The Grindr Series 

brings together five portraits and five personal narratives to explore how queer intimacy is lived today. The project looks at the question: how do queer people learn to love when there are so few maps to follow?

For generations, heterosexual culture has offered templates—engagements, weddings, anniversaries, predictable milestones. In queer life those templates rarely existed. Heterosexual models were followed by lack of other options. Many of us had to invent our own versions of relationships without guidance, without visible role models, often without language for what we felt.

Digital dating promised a new kind of freedom. Apps expanded the field of possibility, connecting strangers across cities and continents. Yet they also changed the nature of connection itself, turning intimacy into something immediate, disposable, and endlessly replaceable.

The five portraits in this series stand as witnesses to that reality. The accompanying texts reveal what happens after the first message, after the first night, after the declaration of love.

Taken together, the works trace the spectrum of queer relationships:
the thrill of discovery,
the search for belonging,
the impact of addiction and secrecy,
the weight of stigma,
and the fragile dream of lasting connection.

These stories reflect the imperfect, improvised ways queer people try to build lives with one another—often without instructions, sometimes without safety nets.

The series is not a celebration of dating apps, nor a condemnation of them. It is meant to be a portrait of a community learning, in real time, how to love themself.

Portraits

The five portraits form a visual archive of how queer people meet, love and lose one another.

Each portrait is paired with a short story—texts that act as counterpoints to the images. Fragmentary, atmospheric, and emotionally charged, these narratives trace the residue of each encounter, whether it lasted an hour, a night, or longer.

@lgbthistorytouramsterdam

@makeamsterdamgayagain

Portrait I — Andy O.

When I picked up Andy from Schiphol Airport after a few months of flirting online, I was in awe of his physical presence. He was taller than me, bigger than me, perfect teeth. The fact that he had flown to Amsterdam just to see me, impressed me.

We went straight to my place and made love—well, had sex immediately. The physical tension had been building for weeks. Only afterward did we sit down and started talking.

For the next few months we flew back and forth, between London and Amsterdam. His job at British Airways made it easier for him. I had no idea where any of this was heading, but I was flattered by his attention and his persistence. He told me he had a ten-point list for a future boyfriend or husband and that I had already ticked several of the boxes. Apparently box number three — “has to have a big dick”—was an important one. I would laugh and say I was happy to oblige.

As the holidays approached, we had to say goodbye for a while, promising each other we would meet again in the new year. He was going to Cape Town, and I was visiting my brother in Kuala Lumpur with friends.

A week into my trip I got a call from Andy. He said he was flying to Kuala Lumpur because he needed to see me. While I dropped my friends off at the airport, I picked him up at another gate. They got a brief glimpse of the man I had spoken about only in vague terms. We went to my brother’s apartment overlooking the city and spent almost an entire week in bed. It was there that we first exchanged the words “I love you.” It was also there that he introduced me to his “special powders,” as he called them—magic that gave us the energy to keep going, to satisfy our needs. Those powders would drift in and out of my life over the next twenty years, sometimes feeling like a blessing, sometimes like a curse.

I was in my thirties and had never spoken those words before, so they meant everything to me. I loved a man, and he said it back. Although I had known since I was eleven that I was attracted to men, relationships and sex were still largely unexplored territory, and there was nobody to ask for guidance. It didn’t help that, in those years, gay men were still dying of AIDS and the stigma was enormous. Over several Christmases I watched a promising young man slowly wither away from the disease and eventually pass away. He was not even forty. It left a deep mark on me.

Even so, I believed I had found the love of my life. One morning, while I was still half asleep, he called me from Athens to say he wanted to buy us wedding rings. Things moved fast. Within a year he moved in with me, partly because of his financial problems. I was on cloud nine.

Then, for the same reasons, he said he needed to move back to London and wanted to put the relationship on hold. I wasn’t ready to give up and suggested that I move to London instead, that I would support us both. That wasn’t what he wanted.

For a while it remained painful but still amicable, until I discovered that a young Brazilian man had moved in with him. I felt I had been led on, all along. In a final, bitter phone call, I said the cruelest things I could think of, wanting him to feel the betrayal the way I did.

Portrait II Alex Fuerte

There is always been a gay gym and I had been hitting that gym since I moved to Amsterdam. On that particular day just before the weekend would start, I had finished my work out and took a shower. 

