Snippy gay app
Gay Hookup Apps: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
09.22.20
We sort through it so you don’t have to.
Grindr
“You gay bro?”
“Nah just here to network”
Who’s on it? Lots of people. Grindr is international, and guys use it to network and chat as often as they use it to actually facilitate a hook up. At the very least it’s a great way to figure out if that guy at the gym is gay or not.
Best for? Scoping out the scene in a new town, flirting for weeks with someone you’ll never meet, getting catfished.
Downsides? Upgrading to Grindr Unlimited is a jaw dropping TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY NINE DOLLARS per year, capital which could alternatively go towards...I don’t know a plane ticket somewhere cool? Like, 75 separate OnlyFans subscriptions? A very welcome donation to the help of your choice?
Sniffies
“looking?”
“yeah”
“come over”
Who’s on it? Sniffies is a cute mixed crowd. DL, bi, married, and curious guys are drawn to Sniffies because it’s straightforward to be as anonymous as they’d like. It’s also easy to identify glory holes and cruising locales for a quick connect up. Kinksters and horndogs are
As a video producer and interviewee in the Snippies Online Virtual dating Horror Stories, I can explain you that there was much more to my story than what made final cut. So, here are the full gory details of one of my more noteworthy New York Capital dating escapades.
At the peak of my online dating career I would try almost any app or service that existed, from the traditional Match.com to the questionable algorithms of Coffee Meets Bagel. Like many New Yorkers, Tinder was one of the apps that (shamefully) worked its way into regular use on my phone. While I was willing to believe that it would be possible for me to find someone, I never wasted a single second considering Tinder would present me with the potential next rung on the ladder of career advancement.
What started as a seemingly blameless night of swiping while pup sitting took an interesting change when I matched up with “Jane.” She was short with an affinity for avocados and incisive wit. We met up at a bar in Brooklyn known for its extensive craft beer list and a propensity for dim lighting. Throughout the course of the date, conversation settled on our current employment situations where we subsequently establish out that ou
How Sniffies Saved Cruising
“Is this a Grindr thing?”
A woman answers her door in curlers. The male knocking tries to explain: He’s supposed to be encounter up with someone from a, uh, “guy on guy” ad. He’s been given the incorrect address, apparently, and his intended “guy”—one who advertised himself as having a penchant for existence on the receiving end of many other guys—is instead a perplexed chick with no intention of hosting. To add to the confusion, the “Grindr thing” was actually a botched date facilitated by something called … Sniffies. This cringetastic interaction—which the woman in curlers filmed—now has over 7 million views on TikTok. And understandably, it has prompted the unenlightened commentariat to inquire: What the fuck is Sniffies?
Today, Sniffies is a web-based app for men looking for sex with other men, often in public spaces—what traditionalists would call “cruising.” The site actually started as an underwear trading platform, but in 2018, founder Blake Gallagher repurposed the website into a literal heat map for men of the liking-men persuasion.* Manhattan, for example, appears as a navy city grid speckled with circles: Some are profiles of cruisers, whi
Back on the Prowl With Sniffies
This post is part of Outward, Slate’s home for coverage of LGBTQ experience, thought, and culture. Read more here.
While it’s hard to say whether the post–COVID vaccine period will convey on a surge of hedonism like the storied decade that followed the 1918 pandemic, a rapid scan of the maskless, largely naked boys of New York’s Jacob Riis Beach on a recent weekend suggests that, at least for the local queer crowd, the ’20s are entering a packed roar, baby. And as bottoms, tops, and N95s hit the floor this Pride month, a modern hookup website (that’s website, not app) has calm itself to strut past the more familiar Grindrs and Scruffs on our phones and capitalize on all the horned-up, post-quarantine energy.
Sniffies is an upstart gay hookup site(NSFW!) that’s seeking to harken help to the old days of cruising, giving users a freak-forward user interface that shreds the decency mandates of the app stores and allows users to instantly locate the nearest dick or ass floating (literally, as photo icons) around in their neighborhoods on a dwell updated GPS map. The approach cuts out the tedious texting and etiquette now so common on the traditio