy I was interested in kissing resulted in a very specific form of internal torture.

One of the many absurd things about being a human is that you have almost no control over the body you’re born into. Some people have big dicks. Some people have medium-sized dicks. Some people have small dicks. That’s just how the biological cookie crumbles.

But the big and medium-sized dicks are the ones we tend to see - in porn, on X, in the media whenever a celebrity wears grey sweatpants. When it comes to the small dick community, however, there seems to be less representation.

And at this point, I’m sure it’s quite obvious which camp I fall into.

Read more

Eminem’s ass in 8 Mile.

Justin Timberlake’s bare abdomen on the cover of Rolling Stone in 2003.

All of Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal in Y tu mamá también.

Every gay kid growing up in the suburbs collects artifacts. I wasn’t religious, but those movie moments became my religion. Proof that there were other people like me.

When I finally came out in 2010, I quickly confused sex with belonging. I didn’t know any gay people, which means I didn’t know what being gay looked like outside of TV and magazines and the internet. So somewhere along the way I internalized a simple equation:

To be gay was to have sex.

After my relationship ended, it’s no surprise, then, that Grindr became church.

One Sunday night I was chatting with a guy who lived a few blocks away. We started with the standard opening questions - where do you live, what are you into, what are you looking for? I told him I was available and willing to come over.

“Are you sure?” he typed. “You saw my pictures right?”

Of course I’d seen his pictures. It was his profile picture that inspired me to click on his profile so I could see more of his pictures, in fact.

“I’m fatter than you,” he added.

The message landed with a gravity I wasn’t expecting. Not because of what he looked like, but because he felt like he had to apologize for it.

I wondered how many times he’d typed those words before. How many profiles he’d been blocked by. How many magazine covers and movies had quietly taught him the same lessons they’d taught me.

“You’re very handsome,” I wrote back.

I meant it.

Read more

We’d chatted before. Maybe more than once. He had one of those profiles that seemed to reboot every few months - new photos, slightly different bio. Our schedules had never lined up, or he’d blocked me, or some combination of the two. Either way, here we were again. But this time, we locked in a plan.

We agreed on 11:30 p.m.

I climbed into an Uber outside my building and watched the avenues zip by - crosstown, then downtown. A few weeks earlier I’d met a guy on Ludlow. Now it was Alphabet City. Apparently I was developing a type, and my type lived east of where I did.

I texted him that I was outside. He said he’d be a couple minutes - he just needed to run to the bodega. For what, he didn’t say. I didn’t ask.

I stood on a dark stretch of Avenue B thinking the thoughts you think at midnight in a neighborhood you don’t know: Is this worth it? Is this safe? Is this insane?

As usual, I landed on, Eh, it’s probably fine.

He came back holding a pack of cigarettes.

I’m not a smoker. I’ve never been attracted to smokers. But when he kissed me on the cheek and said, “Hey, handsome,” I realized my anti-smoking platform wasn’t going to survive the evening.

Read more

Chatting on Grindr during a pandemic was a particular form of torture. Everyone had a different threshold for risk, so conversations often went further than the people behind them ever did. I’d met up with Closest Thing to Lube back in April, so I was feeling like I was ready to try again. This time, I’d be the one traveling.

“Fox” and I had been chatting on and off since April - bro-y energy, monosyllabic messages, the kind of guy who takes four days to answer “you around this week?” But his profile photo did a lot of heavy lifting. You know the photo - mesh shorts with a visible penis line that inched toward his left knee.

Finally, on a random Tuesday, the stars aligned.

He lived on Ludlow in one of those walk-ups that seemed to be actively resisting my visit - buzzer half-working, stairwell lit like a crime scene. His texts had gotten oddly specific before I arrived: exit out of Grindr before you knock, shoes off in the doorway. I filed both under “eccentric” and kept walking up.

First observation: he was wearing the shorts from his profile photo. Fox knew what he was doing.

Read more

I built him in my head using six Grindr photos and a bio that said “travel nurse, based wherever they send me.” We’d been texting for two weeks, which was long enough for me to be nervous to meet him in-person for the first time.

He was renting a sublet in Long Island City. The door opened before I could decide if I should text, call, knock. He was tan and tall, just as his six photos had suggested. More handsome, even, which I’d learned to treat as a minor miracle rather than an expectation.

We ordered Thai food with a side of first-date conversation that was really just two people trading resumes. He’d spent years doing ICU work before he got restless and went mobile - a contract here, a contract there.

Then, somewhere between the pad thai and the second tequila soda, he mentioned who he’d cared for when he still worked full-time. A woman everyone in the country had opinions about.

“She’d only respond if you called her Justice,” he said.

