Full disclosure: As it happens, I'm straight. No one's fault. That's just me. But the Grindr team, in September, was launching a new app, Blendr—which was not just for gay guys but for Everybody. It's a mad ambition, and I had no idea if Blendr would work. Is this the way straight men and women—especially straight women—want to meet and mate? The ladies certainly wouldn't treat Chat the same way; they'd be euphemistic and vaguely lyrical (I hoped) while the males were doing something close to grunting. But hooking up with strangers via GPS? From a female standpoint, that might be seen as one romantic step away from being spirited into a van. Less darkly, what happened to the good old dinner party, the comically bad set-up date, the meet-cute fender bender?

And so I stepped into the long night of the soul that was Grindr. I wanted to see what the rest of us could expect—hope for— from Blendr. I'd soon learn that grinders weren't always bathroom-trysting and Rusty Tromboning and doing Japanese nose-torture on each other. Some grinders were as genteel as the ladies at a book club; some wanted true love, others new friendship. This subculture was populated with all sorts of people—like any community. Together the sex-crazed and lonely hearts and the rest were building a digital neighborhood on top of their physical one. Maybe, with Blendr, it really could grow to include Everybody.

···

To be a grinder, unlike with Match.com or eHarmony or OkCupid or any of the other doddering old iDate sites, you need register no name, no password—not even a screen name. Those other sites are proud of asking for massive detail. They actually market themselves on the thoroughness of their interrogations: What are your favorite sports, your taste in movies, your eye color? They have it all down to a science, selling their sites on that old adage, "Similars attract." On Grindr, you are permitted to write a 120-character profile and upload a photo, and that's pretty much all you get to spark that digital First Look Across the Room. To ensure that no user of Grindr ever felt hoodwinked, I took the name "GQ Magazine" and used as my icon a collage of covers, though I was slightly worried that grinders would think I was hawking subscriptions in some kind of seedy jailhouse telemarketing scheme.

But guys did drop me a line, at all hours and in great numbers.

Chat is the gateway drug on Grindr. Though it is 96 percent inane, it's not all sexting and Weinering pics to people. Many guys started a conversation with the aforementioned "Sup?" or the even more unforgivable "Wassup?" I admit, I looked down on them, as one would on "mole people" or Michael "The Situation" Sorrentino. My deep misunderstanding of Chat was that it was meant to be witty, an actual conversation. But eventually I realized that the "Sup" people were not cavemen. They were efficient. They were men in a rush to achieve, and that's what men like to think they do.

Grinding is less a pastime than a palm-sized addiction. It is iHeroin. Grinders spend an average of ninety minutes on the app every day—and not just in one session. They're online eight or nine times. In my experience, that's an unrealistic number. It should be ten times that. I never wanted to get to the neurotic stage where I logged on while walking around, so I made a point of doing less walking around. And I checked in on my boys several times an hour. What were they up to, or at least where? The iPhone simply had to be checked.