ABSTRACT
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, almost every human being learned to live outside of their anatomical boundaries. During the pandemic, technologies—and particularly social media—became the means through which intimates at a distance sustained their intimacy. Yet, technologies are not just the architects of intimacy between intimates, but also between strangers seeking intimacy. In particular for the gay community, dating apps have provided interfaces through which people might encounter intimacy. Dating apps give gay men an inadvertent facility for delivering an intimacy more public than private, making intimacy into an exchange, a production, even a reproduction. From the perspective of so many gay men, apps have both enabled and utterly erased the possibility of finding a romantic partner. Greene observes that “[i]t has become part of conventional wisdom today to believe that the once radiant individual is in fact a powerless creature, that the freedoms he once possessed have been eroded, that he has no control over his life”.