Alex looked like a Ken doll, caramel from head to toe, hairless, a beauty that only existed in movies, books or gay porn.

Soon I found out that he was Colombian and visiting, we spent the days and nights together. Also soon I would find out that he was a Gay Porn star and a sex worker, I was not shocked, more amused and interested in a world I did not know.

His story made me realize that despite being lonely growing up, there are different levels of loneliness. He had been kicked out of the house at the tender age of twelve, been homeless and made himself into what he was. And he supported the same family that had left him abandoned.

I did know this was not the great love, he was lovely, sexy and many things but I was still depressed from how my previous relationship had ended.

The anti-depressant I took, also took away my libido and that became a problem. I took him to a phsychiatrist to explain my situation but he did not buy into it.

We went to Colombia to see his family and I supported him. But it did not do any good, things got harder and harder and we just didn’t get each other.

One night things erupted over money. He struck me.

I called a friend I knew he valued and in a discussion we ended it, he moved out immediately.

His stuff remanined in my attic for the next ten years, waiting for him to collect it, which he did not.

Portrait III Zack

When he stood in front of my door the first thing I noticed was his smile. A young Maroccan man and we finally met in the flesh, he was a bit younger but he never bored me, we had these endless discussions about religion. I had left the catholic church long time ago and called myself an intellectual Budhist.

He would go to Mosque before he would come over to me. Once in the years we were together he told me he would not be able to see me because it would be Ramandan, of course I respected that.

He struggled with his belief and being who he was, I would tease him that what we were doing was very haram. When halfway Ramandan he stood in front of my door, I was surprised. On my question why, he just answered I needed to see you. And then we made love.

I say love but we never spoke the words, that was agreed upon when we met. We both came from a disturbed relationship and did not want to put labels on what we had.

But I felt love when he waited for hours outside the club when the coatcheck was a mess and I finally left without my jacket. He was there standing next to the car and not a word about how long he had waited.

I saw love in that he said he would have to leave Sunday evening but ended up staying till Wednesday.

When months became years patterns started to show.His inner conflicts caused depression and his anxiaty made him not want to leave the house. Always afraid he would run into someone who would recognize him and ask questions, my social life dwindled and caused stress in the relationship. Six years in and spending all this time together is some kind of relationship right?!

When my father suddenly passed away and he did not show up at the funeral I had, had enough. I broke things of. I had needed him and he had let me down severely. I also hoped that it would be a wake up call for him. To get therapy, get his life together and control the substance abuse.

But it did nothing, he went silent after a while. Then my mother passed away eleven months after my father. When things had settled I wanted to get in touch with him and let him know and wanting to know how he was doing.

He had known my world but I did not know his world. In his world I would have been just a friend and I had not wanted to make concessions in that. So when he did not answer, I was lost. 

Then I learned the news.

The reason he did not answer was because he himself was gone. When I learned how, I knew it had been his choice, even if it was ruled accidental.

Portrait IV Chip Kilkenny

An American in Amsterdam, living the expat life as there were so many in the city. He was smooth, slick, sexy, horny and had a brain.

We spent hours together, days and nights and it felt so good and familiar. I listened to his stories, where he came from, his family and his past relationship.

If felt all so good,so intimate knowing his secrets and desires.

Afterwards I brought him a standing Buddha statue, which I thought was meaningfull, having listened to where he was in life and the path taken. Then it went silent.

Six months later in the middle of the night, a message, an apology, followed by more nights of intimacy.

Then again messages unanswered,

Portrait V Lucas

He looked Spanish but was South Asian, spoke Hebrew but was not Jewish. When Lucas stuck his head around the door, I was smitten. Way to young but he knew what he was doing. New to the city and being young, he was definately exploring. 

Already high when he came up the stairs he would pass out two more times on G that night. I slapped him hard to keep him awake and he came to himself with a big smile.

It was then that he declared his love for me for the first time, not funny I said. Say it again when you are not high. And that is what he did with a cheeky smile, how serious can you take such a thing.

When he passed out again it was less funny but I knew what to do and then he left. But when I got a panick attack he came back and held me in his arms till things were good again.

Such a soul in the boy.

We met a few times again, took him for dinner. No expectations. But he would say one thing and do another, confronted, he ghosted me hard.

@lgbthistorytouramsterdam

@makeamsterdamgayagain