Author: Ahmed Rik

Published by: PridePakistan.org

A gay man can spend an entire day surrounded by people and still have nowhere to be openly gay.

He might go to university, work, sit with friends, eat dinner with family, and move through a city of millions. Queer people undoubtedly exist around him, but most remain invisible to one another.

Then he opens an app.

Suddenly, there are profiles nearby. Someone is a few kilometres away. Someone else lives in the same neighbourhood. Another person understands a joke he would never make around his straight friends.

The city has not changed. His ability to see a queer community inside it has.

That is why apps such as Grindr and HeeSay (formerly Blued) cannot be understood in Pakistan simply as dating or hookup apps. People certainly use them for sex, dating, and relationships. But they can also become places to make friends, gossip, argue, ask questions, find health information, deal with loneliness, and simply spend time around other queer people.

In a country where openly LGBTQ+ physical spaces are extremely limited, sometimes the app itself becomes the queer space.

Why an app matters differently when there is nowhere else to go

Queer digital life in Pakistan exists inside a difficult legal and social environment.

Section 377 of the Pakistan Penal Code, inherited from British colonial law, criminalizes what the statute describes as intercourse “against the order of nature.” Pakistan’s wider legal environment around sexuality and gender also remains deeply contested.

The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2018 represented an important expansion of recognition for transgender people, including self-perceived gender identity. However, in May 2023, the Federal Shariat Court struck down key provisions relating to self-identification, reflecting ongoing legal challenges.

Then there are the social pressures that never appear neatly in legal statutes:

• Family expectations
• Marriage pressure
• Religious stigma
• Fear of being outed
• Fear of losing housing, employment, or relationships

For many gay, bisexual, and queer men, survival can mean separating different parts of life. Your family knows one version of you. Your workplace knows another. Your queer friends may know someone much closer to the person you actually feel yourself to be. That is the environment in which digital platforms can become unusually important.

Grindr reveals a queer city hiding inside the ordinary one

Grindr’s basic idea is simple: show people who are nearby.

But proximity means something very different when a community cannot easily make itself visible in public. Open the app in Karachi, Lahore, or Islamabad and suddenly the ordinary geography of the city gains another layer.

There are gay men around you. They were there before you opened the app. You simply could not see one another.

Academic research on digital media in South Asia describes Grindr as a space where Pakistani queer men negotiate desire, secrecy, identity, and risk. A profile that initially appears because of attraction may eventually become a friend. A conversation intended to last ten minutes may continue for months. Someone you never meet physically may still become part of your social world.

The technology begins doing something larger than matching people: it starts mapping an otherwise invisible community.

HeeSay and the rise of a “second social life”

This becomes even easier to see with HeeSay.

Blued’s international platform was rebranded as HeeSay and expanded beyond one-to-one dating toward livestreaming, voice conversations, and community content. That creates a different kind of queer digital environment.

Someone can finish work, come home, deal with family responsibilities, and then spend several hours in a livestream or voice room. People arrive. Someone starts flirting. Someone tells a story. Two people fight. Everybody else discusses the fight. Someone dramatically leaves. Twenty minutes later, they return.

Friendships form. Rivalries form. Crushes appear. Inside jokes develop. None of this sounds particularly revolutionary, and that is precisely why it matters. These are ordinary forms of social life.

In places with visible queer neighbourhoods, bars, organisations, and community centres, some of these interactions happen physically. When those spaces are difficult or impossible to access, they can migrate into an app.

For some users, this creates something resembling a second social life: a queer social world existing alongside the heterosexual-facing life they navigate offline.

A digital mehfil

Perhaps one useful way to understand these spaces in a Pakistani context is as a kind of digital mehfil. A mehfil is a gathering. People come together to talk, listen, perform, exchange stories, flirt, debate, and simply spend time in one another’s presence. The technology is new; the human need behind it is not.

Scholarly literature on South Asian gender and sexuality challenges the idea that queer life in Pakistan is simply a Western import. Same-sex intimacy, gender variance, and non-normative desire have rich histories intertwined with South Asian cultural, literary, and spiritual traditions.

