BoysDo vs Grindr: Two Different Things Both Called "Gay Photography"

More Photographs of Gay Men's Bodies Pass Through Grindr Than Anywhere Else

If you measured by raw volume of images involving the gay male body that actually reach a viewer, Grindr would beat every photography platform on the internet several times over. The profile photos. The unlocked private albums. The constant exchange of images in DMs. The whole grammar of gay digital cruising runs on the visual transaction, and the visual transaction runs on photographs.

This is, statistically, an enormous body of gay-male visual content. It is also not what the rest of the gay erotic photography conversation is talking about. The Grindr image and the BoysDo image are different categories of object — different in purpose, in production, in what the viewer is doing while they look. The comparison only works if the difference is named first.

What the Grindr Image Actually Is

The Grindr image is a credential. It exists to communicate that the person sending it is real, present, available, and within messaging distance of the person receiving it. The job of the photograph is to reduce the friction between two people deciding whether to meet. Composition, light, photographic intelligence — these are not what the image is for. The image is for matching the body in the picture to the body that will, possibly, walk through the door an hour later.

This produces a specific aesthetic. The Grindr photograph is shot quickly, usually on the phone the user is sending it from, often in the bathroom mirror or the bedroom or the gym locker room, lit by whatever light was available, framed by whatever angle the user has decided shows their body well. The visual register is functional in the same way a passport photograph is functional. It works because it is plain.

The platform's social architecture amplifies this. Grindr's grid is sorted by proximity. The interface is built around tap-to-chat. The private-album system is a trust gradient — you unlock more revealing images as the conversation moves toward a meeting. None of this is about the photograph as an object of looking. It is about the photograph as a piece of communication.

What the BoysDo Image Is

The BoysDo image is a made photograph. The photographer set up the shot. The lighting was chosen. The body was positioned and the frame was composed. The image was edited in post and selected from a contact sheet. The photograph is not communicating availability or trust gradient — it is the work, presented as the work.

What the viewer is doing on [BoysDo](https://boysdo.com) is also different. The session has more in common with reading a magazine than with using an app. The photographs scroll past. Some of them stop you. You stay with the ones that catch you. There is no inbox. There is no person attached to each photograph who is about to message you. The photograph stands or falls on whether it is a good photograph.

These are completely different experiences. They are both legitimate. The Grindr experience is the right tool for the Grindr use case, which is meeting people. The BoysDo experience is the right tool for a different use case, which is looking at the work made photographers are making, in the form they made it.

When the Distinction Matters

The reason this comparison is worth making at all is that gay digital culture has spent the last fifteen years training its users to treat the dating-app image as the default category of "gay photograph." This is partly because the dating apps are where most of the volume is. It is partly because the alternative — the dedicated platform for art-erotic photography of the male body — has been intermittently absent (Tumblr's collapse) or under-served (the various paywalled fragmented options of the last six years).

The result is a generation of gay men whose visual relationship with the male body has been shaped almost entirely by the profile-photo register. The slow, photographically considered, magazine-tradition image — the Honcho spread, the BUTT portrait, the contemporary heir to that tradition on a dedicated publishing platform — has had nowhere to live for long stretches of recent internet history.

That tradition is what BoysDo is for. Not as a replacement for Grindr. As a separate appetite that the dating apps were never built to satisfy and that the audience, when reminded the appetite exists, recognises immediately.

Picking the Right Tool

Grindr for meeting people in your city. BoysDo for the photography hour that has nothing to do with meeting anyone at all. The two are separate jobs and the platforms that do each job individually are better at it than any hybrid that tries to combine them.

[Open the photography platform →](https://boysdo.com)

Read our full guide: [Where to Find Artistic Gay Erotic Content Online](/articles/guide-where-to-find-artistic-gay-erotic-content)