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Dating as a kinky man is difficult. I’m mostly using apps and online profiles. How do I show my kink interests, like fisting and leather, without making my dating profiles overtly sexual? I’m not always just looking for sex, but it's hard to communicate kink without it looking like that’s all I’m into. Any advice?
Heyo,
Yes, dating as a gay or queer man is hard. Dating as a kinky person is hard. Dating as both is harder still, especially if you need your partners to be kinky too. That requirement narrows the field.
Here's how I've worked around it: I compartmentalize. I relegate kink to sex, and sex to the sex-only relationships I build with people. In gay land, we call these “fuck buddies.” Kink, for me, is for fuck buddies, not boyfriends.
Fuck buddies are easier to find and come with fewer requirements than a serious partner does. There are good men in my life who make great fuck buddies, most of whom I will never date and who aren't available for it anyway.
This works for me because many kinks involve complex power dynamics and dom/sub roles, and I've found it's best to keep that stuff out of my romantic relationships. The power play stays at a bit of a distance from me that way; my feelings aren't as heavily on the line.
Doing it this way does require a degree of nonmonogamy and dividing yourself between sex and love, and not every guy wants to do that. If you don’t, that's fine too. That just means your requirements for a romantic partner get heavier: You need someone you connect with romantically, who's into your kinks, and who can communicate well through both the kinky dynamics and the emotional terrain of commitment. That's a lot to ask of one person, which is why I don't.
All of this is hard whether or not one uses apps, which brings me to the apps themselves. "Dating" and "building the right profile" are not the same task. Dating is the whole of it: the communication, the dates, the rejection, the consent negotiation. Building the right profile is just one part of that. Apps are crude tools that flatten everyone, incapable of capturing anyone's real complexity, and a kinky person is more complex than most. Even people who are good at dating, and I count myself among them, can be bad at apps. And I am.
So think of the app as a tool that aids the real task, not the task itself.
Treat your profile like an ad. Ads work best when they sell one thing clearly, not everything at once. If your profile tries to advertise cuddle dates and hardcore kink sessions simultaneously, you'll do a mediocre job selling both. My "nice guy looking for friends and lovers" profile is very different from my "few-limits kinky sub built for rough play" profile. Both are real. Both are in me. I just don't sell them on the same profile.
One time, I interviewed the writer Leo Herrera for Out about the many problems with the apps. Leo is a staunch supporter of ditching online profiles and returning to old-school, IRL cruising, and he's written a great, useful book on how to do so. In the book, he put his finger on exactly why the apps frustrate us: “Everyone on the apps arrived for a different party … There was no way to gauge interest — whether someone was just bored and horny, looking for a little connection to jerk off, or really wanted to meet up … Communication was instant or chats were over the span of days. After all these years, there seemed to be no common etiquette.”
Because there are no clear rules for how the apps are used, everyone on them is selling something different, and they can be used to seek a wide range of different experiences. Considering that, I asked myself which side of me is hardest to sell in person and which side I could handle fine offline.
For dates and vanilla sex, I do well IRL. I can meet guys at bars and clubs and arrange a date without a profile doing any work. My hardcore, kinky side is genuinely harder to sell in person, so that's the side I show on the apps. No cuddle dates, no romance, just sexual, kinky stuff, since that's what I find the apps sell well. Sometimes I end up dating someone I meet through a kinky play session, but I don't go in expecting that.
Like Leo, I love IRL cruising, and delegating parts of me and my interests to in-person, offline spaces has made me better at navigating them. These spaces are now more fun; I find friends and playful hookups in them more easily than I used to. But when my kink side wants to come out, there's no point heading to the nearest gay bar. I go online because that's the one job my profile is built for, and it does that job better for not trying to do everything.
If you'd rather run multiple profiles across different apps or sites, that works too, as long as each one still sells one thing. Use one for kink, another for dating, and don't cross the streams. The sheer number of niche apps now (Recon for kink sex, Sniffies for anonymous hookups) tells me plenty of guys are already doing this. (Just don’t use Grindr; don't give your private, sensitive data to apps that have sold it to advertisers.)
If you're not looking for anything specific, cruising IRL is easy. But if you want something specific, it gets harder. Fisting is one of the toughest kinks to cruise for in person; you'd need to go to a fisting night at a sex club, like Fausthaus at Lab in Berlin, and those nights (and those spaces) are relatively rare globally; for this reason, kink communities have connected and thrived online.
Once I decided apps were for sex, not romance, the anxious question, "Is my profile too sexual?" disappeared. Being sexual there became the whole point. Yes, that means a guy I'd genuinely connect with might see my profile and get scared off. There's nothing to be done about that. Apps are a tool built for one job at a time. Let yours do one job well, and let the rest of you show up in person.
Hey there! I’m Alexander Cheves. I’m a sex writer and former sex worker—I worked in the business for over 12 years. You can read my sex-and-culture column Last Call in Out and my book My Love Is a Beast: Confessions, from Unbound Edition Press. But be warned: Kirkus Reviews says the book is "not for squeamish readers.”
Here, I’m offering sex and relationship advice to Out’s readers. Send your question to askbeastly@gmail.com.