Digital platforms are therefore not creating queer Pakistanis. They are creating new ways for queer Pakistanis to find one another.

The community does not end at Pakistan’s borders

Digital queer spaces can also matter to Pakistanis who have left the country.

Someone living in the United States, Canada, Britain, or elsewhere may have far greater access to gay bars, Pride events, and LGBTQ+ organisations. But access to gay life does not automatically replace access to Pakistani gay life. Language matters. Humour matters. Urdu slang matters. Cultural references matter. The particular experience of being both Pakistani and queer matters.

A Pakistani gay man abroad can join a HeeSay room and suddenly be surrounded again by familiar accents, jokes, arguments, and references. One platform can therefore respond to two different forms of isolation:

• Inside Pakistan: It connects people who lack physical queer infrastructure.
• Outside Pakistan: It reconnects people with a queer cultural world they miss.

Sometimes a dating app becomes part of public health

There is another reason these platforms deserve serious attention: they can help sexual-health information reach people whom traditional outreach struggles to reach.

UNAIDS and national surveillance estimates highlight elevated HIV vulnerability among key populations in Pakistan, including men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender individuals. Mental health literature also points to significant rates of anxiety, depression, and minority stress among marginalized communities. At the same time, social stigma can discourage individuals from seeking timely healthcare.

Imagine being afraid that simply asking a doctor about HIV testing, PrEP, or sexual health might expose your sexuality. Traditional outreach therefore faces significant structural limits.

Historically, community initiatives—such as the pioneer work by the Naz Male Health Alliance (NMHA)—demonstrated the importance of tailored community health programs. While physical community-based organizations in Pakistan face operational and regulatory hurdles today, digital outreach models have increasingly stepped into the gap. Internationally, platforms like Blued/HeeSay pioneered “Internet + HIV Prevention” models to connect users with confidential health resources.

If someone is reluctant to visit a physical clinic, but opens a social app every evening, digital health communication can serve as an accessible first step toward accurate information and safer practices.

The same technology that connects you can expose you

This is where the story becomes more complicated.

Grindr works because location matters; you want to know who is nearby. But when membership in a queer dating app itself reveals sensitive information about someone, location becomes much more than a convenience.

Global cybersecurity research has demonstrated techniques such as location trilateration, where multiple distance measurements can potentially be used to estimate someone’s physical location. While these technical studies examine digital infrastructure globally, the risk becomes particularly serious in any environment where being identified as queer carries severe social or legal risks.

For a closeted gay man, a location leak is therefore not merely a technical privacy problem; it can become a physical-safety problem.

The same principle applies elsewhere:

• A screenshot can become blackmail.
• An intimate photograph can become leverage.
• A fake profile can become a trap.

Reports on digital security in Pakistan document users navigating risks including catfishing, extortion, and offline harassment.

The closet can be weaponised

Blackmail targeting queer people works because the attacker understands the victim’s social environment. The threat does not have to be: “Give me money or I will hurt you.”

It can simply be:

• “Give me money or I will tell your family.”
• “I will send these photos to your employer.”
• “I will tell people you were using Grindr.”

The attacker is weaponising the closet. That is why queer digital safety cannot be reduced to basic advice like “use a strong password.” The danger does not exist only inside the phone; it comes from what can happen when information from the phone enters someone’s family, workplace, or community.

The Pakistani internet is not politically neutral

Queer users also navigate a broader environment of internet regulation and surveillance. Pakistan’s Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) grants authorities extensive powers over online content and electronic data.

In September 2020, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) blocked several popular location-based dating applications, including Grindr and Tinder, citing content moderation policies. Users frequently respond to blocked services through VPNs and circumvention tools. Meanwhile, regional discussions continue around expanding digital monitoring and filtering systems.

This produces a complex paradox: the internet becomes important partly because offline queer life is restrictive, while digital spaces themselves remain subject to restrictions and monitoring.

Your information may travel further than your screen

Location is not the only privacy concern. Dating apps exist inside a much larger digital advertising and analytics ecosystem.

Applications interact with analytics providers, advertising networks, and software development kits (SDKs). Globally, major dating platforms have faced scrutiny over data-sharing practices and the broader real-time bidding advertising ecosystem, where device data circulates across advertising networks.

