On a ferry to Rockaway, I asked DL to tell me about his most recent sexual exploits. I was trying to do anything and everything I could to extract myself from a particularly fierce bout of the Summer Blues, and the solution seemed to be hearing about other people’s more interesting sex lives, all while adjacent to bodies of water. I needed to look at buildings from a distance to calm me down. I needed the skyline and the wind in my hair. DL needed to get laid this week, or he said he would Lose His Mind.
For DL, Casual Sex was abundant (such is the case for many gay men in New York). He could experience wanting, getting, fucking, and moving on within the span of thirty minutes. Sex was just emotional regulation. Where I was bogged down by hyperanalysis and behavioral forecasting, DL traversed his sexual exploits with a sense of Thrilling Freedom.
The wind was whipping in at my face, and DL said that actually, yes, men were getting a bit too fucking Vanilla these days. I was complaining about an unfortunate streak of unavailable boys with sex problems (pretty run-of-the-mill problems for a girl living adjacent to Bushwick), and DL was complaining that everyone he met on Sniffies kept wanting to spoon (pretty run-of-the-mill problems for a gay boy living in any of the five boroughs).
Sniffies has been What’s Next for horny gay men in New York. Sniffies (a website, not an App) allows users to view each other’s locations in real time, for a seamless and gleefully panoptic type of Cruising. Its map of the city is a digitized overload of genitalia: hundreds of profile bubbles full of abs, ass, and cocks drifting up and down every block, blocking any semblance of a grid underneath. It’s an overstimulating Topographical Fuck Fest.
DL had been on Sniffies for all of his four years in New York. Like many Good Things, the platform had started out niche, unknown, tucked away in an internet corner only for those lucky enough to find it. But with time, it had come out into The Mainstream. In April, the platform was acquired by our Dating Overlords, Match Group, owners of Hinge and Tinder.
Much like the Great Dating App Migration from Tinder to Hinge (and now to Feeld), many Grindr Users are similarly traversing their way to Sniffies. Mostly because Grindr has rendered itself obsolete with obtrusive pop-up ads and an increasingly poor algorithm. Like many of its forebears, Grindr allowed the need to Make A Profit to ruin streamlined erotic exploration.
With this mass-market unveiling, the site, DL noted, has become more fraught. Once the NYPD discovered it last year, they latched onto its Palantirific Essence to track and arrest users engaging in public sex. It got a bit more real, he told me, but he shrugged at this. These things are always like that. It’s true: The Pigs remain in unrelenting search for new ways to handcuff queer people. And as for the acquisition, it would probably make the app a lot worse, maybe even ruin it, he said.
DL had joined in search of The Thrill. And I loved to hear about it. I figured that I’d probably be murdered if I undertook anything he was brave enough to do, so I appreciated hearing about the depths of his Kink from afar. He was Heroic for it.
What sorts of activities were people engaging in? I asked as our ferry inched onward toward The Beach. My button-down, stained lightly pink from the unavoidable Crisis of Forgetting to Sort Your Laundry, flapped open at odd intervals, exposing my skin to the late summer air, now riper with salt than exhaust.
Glory holes, he noted. Those are always nice. And you know, he said, I’m not the type to go to the ones at random bars. That’s a bit too far for me. People have them in their homes, so it’s a bit less debased that way. I enjoy those. And there are lots of people meeting up for public sex, too. I’m not really doing that, but it’s what a majority of people are seeking. Then there’s group sex: open invites on the map to orgies, group JOs, sex parties. Or guys post about different darkrooms in bars. It makes the experience of going to one a bit less terrifying if you have a point of contact beforehand.
It’s really a lot of Great Fun if you’re horny. And it’s low stakes, for the most part. You don’t even need to give an email address or a phone number to use Sniffies, and all your activity can easily be wiped after each use. It allows for a bit more experimentation. The anonymity provides a certain freedom for unadulterated messiness and trying new things out. It was an Anonymous Encounter when I topped for the first time, he said, because there was just no pressure there.
Anyway, even though you’re removing one type of vulnerability through Anonymity, you’re risking something else entirely: something more bodily, something about your very safety. But there’s Thrill in that, he said as we cruised past beach houses that would be underwater in ten years. Of course there is. Sometimes that’s the Entire Appeal.
I thought of that Anonymity, standing in opposition to so many of the major Dating Apps, which are so entirely defined by The Online Profile: that confusing and irregular system of identifiers we construct to attractively and accurately (or not) represent ourselves. The Dating Apps are all about presentation of the Self, about creating a Marketable Identity. So I felt there must be a real relief in Online Anonymity. But then there was also Terror (perhaps others, too, might know the more terrorizing aspects of Anonymous Users: the undue power Anonymity can grant to the wrong people). I was more aware of the Terror than the Freedom.
But recently, DL said his exploits were ruining said namelessness. They were soiling Anonymous by making it non-anonymous. The Act of Being Anonymous, for anyone who is not a Sniffies Regular, is an arrangement between two strangers to meet and fuck in a state of complete Anonymity. The Anonymous Top arrives at the Anonymous Bottom’s apartment. The Anonymous Top is buzzed in (doormen really ruin this too), while the Anonymous Bottom waits for the Top’s arrival, facing away on their bed in a prone position, usually blindfolded. The Anonymous Top is to then leave immediately after the sex without ever having seen the Anonymous Bottom’s face.
Bottoms were really not abiding by the rules these days, DL noted. They’d turn their heads around halfway through to reveal their face, they’d pull away blindfolds, they’d ask to cuddle and kiss afterward. Which, DL noted, was defeating the entire structure and namesake of the act. People are getting very conventional these days, he said. But mostly, he conceded, their initial desire to do Anonymous was maybe less about Kink and more about insecurity. In several of DL’s Anonymous arrangements, the aspect of anonymity would slowly erode away as they got comfortable. It was only at the very beginning when they wanted things to be Anonymous. With time, intimacy always crept its way in.
By the time the ferry was pulling into Rockaway backwaters, DL had received a message back from someone with an Objectively Great Body he’d shown me on the map earlier:
So I can come you leave the door open and be naked in bed I get naked and worship your feet on my knees when I be close to cum I give you the facial Can be gen big feet?
I asked him why not? He has an Objectively Great Body. DL shrugged. To me, his options seemed endless. This was just another body amid a map of choices.
DL did a marvelous job of balancing a desire for meaninglessness with another, deeper one for tradition. In the end, like any Traditional Monogamist, he just wanted to get married and have lots of babies. He was enduring this urge as many do around thirty—in tandem with his hatred for revealing identity. But are they really so separate? Can kink exist without convention?
On the way home, I told him to lean off the edge of the ferry and scream out his desires. Maybe if he yelled them into the East River, they would come true. Maybe then they wouldn’t weigh so much. Like mine, they could be consuming. They could be held in opposition to one another, veiled and revealed through the Immediacy of the Internet.
I closed my eyes and tried to take a deep breath of the mangled harbor air. I imagined DL’s icon on the Sniffies map, soaring through city bays, suspended within the dull calm of Apple Maps Blue, bordered by the Brilliance of Thousands of Cocks swarming the mainland.
In the end, he didn’t scream out his desires. Either for sex or for marriage. We both laughed, and it fell flat, because we both knew neither of us had the brave abandon to scream embarrassing things out loud.
I’d just like to be in love, that’s all, he said. Isn’t that what we all want? Whether or not we identify as Sex Pests?
EL is a writer based in Bed-Stuy.
Images taken from Sniffies.
Leave a Reply