Are Gay Men Losing the Ability to Socialize?

By: Scott James

Decades ago when the AIDS crisis was devastating San Francisco’s gay community, a group of friends gathered in a local living room to watch the Academy Awards. Frivolity was on TV, but death lurked outside the home, so they decided to pass the hat to raise money to try to do whatever they could to fight the plague.

From that small social gathering came the Academy of Friends, a non-profit group that throws an Oscar Night gala each year that has raised more than $8.5 million in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

That a social gathering turned into a social group with a greater social purpose is such a San Francisco story – the Academy is just one example of this happening in the LGBT community. Causes like same-sex marriage, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and the battle to end discrimination have all received funding from social groups.

But with the rise of online social networks, many social groups are in decline. How that trend is impacting the gay community is the subject of my latest column. 

While reporting the story there was a question stalking in the background – is what’s happening in social groups an indication of something larger? Are gay men losing the ability to socialize in person because of the Internet?

Walk through the Castro almost any night and there are plenty of people out on the town, but for many gay men keyboards have replaced clubs as the mechanism for meeting, especially for sex. Sure, the same thing is happening in the straight world, but gay men appear to be far ahead of others when it comes to leveraging the latest technologies for hooking up.

Yup, there’s an app for that. Lots of them, actually. Guys are using GPS location technologies via iPhone (and some Android) applications to find other like-minded men, sometimes standing just feet away. Websites also offer the same ease of connection with remarkable specificity: there are now gay social networks designed for those attracted to surfer dudes, bears, daddies, twinks, and men who seek unprotected sex or sex using crystal meth.

For many, typing and texting have replaced talking. There have been concerns for quite some time about how this is impacting San Francisco’s gay community. In 2007 Patricia Leigh Brown wrote an article for The New York Times where some worried that the rise of the Internet was “contributing to a declining sense of community.”

Back then Doug Sebesta, a medical sociologist at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, said, “I’ve had therapists who have told me they are asking their clients to go back to bars as a way of social interaction.”

And that was before many of today’s most popular websites and phone apps were invented.

Of course social networks and technology can also be used to build communities. There was certainly evidence of that after Prop 8 passed in California, rescinding gay marriage. Technology helped mobilize and fuel an uprising.

So perhaps that’s what’s needed for social groups to thrive in the Internet age: a strong purpose.