By
Daniel Sorungbe
Affiliate Anthropology
I told the #Institution I would document some of my London experiences to promote studying abroad… I doubt this is what they had in mind, but I made it clear that I was here for the niggas and the gays ONLYYY! Say what you want, this’ll be useful to somebody.
So now that I’ve been in London for some time, here is my comparison of Grindr in both worlds: Atlanta vs. London.
1 PROXIMITY
There’s no such thing as true privacy on Grindr, whether you’re out, DL, or somewhere in between. This fact is made most clear by the location-based setup of the app, which places you (and all app-users near you) in a grid based on proximity. Of course, you can turn this off, but it kinda cuts your credibility in half… No one wants to text someone who’s hiding information, especially when everyone else has gotten over that sense of vulnerability to an extent.
In Atlanta (or at least the part of Atlanta I live in), this grid is a little calmer because people tend to live a little further from one another. On any given day, the closest account to me might’ve been 2500 feet from me, and the furthest available account would be about four miles out. I did the math so you didn’t have to…. With the knowledge that the unpaid version of Grindr lets you see ninety-nine profiles at a time, that’s about one Grindr user per 3,800 feet. Obviously, compared to more rural or scarcely populated cities, this is a pretty good number. Imagine my surprise when I got to London and the number multiplied…
I’ll preface this by admitting that London is a huge city with a crazy amount of people from all over (more on this later), but I didn’t realize just how many people used Grindr here. When I first got here and opened the app, the closest profiles were 0 feet away… That’s insane… like are you mfs on top of me…? And I did a little more digging (scrolling down), boom, the furthest profile was like 1000 feet away… I’ll do the math again (y’all are so lazy), that’s one Grindr user per 175 feet. So, every 200 steps, you’ve probably passed someone who was on the app, too… How intimate.
2 DRUGS
Atlanta’s super funny to me, because it’s a major urban hub in the middle of a rural ass red state. The reason I bring that up is to confront the fact that weed (most forms of it, anyway) is illegal in Georgia, but walk through Piedmont Park for thirty minutes and tell me what you smell. Weed is normalized as fuckkk in Atlanta, even if you have to be creative about buying it.
Weed’s illegal in the UK, too, but it’s actually weirdly stigmatized here. It’s still normalized in younger, Blacker, and gayer crowds, I think, but as a whole, weed here is frowneddd upon.
Which is so funny to me because these people will go through a pack of cigarettes a day without batting an eye, but let it be a blunt…
What does this have to do with Grindr? I’m about to spill a little. So in Atlanta (and the U.S. pretty much), if you see a capital T on someone’s account, it means they do meth, plain and simple. So if you get a text talmmat[ED1] “wanna parTy?” please know and understand that it wasn’t a typo. I was a little comforted by the lack of capital Ts populating my grid when I got to London, but my naivety was quickly fixed by a new grouping of letters: “HnH.” I ignored it at first, but it was literally everywhere I turned… So, being the anthropologist I am, I texted a Grindr user to figure out wtf it meant.
Bitch… it means high and horny.
I guess parTy was too specific for them… They needed a terminology that encapsulated ALL drugs (but not alcohol or nicotine… okay). And now my stoner ass is being shuffled in with everyone else like… Is that not crazy…?
3 RACE AND DIVERSITY
Atlanta’s known as one of the gay capitals of the world. One of the Black gay capitals, too. So, living in Atlanta as a Black gay man is pretty convenient. White people dominate the grid (duh), but there are also parts of town where Black people are the majority, and everyone else is kinda the “minority.”
London is also known as one of the gay capitals of the world, but in a different way than Atlanta. Obviously, White people are the majority here, too, and so are Black people in southern spots like Peckham, Lewisham, and Greenwich (this place isn’t free from the hegemonic racialization of the South, either), but it’s in a totally different context.
Race operates really differently here. In the U.S., I see race (specifically, a phenotypical conception of it) as a unifier. We all have our ethnic differences and diaspora wars and yada yada, but as a whole, Black Americans have a collective identity tied to being Black in America and, as a result of group conflict, White Americans have been labeled with “Whiteness”. The UK isn’t like this at ALLLL. I kid you not, I might have met ONE actually British White person in my first two weeks here… Everyone’s been Italian or Greek or German or Turkish or some other European nationality. In the same way, Black people here don’t really subscribe to a ‘Black’ cultural identity. There’s kind of an understanding that everyone’s Black, but ethnicity is really emphasized. You’re either Nigerian or Ghanian or Jamaican or mixed.
