Disclosure
For Lewis, hook-up apps such as Grindr offered a way to explore gay culture that had been missing in his upbringing in rural Dumfriesshire.
At first, he loved the excitement of casual sexual encounters being available at the swipe of a phone but soon it became addictive.
“You get the validation, that dopamine hit when people message you and hit you up, it is enjoyable but that is the problem,” he says.
Lewis says it started to damage his self-esteem and he found himself chasing validation – equating his worth with his body.
He says low moods led him back to the app’s loop of quick sexual encounters that often left him feeling “dirty and gross”, fuelling his anxiety and depression.
“On Grindr you’re an object to them, like picking clothes on Asos,” he says.
Grindr, a social networking app for the GBTQ community, is the biggest app of its kind and it now has about 15 million active monthly users.
Many people, gay and heterosexual, use other apps for hook-ups too.
Some enjoy it and don’t think twice, while others feel there is a deeper issue and it has become a fast-track to instant gratification and has normalised easy access to sex.
For Lewis, it has been challenging to establish more meaningful connections beyond sexual hook-ups in a world where many young gay men seem to be focused on one thing.
“When you don’t just want that, you feel like the odd one out,” he says.
Jules MoskovtchenkoJacob Alon is an up-and-coming singer who played Glastonbury this summer and has been compared to 70s folk legend Nick Drake.
Alon’s songs are often tender but they also tackle subjects such as casual sex with strangers on gay hook-up apps.
One of the 25-year-old’s most popular songs – Liquid Gold 25 – ends with the refrain: “This is where love comes to die.”
“I wrote that song after a series of hook-ups on Grindr that left me feeling quite empty and degraded,” Alon tells the Disclosure documentary Should We Hook Up?.
“It can be great fun,” the Scottish singer says.
“But there is definitely a culture that can be quite toxic.”
Alon, who uses they/them pronouns, says in the past they put themselves in risky situations by meeting up with random strangers in a park in the middle of the night.
“Those people could have very easily hurt me and no-one would have known,” they say.
“People have done things I didn’t want them to do and not listened to me when I told them not to.”
Hook-up culture in the gay community has deep roots, dating back to a time when same-sex relationships between men had to remain hidden.
Homosexual acts only became legal in England and Wales in 1967 and it was more than a decade later that Scotland followed suit.
Today, hook-up culture means sex is available 24/7 – and with just a swipe of the phone in your pocket.
At a bar in Glasgow, Fintan, Kip and James say Grindr is for hook-ups and there was no pretence it is for anything other than sex.
“It’s so superficial,” 23-year-old Fintan says.
“Everyone’s got three pictures or maybe just one picture. Nine times out 10 a lot of them are shirtless.”
Kip, who is 30, says there has never been any intention to build a genuine connection with someone on his hook-ups.
“It has never been ‘wine and a gossip’,” he says. “It’s been ‘take your knickers down, let’s get to it’.”
But Kip says it is not always a great experience.
“Sometimes I have left and I have thought: ‘that was so hot, I’m so amazing’.
“But there are other times when you leave and it is 07:00 and people are going to work and you are there shivering, feeling dirty and dejected.”
In response to the documentary, a Grindr spokesperson said: “We take seriously the responsibility that comes with being a platform used by millions of LGBTQ+ people every day, and we’re committed to supporting their wellbeing in all its forms.”