I made him repeat it twice, unable to process that he’d occupied such an intimate space with someone as iconic as Mrs. Justice.

Read more

Studying abroad in London taught me how to align my external self with my internal self. Five months of saying the word “gay” without wanting to throw up. Of kissing a boy on the Tube and discovering I did not, in fact, get sucked into the lowest ring of He*l.

It was our last night before heading back to the States, and nobody wanted to go out. Hannah was the exception. (She was always the exception.) “I refuse to spend my remaining hours watching you fold and then re-fold your underwear,” she said. I knew better than to argue.

We hailed a cab in front of our building, and as one pulled up, a man in a suit reached for the handle at the same time as I did. He apologized quickly, in an accent that rendered my body spineless. He explained that he was coming from his office holiday party and was off to meet some friends. Hannah and her opportunism asked where he was headed, and it turned out to be the exact bar we were going to. This, dear reader(s), was the Universe at play, guiding two hands to become one at just the right moment.

Read more

A pandemic will put a magnifying glass on anything. Ours landed on Noah and me. It asked us to sit still, in one apartment, and look at each other for months without the usual noise to fill the space. Turns out the noise had been doing a lot of work.

I started wondering how much longer we would’ve lasted if the world hadn’t shut down around us. Not in a dramatic way. More like doing math on a napkin, half-hoping you land on a number you like.

The apartment had been his family’s, so when we finally called it, I was the one who left. I found a studio near Hell’s Kitchen so small I could touch both walls of the kitchen at once. I didn’t care. It was mine.

Being single for the first time in years felt like waking up with a limb that had fallen asleep - the pins and needles of it, the strange rediscovery of a thing you’d forgotten you had control over. I didn’t have to time anything around Noah’s practice schedule anymore. I didn’t have to invent a Kelsey, or a Joe, or a reason I happened to be staying out late on a Wednesday night. I could just say where I was, because where I was was allowed. I could be on Grindr at nine in the morning. I could be on Grindr at midnight. Nobody was waiting for me to put the phone down.

Read more

After a year of being in an open relationship, the most important thing I’d learned was the difference between a dick and a cock.

A dick just is. A cock is what could be.

A dick doesn’t know where he’s going. A cock, not unlike an Olympic athlete, has been training for the journey since birth.

So when SuckMeNow sent his album, I understood immediately: this was not a dick situation. This was a cock.

Read more

When you’ve been with someone for long enough, the shifting doesn’t happen overnight. It’s gradual. Imperceptible. Minute changes accumulating in the dark until one day you look up and the furniture’s been rearranged and you don’t remember anyone moving it.

Noah and I had a weird Valentine’s Day.

We went to the Italian restaurant we loved - candles, the good bread, the waiter who always remembered us. I’d found a list online called The 36 Questions That Lead to Love and thought it might be fun to run through a few over dinner, the way other couples do crosswords. We got to the one asking us to list everything we loved about each other.

Noah didn’t hesitate. His list for me was long, specific, generous. I was overwhelmed. Surprised, too, in a way I wasn’t proud of - I hadn’t realized he loved me quite that thoroughly.

Then it was my turn.

I hesitated.

The last year of the open relationship hadn’t brought us closer so much as it had given us a new routine: he went out with his gay sports league friends, and I went on Grindr and spiraled. My list, when it finally came, was a fraction of his. I have never felt like more of a disappointment to another human being than I did in that candlelit moment, watching him wait for me to say something that would match what he’d just given me. I just wasn’t feeling it. I’d lost the energy to pretend otherwise.

So a couple weeks later, when Noah was out for the day, I let Grindr take the wheel entirely.

Below is what happened.

Read more

January has a way of presenting itself as a fresh start. Two weeks earlier I’d been unwrapping presents under a tree, eating cookies for breakfast without consequence, existing in that suspended holiday economy where time doesn’t really count. Now I was expected to return to a desk, answer emails, care about quarterly anything. The audacity of January.

So when Noah texted that he’d be late from work, I did the responsible thing: I opened Grindr like a man checking his email, except the email was a grid of torsos and the inbox never closed.

A message arrived almost immediately - a small, specific dopamine hit, the app’s version of someone laughing at your joke before you’ve finished telling it. He was close by. Wanted to bottom. I told him I didn’t have much time, but that he was welcome to use what little of it existed.

Jordan, he said.

Peter, I replied.

He arrived in under five minutes, which either meant he lived in the neighborhood or had been standing outside already, hedging his bets. I didn’t ask. His eagerness had a kind of unguarded quality I found disarming - no posturing, no performance of nonchalance, just a guy who wanted what he wanted and had decided not to dress it up.

