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For those who are unaware, Grindr is the overall most popular dating/chat app for gay, bisexual and queer men in the United States (though other apps are preferred by particular demographic groups). Users are presented with a grid of profile pictures to scroll through. Each profile has space for a picture and a name. The picture may or may not be, but often is, of the person’s face. The name may or may not be, but rarely is, their actual one (like on a lot social media). Neither a picture nor a name are required. Tapping on the profile shows more information the person might choose to share or not, like height and weight, relationship status, what they’re looking for, STD status and more pictures.
I’ve had Grindr on my phone since 2022. During that period, I’ve been semi-nomadic, spending most of my time in rural communities, but also visiting big cities. The contrast in the grids is stark. In a place like Portland or the Bay Area, nearly every profile features a face pic. But in sparsely populated locales like eastern Oregon or western Colorado, less than a quarter do. Maybe a third show just a portion of the body (exposed torso, clothed ass or crotch) or a full body shot but with the face concealed. Of the profiles that remain, local landscapes are common, but about 40% are simply blank.
For the record, I have face pics on my profile and I change the name depending on where I am and what I’m looking for.
The subject of face pics is definitely a thing on Grindr. Very commonly, people put “NPNC” in their profile description or even in their name slot, which is “no pic, no chat” and which is fair enough. Stating your conditions is totally valid. Of those without face pics, quite a few do say in their profile description that they’re willing to share them privately. Again, fair enough, at least as far as I’m concerned. But not everyone feels like that.
There’s always a few (and just a very few thankfully) who are like, “It’s 2026. Show your face.”
My response is, “It’s 2026. Don’t you get why some people wouldn’t want to show their face?”
Let’s back up a little.
I was three weeks old in late June 1969 when the famous Stonewall Riots broke out in NYC, a watershed event of the contemporary gay rights movement. That was my welcome to the world, I like to say.
Even still, the ‘70s and ‘80s were a slog for the movement, especially when the AIDS crisis struck. Homophobia was rampant. I grew up in deeply conservative Nebraska and couldn’t even come out to myself. Life was miserable.
My college didn’t have a gay group, so I helped some friends start one, and co-led it my senior year. That was 1991 and it was a very different world. We were just trying to make the case that gay and lesbian people were not perverts or pedophiles or sinners (it was a Lutheran school) and that we were actually just ordinary people with all the same feelings about love, life and companionship as everybody else. We subjected ourselves to all sorts of silly, offensive or personal questions in the interest of educating people. All we were actually doing back then was beseeching the culture for tolerance. The idea that gay marriage could be legalized was such a far out fantasy that it wasn’t even a subject of conversation.
The ‘90s were a time of increasing tolerance, but being public could still be risky business. The fear of getting gay bashed was real. When I was living in Minneapolis mid-decade (in large part because it was considered a gay haven in the Midwest), there were still stories about blood in the snow outside gay bars. In 1998, Matthew Shepard, an openly gay 21 year old, was brutally murdered in Wyoming because of his sexuality. This was a deeply affecting event for many of us who were alive then.
As the years passed and people kept working on it, real progress happened in US American culture, and it started to feel good in the 2000s. The baseline stepped up from tolerance to acceptance. We gained representation in the media and in politics. Laws improved. In some quarters, acceptance bloomed into celebration.
For nearly fifty years (notwithstanding the horror of the early years of AIDS), improvement in quality of life for gay people was constant and seemed unstoppable. By the mid 20-teens, the world felt transformed, and I was so grateful that contemporary young people didn’t have to suffer like I had.
But then.
2016: enter Trump. By 2017 the mood started to shift. It was subtle at first, just a nagging doubt on the edge of thought, but it metastasized, and by 2020 it was out in the open. A backlash was underway. Nasty rhetoric was on the increase. Intolerant legislation was introduced. Life started to feel less safe.
This isn’t just me going off vibes.
- Wikipedia has a long, well-cited article entitled, “2020s anti-LGBTQ movement in the United States.”
- The American Civil Liberties Union has been tracking anti-LGBTQ legislation.
- Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has been covering anti-LGBTQ bias in the media.
- See “Human Rights Violations Against LGBTQ+ Communities in the United States” from Human Rights Watch.
- See “United States of hate: mapping backlash Bills against LGBTIQ+ youth” in the peer-reviewed journal, Sex Education.
- See “Attack on LGBTQ+ rights: The politics and psychology of a backlash” at the UC Berkeley News.
- According to a 2023 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, support for a number of LGBTQ issues including gay marriage has dipped slightly. It’s not a significant drop, but it shows that progress is reversible.
- According to the United Nations organization, UN Women, the backlash is global.
- The revival of the term “grooming” and its implication of pedophilia is an awful development and a return to a darker time.
- 2024 saw an uptick on assaults on Pride celebrations.
- In 2023, Matthew Shepard’s own mother said: “The out-and-out hatred you see is just astounding to me,” she says. “It used to be socially unacceptable to be a bigot. It’s not anymore. We need to stop letting people behave that way.”
I spent the summer of 2025 living and working on a farm on Colorado’s Western Slope. This is deep red territory, with Lauren Boebert as the elected representative. Sure there are islands of relative tolerance, like college town Durango and farming community Paonia (where I was), and Grand Junction has a gay bar, but overall the atmosphere was sketchy. I honestly didn’t always feel safe. When I went out on my weekends to shop or hike or whatever, I consciously tried to “look straight.” More than once in that ranching country I thought of poor Matthew Shepard tied to a cattle fence and pistol whipped into a coma. Could that happen to me if I was too out around the wrong people? Maybe. I didn’t want to risk it.
Was that kind of fear so close to the surface for me ten years ago? No, it wasn’t.
Coming up to the present day, a lesbian was just murdered in front of her wife in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The victim’s name is Renee Nicole Good and her executioner was an ICE officer. Don’t think her identity wasn’t part of it? As another ICE officer said later, when threatening someone else: “Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch.”
Given all this, I totally get it if someone might not want to display a picture of their face on an app that anybody can download.
So when I go on Grindr and there’s some smug dude going, “It’s 2026, show your face,” as if everything is fine, I’m disgusted.
Because yeah, it’s 2026 alright, and everything isn’t fine.