This translates to Grindr in a couple of different ways. In Atlanta, you get the usual fetishization of Black men (phrases like BBC), and a somewhat popular choice of Black gay men to only mess with other Black men. In London, there’s a kinda similar fetishization of Black men, but it’s not as normalized. Like I haven’t heard the term BBC once here. Don’t get excited, though… There might be less microaggressions, but that’s only because they don’t give you the time of day unless you’re a very specific version of Black (muscular, masculine, lightskin). On the other hand, Black people in London don’t really tend to stay within ethnic or racial lines when it comes to hooking up…
This blend isn’t without its own complications, though.
To push this into a more personal context, I’ve been talking to a lot more people in London, whether it’s on dating apps or in person, and I’ve been particularly aware of the way people express “attraction” to me based on the contexts of my race, ethnicity, and even nationality.
I’m gonna start it on the macro-level with some general, non-raced (allegedly) interactions.
If you’re an avid Grindr user like me, you know by now that this is a very regular-degular occurrence on Grindr. Some people don’t wanna do the small talk thing. They see Grindr as a hookup app primarily and treat individuals they text on there as such. And of course, with my being in London, the number of texts like these has multiplied exponentially. So I’ve been slowly getting used to a new brand of sexual objectification; the quantity of people here can be overstimulating, there’s a different culture around politeness (I’m a Southern belle at the end of the day), and if you show discomfort or hesitation, you’re already chopped (clapped is the word here, I think?).
That’s nowhere near enough background but at this point let’s just get some context going. We’re gonna start with race.
I’ve gotten considerably more mindful and demure each week I’m in London! But that first week, a nigga was tore upppp. I went to like four different clubs, countless pubs, just acting foolish af. There was one club in particular I went to: Ministry of Sound… She was cute I can’t lie… It had an outdoor-ish smoking area, different rooms with different music, and it was a night for students specifically, so I was with other students at my school and people around my age (and younger… smh).
But back to the story. I was approached by a random (non-Black) guy who kept looking me up and down. I didn’t think much of it, I assumed he was just looking at my clothes (I was wearing my LMU jersey and the acid-wash pants… my fit was so hard), but then he came in close and said “You look like Michael Jordan!”
I do not look like Michael Jordan.
Didn’t take him serious from this point forward, but I didn’t wanna be rude so I just laughed it off. To my surprise, he came close again to add with a laugh, “you seem like you play basketball and get mad bitches.”
Racist undertones aside, that’s such an odd thing for a straight man to say to another man, but that’s not really an experience I can speak on… So I just told him I was gay and prayeddd that homophobia would get me out of a pickle this time.
I guess my luck had run out that night, because he got close AGAIN to whisper, “Oh really… I heard Black guys take dick the best.”
I laughed, patted him on his shoulder, and sent him on his merry way.
Long story short, microaggressions have been a lot more common here. I personally think it’s because Blackness isn’t as rooted in revolution here, so people tend to get away with saying crazy shit, but I don’t think I’ve been here long enough to credibly break down British Blackness yet, so I’m gonna move on to my points on ethnicity and nationality.
I’m a very proud Nigerian-American man, and I know we have our reputations (that I might perpetuate here and there), but I didn’t know how that reputation would follow me overseas. For example:
He was Black so I wasn’t really trippin fr, but the Nigerian aura is the same here, too. And I got that both from my experience as a Nigerian, and my experiences with the British Nigerians here (the first one was entertaining and flirting with me while he was in a whole relationship… the second one just couldn’t stand on business… what a useless culture).
But the context that’s really been frying me has been my American one, specifically as an Atlanta gay. I know Atlanta’s a major city, especially in queer culture, but I didn’t know just how far ATL would follow me… For example:
So, from what I gather, people here see Atlanta gays are hypersexual and extremely festive. I’ve gotten a lot of phrases like, “Atlanta? Y’all get down over there!” “Oh I’ve heard a lot about ATL boys…” and my personal favorite: “Are YN’s real?”
But this is kinda charged with the fact that queer culture in Atlanta has a certain shade to it. Atlanta’s super diverse, don’t get me wrong, but as one of the only queer hubs in the American South, Atlanta’s queer culture is steeped in Black experience (as seen in things like E. Patrick Johnson’s Pouring Tea, NSFW Twitter content creators, and like… Tyler Perry movies). So, in saying that gays from Atlanta “get down,” is there an implicit idea that Black gays are “known for” that? And isn’t it also somewhat problematic when Black people in the UK follow that same rhetoric, as Southern Black culture is rooted in African American culture, which doesn’t really exist here?
I guess I’m still grappling with the idea that queer American Blackness is always at odds with someone for something. Whether it’s fetishization, disrespect, or general misrepresentation hidden by an air of sexual interest, being gay, Black, American is an experience rooted in implied adversity. But like I keep saying here in London, I guess I just gotta get used to it.
This piece contains excerpts from Daniel’s blog VERSATILE, edited for publication on the Creative Collective. For more, visit dsorungbe.weebly.com.
