"No Fats, No Femmes, No Asians"
Homonormativity and how digital infrastructure perpetuates discrimination
Gay dating sucks. I wouldn’t go so far as to proclaim that gay dating is dead, but it definitely sucks. Ask any gay person and they will agree that there are many challenges to dating that aren’t as pronounced in the straight world. My favourite phrase from a straight person is '“Did you match with them on Grindr?” followed by the look of shock when I tell them that literally anyone can message you on this app as long as they fit within the nearest 100 squares, which can be extended and modified by age, race and category to suit your preferences. Yuck. Preferences. I hate that word. But it’s precisely this word that perpetuates a very unhealthy digital environment for young queer people, as well as old queer people. In academia, this idea has been labelled homonormativity, which skips along hand in hand with hyper-masculinity, down the Yellow Brick Road towards a Trump rally or something. So what is homonormativity and how does this have tangible impacts on the lives of many queer people today?
Where heteronormativity denotes an implicit bias of everything in the media and cultural space towards perpetuating and privileging the idea of straightness (see The Bachelor and Love Island), homonormativity exists to preserve a toxic culture within the queer community that favours young, white, attractive cis-gendered men. For a long time, black academics have been critiquing the rhetoric around feminism and queer studies dominated by white women and gay white men (this is important), particularly theorists like bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, who champion ideas like intersectionality. More recently, however, anthropologists and sociologists have been exploring the idea of homonormativity, particularly in the way it manifests in digital worlds.
The queer community is made up of pioneers, not only in their trailblazing deconstruction of heteronormativity, but also in colonising (for lack of a better word) the internet. Grindr and Tinder, for example, are natural successors of chatrooms, which were originally safe spaces for queer individuals to connect with likeminded people outside of gay bars and dodgy cruising spots. Particularly during the AIDS epidemic, being queer was particularly regarded as unsafe in wider society, so the internet became a place for people to make friends in safety, and share common experiences. From its inception, queer online communication has been exclusive, almost by design, and this culture has been carried into the modern iterations of digital communication.
When I first went on Grindr, I was just another faceless profile, lurking, seeing how this ecosystem worked before engaging with anyone. What I noticed, very quickly, however, is that at the time it was fairly normal (although disgusting) to see statements such as “No Fats, no Femmes, no Asians” on countless (white) profiles, people clearly stating their preferences openly, with very little repercussions for blatant racism, fatphobia and internalised homophobia. This is homonormativity made manifest. Homonormativity serves to deem everyone outside of the “normal” (young, white, muscular cis-gendered men) as unattractive, unwanted, undesirable and ultimately worthless. This is why you see gay couples who are literally clones of each other. Homonormativity is prevalent in most Western societies, but particularly so in settler societies, where the perception of non-white people is particularly skewed in order to preserve structures of white supremacy. But even white people are victims of homonormativity. If you are feminine presenting or “old” (and old-ness is relative) or don’t have a six-pack, you were also grouped into the out-group, made to feel unattractive and thus worthless in a community hung up on aesthetics and penis size.
The very fact that Grindr allows you to filter not only by age, but by race and “tribe” as well shows that it was designed to be discriminatory. It is difficult to defend an app that is solely designed to maximise the likelihood of anonymous sexual encounters, thus encouraging minimal interactions, while at the same time allowing people to actively practice their racism and call it a preference. Getting no response is probably the worst form of rejection on the app. Where on Tinder you at least have to swipe right on each other to enable you to match and make contact, Grindr’s design encourages you to “tap” or message every six-pack in your grid - if you don’t do it now, you may never see them on your grid again, and then you have missed your opportunity. For the most part, Grindr is a dangerous cycle of rejection after rejection, which is particularly acute for people who suffer from mental illness or have low self esteem. Couple this design with a culture of homonormativity, and you have a platform that actively punishes “fats, femmes and Asians” among everyone else who doesn’t fit within the narrow definition of “attractive” that haunts us all.
Homonormativity is not just limited to dating apps. You see it everywhere - look at any queer character on film, and they are usually one of two things - a caricature of an effeminate gay man who serves to only bring comic relief, or a muscular white gay man who is hypermasculine in his performance. You look at a show like RuPaul’s Drag Race which supposedly champions diversity amongst its drag performers (and this is increasing as the fanbase grows critical of the exclusion of trans performers and drag kings), and even here we see homonormativity perpetuated through the Pit Crew, who are almost always exclusively white, muscular and masculine presenting. All of this is of course changing, and I’m happy that we are seeing big swinging moves to expand the representation of queerness on screen, to move beyond the very narrow experience of white cis-gendered men.
As a person of colour, I have been subjected to many instances of homonormativity discriminating against me both online and offline. Online, I often get asked where I’m from before people even ask my name. Usually upon telling them, people don’t respond. Online I have been called a terrorist just because of the way that I look, which is funny when you consider that the only instances of terrorism here in New Zealand have been perpetrated by white people (see Rainbow Warrior and March 15th). In person I have been told that I am only attractive because I am light-skinned - “I’m into dark boys with culture, but not too dark” (Yuck). As an overthinker, I have internalised all of these comments, measuring myself against a homonormative standard that I will never be able to live up to by the very accident of birth. Homonormativity is a dangerous idea, and I hope that as a queer community we can work tirelessly to dismantle it, and recover from the harms it has caused over many generations. I also hope that we can build safe online communities that are truly inclusive and foster genuine healthy relationships, so we may finally be free of the aesthetic-driven cesspits that our existing dating apps have become.