As a gay man who is almost 30, I think making friends is relatively easy for gay people thanks to dating apps. Perhaps, you cannot same gender friends in Tinder (if I'm wrong, please correct me), but a lot of gay people are using dating apps not only to find relationships but also to find friends.
I also think social isolation around gay people makes friendship among gay people special. I don't know much about Western countries like U.S., but here in Tokyo, most of the gay are still in the closet. They have to pretend to be straight outside gay communities. It is really stressful. They cannot talk much about their lovers or their gay friends. A lot of gay people around me say drinking with straight people is just boring because of those reasons. That drives us to make gay friends.
It is quite anecdotal, but I didn't have single friends a year ago, and now I've got 4, 5 close gay friends since I started using a dating app. I am actually very satisfied with my current life.
Also gay, I think it is much more to do with our "delayed adolescence" and childless-ness. Or at least in the US that's what I see. The older I get, the more blessed I feel to be gay. I can move to any medium to large sized city tomorrow and probably find tons of guys in my age range that are looking for friends and shared-activity partners.
I have many child-free gay friends in their late 30's-50's and their social lives are often 5x those of their straight counterparts.
Off topic, but I'm freshly out of the closest and terrified of the future of my social life without the typical social framework I observe in older couples. Really heartening to know you feel this way.
What are those of us gays who don't have the ability to move to a medium to large city tomorrow to do? (I am not trying to be contrarian, but am genuinely curious.)
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
We've had similar experiences in the swinging lifestyle (not to compare the two in any way, it just seemed like a good place to add our experience). We moved to a new area 2500 miles away, tried our best to make friends, had kids a few years later, tried again to make new friends with other parents (had a few successes), and then later on got into swinging.
WOW. You will never find a friendlier bunch of people who are always looking for new friends, even when there isn't attraction present (a common mistake in the vanilla world is that lifestylers have sex with anything that moves). It is the most welcoming community we've ever been a part of.
As a straight man, I did that with Tinder and made a number of friends, but they were always women. I never had any luck with guys I met on Tinder, not really sure why.
Ahhh ... Just want to ask, does that feel awkward trying to meet a new buddy on app such like Tinder ...?
I mean, if I have a Tinder profile, I will expecting people who tapped me are all womans. So when I found out it's actually a guy, I will be surprised and feel wired.
There isn't actually a friends feature, but there are enough like-minded men (or it seems like there are) that are straight but want to meet other guys, so you can just have "looking for men or women" enabled.
I do have a friend that swears by couchsurfing.com[1] for finding new friends, but I personally haven't tried it.
I find this interesting. Here in the US, the gay social apps, still tend to be more focused on hooking up(in my experience). I have been using some of these apps since the beginning of college, and am now in my late 20's, and haven't developed a single friendship that was of any real quality.
Granted, I am sure some of that has more to do with myself and my personality, but any time I meet someone from "the apps", there's always some sexual tension, even if we establish beforehand that we're not looking for sex. It's an odd dynamic which I've tried to breakdown before meeting by adamantly establishing that I'm just looking for friends. Maybe it's where I live, maybe it's the kind of people I end up meeting, or maybe it's me. I know it's partially me because I am in a very different place in my life at my age than most people I know or have meet through these apps. But I sure do wish it was easier to make friend's via the gay social apps.
I also think social isolation around gay people makes friendship among gay people special. I don't know much about Western countries like U.S., but here in Tokyo, most of the gay are still in the closet. They have to pretend to be straight outside gay communities. It is really stressful. They cannot talk much about their lovers or their gay friends. A lot of gay people around me say drinking with straight people is just boring because of those reasons. That drives us to make gay friends.
It is quite anecdotal, but I didn't have single friends a year ago, and now I've got 4, 5 close gay friends since I started using a dating app. I am actually very satisfied with my current life.