Read more

By the end of December, my Grindr grid had started to feel less like a dating app and more like a year-end performance review - a scrolling slideshow of every decision I’d made since February, helpfully organized by torso. I was due back in Pennsylvania in two days for the holidays, which meant the open relationship was about to go on its annual hiatus: two weeks of family dinners, childhood bedrooms, and the specific chastity that comes from sleeping fifteen feet from your parents.

One more before the curtain came down on the year, I figured. Something low-key. Nothing that needed a debrief.

His profile was the outlier in a grid otherwise committed to abs and ring lights - soft-focus, smiling with his whole face, a guy who looked like he’d wandered onto the app by mistake and was too polite to leave. I messaged him expecting nothing in particular. Within a few exchanges we were deep into a conversation about regional theater, which is not typically where these conversations go.

We moved to Instagram. Then to texting, the universally understood signal that an interaction has been promoted from casual to plans. He suggested brunch. I said yes before I’d fully registered that brunch is not, traditionally, a hookup activity. Brunch is what you do with people you already know.

I decided not to think about it too hard.

Read more

Eleven months into the open relationship. Eleven hookups in. A sensible, almost civic-minded number - the kind of tally that makes you feel less like a person having a recklessly fun year and more like someone keeping orderly books.

It was December, which meant it was time to take stock. I am, at heart, a list person, so naturally I had a list:

• February - kissed him

• March - topped him, sucked him, kissed him, topped him

• April - he sucked me

• June - 69’d (the great diplomatic compromise of hookups)

• July - bottomed for him

• August - sucked him

• September - watched him

• November - topped him

Eleven months, eleven encounters, a tidy if slightly clinical ledger of a body learning new arithmetic. Something in me - the same part that alphabetizes spice racks - felt strongly that the year needed to end on an even number. One more, just to round it out. So when I opened Grindr that night and saw a tile that said, simply, Texas straight visiting, I understood immediately that fate, or at least the algorithm, had heard me.

He was just in town, he said. Staying at a friend’s place nearby. Straight, but curious to suck. It had been a few months since anyone had taken proper care of me, so I clicked.

We exchanged the obligatory diplomatic credentials - torso pics, vague specs. He revised his position almost immediately: not straight, actually. More bi, if we were being honest. I told him that was fine by me. I’d been on my own winding stretch of that particular highway, and I’ve never had it in me to judge another man’s mile markers.

Dirty blonde. Thick. Handsome in the unbothered way of someone who has never once worried about being handsome. Average, like me - we matched in that respect, at least. He asked if I wanted to come over. I did.

Read more

“Want to come stick your dick in my butt?”

That was his opening line on Grindr. Not a Hello. Not a How are you? Just a confident, matter-of-fact, fully punctuated: Want to come stick your dick in my butt?

I stared at it for a moment. Appreciated the clarity. Sent a reply.

I was getting used to hooking up when Noah was out of town. He’d gone home a few days before Thanksgiving to spend time with his family, while I’d stayed back for work commitments. It was the particular loneliness of a city that had already half-emptied out for the holiday, that strange quiet week when the streets thin and the apps thicken.

Which is how I found myself alone in our apartment, reading that sentence.

As a refresher: I didn’t have much experience topping. A handful of times with Noah, once during the foursome. That was about it. I was a student of the craft, not a master.

He lived a quick subway ride away. I was in.

I messaged when I was coming up the elevator, and he said: Door’s open. Naturally. I walked down his hallway noting the specific character of the apartment - the kind of place that tells you a story before you’ve met anyone. On the shelf near the entrance: a complete collection of Mary-Kate and Ashley VHS tapes, lined up with curatorial precision.

I noted this. We’d have to come back to that.

I pushed open his bedroom door.

He was ass-up in a jockstrap.

Oh.

He really did want me to stick my dick in his butt.

Read more

I didn’t expect there to be so much light. Strong. Oppressive. Hot.

It was my first time in Los Angeles, and the culture shock was severe. A sprawling city full of athleisure wear, where everything felt like a suggestion. Time? Who’s she? Meet you at 9pm? Sure, whatever floats your boat.

So when Noah said he was going to spend the night with an old college friend, I told him I was going to take the night to reconnect with an old college friend of my own. I met the friend and his plus one for dinner. The plus one was called Kris, and when the waiter came to take our order, Kris said he wasn’t hungry because he’d had a “big gust of wind” on the way over. I wasn’t sure if he was kidding. I didn’t ask.

There wasn’t anything remarkable about the meal, or the drinks after - but what surprised me was when my friend said he was tired and headed home early, leaving me alone with Kris.

Kris: “I’m taking you somewhere.”

Read more