The nights are about to get a lot colder for men’s figure skaters at the Winter Games. Gay hookup app Grindr was removed from app stores in China this month just ahead of the 2022 Olympics in Beijing.
Olympians are famously hot to trot. As far back as 1988, the International Olympic Committee banned outdoor sex after condoms were found littering the rooftops of the Olympic Village in Seoul. Complimentary condoms remained a staple at the Games, reaching a record at Rio in 2016 where 450,000 “little shirts,” as they’re called in local slang, were supplied to the Olympic Village — that’s forty-two per athlete. In 2014, in Sochi, a female snowboarder told reporters, “Tinder in the Olympic Village is next level,” and in London, in 2012, Grindr crashed as Olympians began to arrive on site.
Tokyo became the first host city to attempt a crackdown on Olympic acts of lovemaking. In 2020, athlete dormitories were outfitted with cardboard beds that reportedly could only support the weight of one person and collapsed under sudden motions, like thrusting. Perhaps in a dig against Tokyo, Beijing isn’t quite so anti-sex. Planners went the extra mile to ensure plush accommodations in each room with remote-controlled beds described in a TikTok video by one 2022 Olympian as “phenomenal.”
While Grindr disappearing in China might seem like a targeted assault against visiting gay Olympians, the app was voluntarily removed from Apple and Android stores because of its inability to protect user privacy in accordance with new laws that went into effect in China late last year.
China’s Personal Information Protection Law limits personal information collected by apps and requires data transferred from China to other regions to be reviewed by the Chinese government. It was modeled after Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, which has been a nightmare for businesses, but a step in the right direction for user privacy. In 2021, Grindr was fined $7.5 million under Europe’s law after the app was found to record users’ exact location and user codes, label them as “LGBTQ,” without their consent, and transmit that data to at least five advertising companies. European officials claimed Grindr’s data-mining practices also endangered users’ lives if they traveled to countries like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan where homosexuality is illegal.
In 2018, Grindr came under fire by activists in the US for sharing users’ HIV status and location with third parties — technology that now may prove to be integral to the “new normal” of post-Covid governments and cheered by those same activists.
Grindr is, of course, in another unique situation where user data is concerned. In 2020, the Chinese owner of Grindr, Beijing Kunlun Tech Co., sold the app for $600 million after US regulators declared Chinese ownership of Grindr to be a national security threat — I wonder why?
Unlike US Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley, China is no baton-twirling pep squad for Dorothy’s friends. The country is running in the opposite direction of Western democracies by pushing its men to be more, not less, masculine. Despite decriminalizing homosexuality two decades ago, China announced last year a crackdown on gay influence in society — yet another reason the workers’ paradise will never produce any cultural products the world wants. Last year, the Communist Party announced “sissy men” were banned from appearing on television. In a “national rejuvenation” effort to “promote revolutionary culture,” China also declared war on “vulgar internet celebrities,” “gossip” and “money worship,” otherwise known as the Unholy Trinity of the homosexual agenda.
Even if Grindr weren’t worried about being fined by the Chinese government, woke, far-left, transgender-supremacist tech companies based in the US almost always comply with Chinese demands to censor content and remove apps. Apple routinely purges apps, including those used by pro-Democracy activists in Hong Kong, at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party. A US-digital rights organization reported in June that Apple’s store in China had the second highest number of censored gay-themed apps in the world, second only to the App Store in Saudi Arabia.
What does all this mean for world champs in leapfrogging? Gay Olympians can still hook up in Beijing if they get a VPN to bypass Chinese restrictions, or sign up for China’s version of Grindr, called Blued, which is in absolutely no way closely monitored by the Chinese government. Or they could go back to the long-lost art of cruising — just be careful how you display the colors of your country’s flag. The old rules of the gay hankie code might leave you in a sticky bind.
