Dating apps and gay travellers: Hyper-local and virtual-physical leisure

This working paper informs about the use of gay dating apps within contemporary gay community, and the spatial reorientation stemming from the juxtaposition of physical and digital geographies. These data indicate that gay apps remain a pervasive way of making connections, even in an environment where common homosexuality is a reasonable expectation, and where open self-expression is permitted and even encouraged. This complicates assumptions that gay apps’ emergence was in response to a need for privacy or anonymity for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in wider, straight society.