Welcome back to another edition of Queerty's "Quick & Dirty" series. Join us as we recap the biggest stories of the week. There's no script. There's no filters. Just queer news, quick and dirty. This week, Queerty's Graham Gremore, Alex Reimer, Cameron Scheetz and Johnny Lopez dive headfirst diving headfirst into the latest Grindr chaos after a former employee spilled to Vox about exactly when things went from spicy to soggy.
In a post shared to the app's website, Grindr announced that it would become an AI-first company, which it says means "a faster, smarter, more personalised app that helps you connect with less effort and makes every conversation count". Powered by gAI™, Grindr's own AI stack, EDGE is embedded across the entire user journey of the app. New AI features include recaps of previous conversations with other users, daily personalised profile recommendations
When it comes to hooking up, millions of gays now prefer to order in. Thanks to Grindr and other geolocation apps, the friction of stepping out into the real world and meeting a potential partner or fling has been replaced with the much easier activity of perusing the grid. But all of this scrolling comes with a price, both social and financial. With gay spaces shuttering and Grindr charging increasingly expensive membership fees, there is a clear cost to convenience. Still, ease usually wins out.
"Grindr shows users who's nearby and how far away they are. In most contexts, that's useful. In the Olympic Village where thousands of athletes are packed into a small area, those same features may become a liability. Someone outside the Village could browse profiles inside it. Distance data could be used to pinpoint someone's exact location. And simply appearing on Grindr tells the world something about a person's identity that, in more than 60 countries, remains a criminal offence,"
Their actions had a devastating impact on their victims. Nobody should be made to feel unsafe in their own homes and they will have to live with the trauma these men have caused them.
U.S. Marshals, who assisted in relocating the escaped fugitives, revealed that Charles arranged for someone to pick up the three inmates in a vehicle and transport them to the house of one of their girlfriends. She reportedly arranged a rideshare service to take the inmates to Florida from there. Police discovered the men in Broward County, Florida, where they were then arrested and returned to prison.
Three young men who lured victims they found on Grindr and then assaulted them for "Catch a Predator"-style videos they posted to social media received light sentences from judges in New Zealand, despite finding that they were all guilty of committing hate crimes. Thomas Bull, Patrick Moloney and Ethan Jeffs, who were 18 or 19 years old at the time of the assaults, were sentenced to between just 8.5 and 10.5 months home detention for the assault spree.
"I won't mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader internet when a problem impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us," he wrote on X. "The sites, businesses and organisations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologise for the impact we caused. "Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours. In short, a latent bug i
Scott Stafford, of Dublin, was charged with contacting a minor with intent to commit a sex crime. He was arrested in late September after an undercover sting by a San Ramon officer who posed as a boy on Grindr, a dating application geared toward LGTBQ individuals, according to court records. At the time of his arrest, Stafford was working as a delivery driver for UPS, authorities said.
With less than a week before the Portola Music Festival 's gates open, San Francisco's electronic music festival is getting an unexpected boost from one of the world's most popular LGBTQ+ dating apps. Starting Monday, the LGBTQ+ app is switching out its familiar "bloop" notification sound. Instead, for the next week, when U.S. Grindr users receive a message, they'll hear the opening of "Come on Over Baby (All I Want Is You)," the 1999 hit by Christina Aguilera.
Alan Musson, of Brookline, was arrested on a sex offense after allegedly viewing a photo of a man's genitalia while he was scrolling on the dating app Grindr, in view of two juvenile girls. He was set to face charges of obscene matter to a minor, threat to commit a crime, and disorderly conduct in Boston Municipal Court, according to a Boston police report.