Gerald can’t forget the first time he met a man off Grindr. He was 12. After exchanging messages on the dating app and arranging to meet, the 30-year-old man picked him up outside school.
“I’m nervous,” says Gerald, as he takes himself back to that moment nine years ago, “because I’d never done this before.” They arrived at the man’s place just down the street from where Gerald lived with his parents.
“We went upstairs. His apartment was nasty. Cigarettes everywhere, dirty underwear,” he says. “We sat on the bed for maybe 30 seconds and then he pulled his pants down.”
Gerald is talking at pace, as if hurtling through the situation to avoid any emotional reaction to it. He’s 21 now and seems confident, even upbeat at times, but unmistakably troubled – traumatised – by everything that happened. He was required to perform oral sex on the man. Midway through, anxiety hit and he started to get scared.
Gerald said he wanted to run home and confess to his mum thinking at least he’d be safe. “But for whatever reason I didn’t take that route, and I go along with it,” he said.
They had penetrative. “I just remember being in a lot of pain – and bleeding,” he recalls. But this was just the beginning. For years, from the age of 12 until 16, when Gerald reached the age of consent, he was talking with men on Grindr and meeting them.
Initially, he put his picture on his profile – a photograph of his 12-year-old face – but later he would post a photo of his torso, or just a blank image. He would often tell the men he was 15 when he was 12, 13, or 14, and even though this was still under the age of consent, still they met with him for sex.
Over a two-hour video call, Gerald tells the story from his perspective, revealing what currents were pulling him into such dangerous waters, meeting men as old as 40, and why this continues to happen to others. While his experiences took place in Indiana, in the US, where he was brought up, they mirror what’s happening in Britain and beyond. His reasons for speaking out are clear – to protect others.
“I want to stop history repeating itself,” he says. “I want us to preserve people’s innocence.”
Gerald first downloaded Grindr aged 11 or possibly 12, he thinks. There was no need for ID or even fake ID, he says, which he didn’t have anyway. “I just remember making an account.”
At the time, Gerald was deeply involved in a local church in his hometown of Hammond – not far from Chicago – and where his uncle was a church leader. He couldn’t ignore his growing feelings towards other boys nor what those around him thought about homosexuality.
“Even though I wasn’t constantly being berated with, ‘Don’t be gay, don’t be gay’ in church everything they said felt targeted towards me. So I never really felt safe. I didn’t fit in,” he says. “I had to supress it.” He’d already moved schools after receiving anti-gay comments, so he decided to conceal who he was.
“I was assimilating to what they thought that I should be. And if I do that, I thought, then maybe I’ll experience a feeling of safety,” he says. It didn’t work. Instead, the split between who he was and who he was pretending to be exacerbated his stress and loneliness.
“Feeling ostracised by everybody, especially at church, truly fuelled me finding somewhere [else] and wanting to be on dating apps,” he says. The youngest of four children, he describes his parents as less attentive to him, as if they were exhausted and busy elsewhere when he began putting himself in danger.
He returns to the moment after that first encounter. “It was terrible. When we were finished, I was ashamed, I was sad, I was telling myself that I would never do this again,” he says. But there was something else – a completely novel experience: Gerald felt good about himself. Not because he enjoyed it but “because he had a good time”.
So he saw the man again.
“From then on, it was a continuous cycle of meeting up with him, feeling that shame. I remember thinking, ‘I’m so glad you’re happy, because I hate this’.” He kept seeing the man for months, telling whatever story to his parents would explain being out of the house. “I didn’t realise it then, but I think he met me because I was 12,” he says.
As disgust towards the man grew, he stopped seeing him and returned to Grindr to find other men. It was, he says, “to make myself feel wanted, or sought after. Accepted.” That need, unmet by anything in the rest of his life, never abated. “Because I had convinced myself that there was no reason to want me, to find value in me. I did not feel I had value as a person, because I was consistently in spaces where I felt ostracised. Even in my own home.”
Through the app, however, he could conjure a fleeting sense of self-worth, even a mirage of empowerment. “Sometimes it was like, ‘You chose me and I let you have me. I’m 12 years old but I told you I was 15. It gave me power over something.”
He describes how the men would react to him at that age. His profile would say he was 18.
“Most of them, when I was 11 and 12, were like, ‘Hey, are you sure you’re 18? Because you look really young.’ But we would still have the conversation, and we would still exchange nudes [pictures].” Upon meeting, he would often tell them he was 15, and the men would express reluctance to engage in sexual activity, but only initially.
By 15 Gerald was sneaking out at night, sometimes getting into Ubers, or the men would pick him up. Some encounters were terrifying.
“One guy wanted to have sex in the bathroom. I remember him trying to have sex with me and feeling something sharp,” he says. “I was really nervous that he was trying to cut me.” The man refused to turn the light on so Gerald couldn’t see what he was carrying. Gerald fled, finding himself miles from home late at night with no way of getting home. He had to phone a friend to ask him to pay for a cab.
Being able to turn men down on Grindr was a revelation to Gerald, an isolated Black, gay teenager in Indiana. “That gave me so much validation and power,” he says. Rejecting others, just as he had always felt rejected, was like payback.
Grindr, meanwhile, regularly kicked him off the platform for being too young.
“I got banned a lot,” he says, “but all I did was wait a couple weeks, reset my phone, and make another account. Or use a VPN to make the [new] account so it didn’t recognize that it was the same device.”
The impact of Gerald’s experiences has been profound. He was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder and a form of bipolar disorder. Day to day, “it makes it incredibly hard to trust people,” he says. The memories of those years continue to intrude.
“It was a really lonely time in my life,” he says. “I’m still dealing with the after effects.” He wishes someone had intervened. He imagines someone knocking on a window or waking his parents up when he was trying to get out the house. “So I could be stopped. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. It’s traumatic. And I know I wasn’t the only 12- or 13-year-old that they met up with.” He seems torn between pity and anger at the men he met.
“What was going on that you thought having sex with a 12-year-old was OK?” he says.
Grindr should tighten its age verification processes, he says, but when asked what the biggest problem here is, between the men, the app, and the underlying causes – the homophobia – he thinks for a while.
“I would ascribe the most blame to the culture,” he says. “I wouldn’t have been there if I felt safe. If more people felt safe, we wouldn’t have children on apps seeking out validation.”
When approached for a response, Grindr said: “Our team continuously evaluates and enhances our multi-prong strategy to monitor for, screen, block, and remove underage user profiles and communications by categorizing our app under the most age-restrictive settings in the Apple and Google app stores.”
The company added that it uses a human content moderation team as well as AI tools to ban accounts suspected of being underage – and that it works with law enforcement and child protection organisations to help identity those who misuse the platform.
If you or anyone you know have been affected by the people highlighted in this article, then please report those individuals to the Police on 101 (999 if an emergency) or visit their online resources for further details of the options for reporting a crime. You can also make a report at Crimestoppers should you wish to be completely anonymous. There is help available on our support links page.