28/02/2026
The Grindr Series:
how do q***r people learn to love when there are so few maps to follow?
Mr. Dr. Benno J. Stokvis wrote the research "De Homosexuelen/The Homosexuals" in 1939.
What is different eighty years later?
The Grindr Series brings together five portraits and five personal narratives to explore how q***r intimacy is lived today. The project looks at the question: how do q***r people learn to love when there are so few maps to follow?
For generations, heterosexual culture has offered templates—engagements, weddings, anniversaries, predictable milestones. In q***r life those templates rarely existed. Heterosexual models were followed by lack of other options. Many of us had to invent our own versions of relationships without guidance, without visible role models, often without language for what we felt.
Digital dating promised a new kind of freedom. Apps expanded the field of possibility, connecting strangers across cities and continents. Yet they also changed the nature of connection itself, turning intimacy into something immediate, disposable, and endlessly replaceable.
The five portraits in this series stand as witnesses to that reality. The accompanying texts reveal what happens after the first message, after the first night, after the declaration of love.
Taken together, the works trace the spectrum of q***r relationships:
the thrill of discovery,
the search for belonging,
the impact of addiction and secrecy,
the weight of stigma,
and the fragile dream of lasting connection.
These stories reflect the imperfect, improvised ways q***r people try to build lives with one another—often without instructions, sometimes without safety nets.
The series is not a celebration of dating apps, nor a condemnation of them. It is meant to be a portrait of a community learning, in real time, how to love themself.
Henk is available for storytelling on LGBT History and many more gay related topics such as the project the Grindr Series. Dating in the q***r community and how apps changed everything.
