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Based on an ethnography conducted in San Francisco between January and Augustthis paper explores how adult gay men use dating apps to find sexual and romantic partners.

Saint Joseph's Arts Foundation

The city passed from being a center of the counterculture to a gentrified haven for hipsters and techies in a process that has also transformed its sociability. The search for gay partners has shifted from cruising to hookups, as the use of apps reinforces a progressive selection of partners based on moral criteria.

A partir de uma etnografia desenvolvida em San Francisco, entre janeiro e agosto deeste artigo explora o uso que homens gays adultos fazem de aplicativos para busca de parceiros amorosos e sexuais. In San Francisco, in one of my club interviews with users of dating apps, I encountered the criticism that this technology supposedly facilitates fast and risky sex, an observation that was echoed in other interactions.

Dan, 1 a young technology professional who lives in an upper middle-class neighborhood of the city, affirmed that he uses the apps only for conversation and to get to know people. He said:. Grindr simply broadens the mentality on uncompromising sex. So I decided not to use it that way. This should be part of your research. But people have been using social media as a new digital bathhouse, as unsafe as the original, and all over town.

Paradoxically, the same user who criticized the practice of hooking-up, a local term for sex without commitment, revealed that he only had sex without condoms. When I commented that his negative judgment about the app and its users did not make sense and that the risk was sex without a condom, he tried to explain:.

The guys on Grindr will let me fuck them without a condom. In fact, guys everywhere let you fuck them without a condom. So I avoid hookups. The long interview that I did using the app on my tablet raised elements to help understand the use of these apps in San Francisco. There is a clear association between their use and sex market commitment, which in the United States today is called hooking-up.

But in the negative moral judgment of this user it is associated to the old practice of cruising, the search for sexual partners in public spaces such as parks, bathrooms or saunas. I will begin by presenting the urban environment of this hub of a new economy focused on technologies. My objective is to reveal deep changes in the economy and the urban structure, without which it is not possible to understand how and why digital media are used today, particularly the mobile media.

I will then show how I entered the field ethnographically, between January and Augustto understand how gays are dealing with these changes. Through co-existence with various interlocutors, readings and observation, I offer some reflections about how the mobile digital media are associated with and give potential to hookups.

I also present some considerations about the reality of San Francisco that points to the configuration of a new economy of desire, in which not only sexual and romantic contacts come to be digitally mediated, but in which the criteria for searching for and selecting partners has been sanitized in relation to the past.

Finally, I critically return to the south of this first user who judges the applications and hookups as morally condemnable. This history created the still widely disseminated image that San Francisco is a type of U. Map of the city of San Francisco with gay main neighborhoods. Little by little, sex and other queers began to live in Haight-Ashbury until in the next decade, the center of the Sexual Revolution had become the nearby Castro neighborhood, whose aura of liberation spread throughout the atlas.