When I opened the door of my flat in Fulham, for a moment I thought I had invited the wrong man.
I stood there with one hand on the handle, mentally reconstructing the conversations of the previous few days. Perhaps I had confused two profiles. Perhaps I had sent my address to the wrong person. On the apps, it could happen.
Then he greeted me, said my name and walked in with complete ease.
I had not mistaken the man.
He had sent me a photograph of somebody else.
During our conversations, he had shown me only one perfectly ordinary image. I had sent him some more private photographs, which he never returned. He said he was discreet and did not like exchanging pictures.
I had respected his privacy.
Only when he arrived at my door did I understand that it was not privacy. It was a substitution.
He was not simply older or less fit than the photograph. He was not the person in it. And, to be entirely honest, he was not my type either.
Naturally, I said nothing. My first instinct, even in the most absurd situations, is to search for a polite explanation. I would probably attempt mediation during the evacuation of a burning building.
He behaved as though everything were entirely normal. He sat beside me and, after a while, began to touch me.
My body kept pulling away. I moved my legs, shifted my torso and avoided his eyes. My face must have had all the warmth and expressiveness of a fire door.
He continued moving closer.
Perhaps he thought I was too confused to object. Or too lonely. As though a man using an app must be willing to have sex with anybody who manages to reach his living room.
Eventually, I pushed his hands away.
Without the kindness I usually try to preserve, I told him to leave.
When the door closed, I remained standing in the silence of the flat. I felt deceived, but also emptied. I kept replaying the tone of my voice, my abruptness and the way I had sent him away.
Rudeness does not come naturally to me. I try to negotiate even the worst situations. But this had been a complete deception, and his insistence had turned discomfort into anger.
I did not open the app again for quite some time.
One unpleasant thought remained, the sort we are not particularly proud to admit.
Perhaps he had chosen me because he considered me less attractive and therefore easier. Perhaps he imagined that a man without a cover-model body should be grateful for any attention. That I could not afford preferences, boundaries or a simple “no”.
I do not know whether he truly thought that.
I do know that apps are very good at planting these hierarchies in our minds.
Gay apps, after all, are not tools. They are Olympic events.
There is the hundred-metre “not looking for anything serious”, the synchronised dive into emotional unavailability and the ghosting javelin. The most popular event remains the message seen at 21:03, followed by a silence capable of outliving several governments.
I know the rules.
You select two photographs in which you look slightly better than you normally do. You write three lines that make you appear interesting, independent and sexually available, but never needy. Then you place yourself on a digital shelf between a sculpted torso and a man photographed in Mykonos in 2019, still hoping nobody has noticed the passage of time.
For more than ten years, I have opened the apps in London and found the same men.
I do not mean that poetically. I mean the same photographs.
I met some of them once, perhaps twice. On screen, they still have the face, body and lighting they had twelve years ago. In the meantime, time has done to them what it is fully entitled to do to all of us: shifted a few lines, added a little weight and lowered things that once appeared determined to resist gravity.
It is not the wrinkles or the stomach that surprise me. It is the distance between the man advertised and the one who arrives.
I wonder why they keep doing it. Perhaps they fear that their present face would receive less attention. Or perhaps the old photograph has become a kind of identity document issued by nostalgia.
I also wonder how people react when meeting them for the first time. Does nobody ever say, “Forgive me, but this photograph appears to have been taken before the Shard opened”?
Perhaps good manners protect everyone.
Or perhaps, in the peculiar economy of the apps, certain generous attributes remain beyond the reach of age and, with a little pharmaceutical diplomacy, continue to operate as universal passports.
The body ages too.
It is the advertising that refuses to.
Then the scrolling continues.
“No fem.”
“No fat.”
“No old.”
As though people were allergens to be listed on the back of a packet.
I played the game for years. I became excited, offended, entertained and exhausted. I waited for replies that never arrived and ignored men to whom I could at least have responded with kindness.
Apps do not reveal only the worst in other people. Occasionally, they reveal ours too.
After fifty, however, the game begins to change.
Not because we suddenly become wise. That would be an elegant conclusion and a completely dishonest one. We simply have less energy to spend advertising ourselves.
Every so often, a much younger man appears in my inbox and calls me “daddy”, with the enthusiasm of someone who has discovered a vintage bottle at the back of a cellar.
I do not dislike the compliment. It would be hypocritical to pretend otherwise.
But often they are not looking for a man. They are looking for a character: someone confident, experienced and perfectly at ease with his age. A fantasy without bills, hesitation or knees that complain on the stairs.
I have played enough roles already. I have no desire to become a supporting character in somebody else’s erotic screenplay.
Men closer to my age move through the apps differently. They carry a kind of aristocratic fatigue. They know the game too well to believe in it completely, but not quite well enough to leave.
One profile says: Just seeing what’s out there.
It has been saying that for four years.
And yet, after a few weeks, I opened the app again.
Not because I had forgotten what happened in Fulham. Nor because I was willing to accept anybody.
I opened it because that man did not represent everyone. There are genuine people on the apps: men who use recent photographs, respect a refusal and can even sustain a conversation without immediately sending an image of their reproductive equipment.
They are harder to find, but they exist.
Perhaps we continue opening these apps because, somewhere behind the bodies, the archive photographs and the badly delivered jokes, a possibility still survives.
Hope is the most persistent application of all: it continues running in the background even when we are convinced we have closed it.
I am not necessarily looking for the love of my life every time I look at a screen. There may be curiosity, sex, boredom or the simple wish to feel desirable again.
But being available does not mean being desperate.
Not having a cover-model body does not mean having to accept deception.
And kindness is not permission to cross our boundaries.
I have not stopped looking.
I am done auditioning.