Most users never see any of this. You open an app, an advertisement appears, and everything looks ordinary. For queer users in sensitive contexts, the stakes are particularly high when data trails could potentially link to sexual orientation or location.

Safety features matter differently in Lahore than in Los Angeles

Technology companies increasingly recognise that identical product design does not create identical levels of safety everywhere.

Initiatives like Grindr for Equality have introduced safety adjustments for users in higher-risk countries, such as disabling precise distance displays, offering disappearing media, discreet app icon options, and PIN locks.

This points toward a much larger lesson for technology companies: localization cannot mean translation alone. Changing English into Urdu does not automatically make a product locally safe. True localization requires understanding the social environment around the user:

• Can family members inspect their phone?
• Could a lock-screen notification accidentally out them?
• Could revealing an exact distance expose their home?
• Can private photographs be saved or screenshotted?
• Can someone browse without becoming publicly visible?

These are product-design questions. For some users, they are also survival questions.

Should you have to pay to be safer?

This leads to a critical question regarding app design. Grindr and HeeSay operate through freemium models where basic access is free and additional capabilities require paid subscriptions.

While charging for premium features is standard commercial practice, tension arises when privacy and safety controls are placed behind subscription tiers—creating what researchers refer to as a “safety paywall.”

It raises a fundamental question every platform serving vulnerable communities should ask: Which features are premium conveniences, and which should be part of the minimum safety standard for every user?

Staying safer on queer dating and social apps

No safety advice can eliminate the risks created by criminalisation, stigma, or bad actors. The responsibility for harassment or harm always rests entirely on the person committing it.

Still, users can reduce potential exposure through proactive digital hygiene:

• Avoid revealing exact home or workplace locations early in conversations.
• Exercise caution with profiles that push for immediate unverified meetups.
• Consider meeting new acquaintances in public spaces first.
• Share meetup plans or locations with a trusted friend.
• Be mindful when sharing photos that include identifiable facial features or recognizable locations.
• Review notification previews, app-lock settings, and discreet icon options.
• Utilize screenshot protection or disappearing media features where available.
• Exercise extreme caution if anyone attempts blackmail, extortion, or coercion. Preserve evidence safely if possible.
• For sexual health, seek guidance from verified health literature and competent healthcare professionals.

These apps are not heroes; they are not villains either

It would be easy to categorize dating apps as either purely liberating or purely dangerous. Reality is more complex.

• They can foster meaningful connections while exposing users to potential risk.
• They can alleviate isolation while reflecting social hierarchies and biases.
• They can serve as channels for health awareness while operating within commercial data structures.
• They can offer a sense of community while creating digital footprints.

That complexity is a reason to analyze these platforms thoughtfully rather than dismiss them.

What would queer-centred technology look like?

A queer-centred approach to digital product design begins with a core principle: The most vulnerable user should not be treated as an edge case.

That means:

• Minimizing unnecessary sensitive data collection at the source.
• Providing granular, free control over location visibility and profile exposure.
• Offering discreet, customizable notifications.
• Ensuring clear data-deletion and account-purging procedures.
• Implementing responsive mechanisms against extortion, harassment, and catfishing.
• Making essential safety features accessible to all users regardless of subscription status.

Most importantly, developers benefit from engaging directly with local community perspectives to understand the real-world environments in which their technologies operate.

Sometimes four hours of “engagement” is really four hours with friends

Technology platforms track user metrics through sessions, retention, and time spent. A four-hour session looks like high engagement on a dashboard.

Behind the metric, however, that time represents human connection: sitting in a voice room with friends, discussing a personal setback, asking about health resources, sharing humor, or simply existing in a space without having to conceal one’s identity.

For many queer Pakistanis, these digital platforms serve multiple roles simultaneously: a social network, a health access point, a digital mehfil, and a vital space for community connection.

Editorial Note:This article reflects the personal observations, analysis, and opinions of the member, Ahmed Rik. Information regarding digital platforms, public health, and human rights is drawn from a combination of published literature, academic research, and personal observation. For specific references, data sources, or inquiries regarding the information cited in this piece, please contact the author directly.