Negotiating a Friends-with-Benefits Network: The Negotiation of Chinese Gay Diaspora’s Experience with Blued
Introduction
Two years ago, I made Fu Guo / The Gay Nation, a documentary that came out of my confusion about the disconnection between the Chinese gay diaspora and the UK LGBT community. While filming in London, I started chatting on Blued — a Chinese gay dating app I had already been using across borders — with a Chinese postgraduate student I found cute. Just for the record, I was not trying to recruit him for anything. But he eventually appeared in my film, and since then we have maintained a long-term relationship that is friendly as well as sexual. That whole experience made me realise that, for me and for many Chinese gay men in the UK, Chinese gay dating apps, exemplified by Blued, are integrated to everyday transnational life in ways that are hard to ignore.
Existing studies have shown that queer diasporic experience is increasingly negotiated digitally, especially through platforms that help people manage ties with the homeland, explore the self, and form social connections (Dhoest, 2016; Dhoest and Szulc, 2016; Shield, 2017). For the Chinese queer diaspora specifically, scholars have explored the inequalities that emerge from the intersection of race and sexuality in dating experiences and consider the (digital) dating scene faced by Chinese queer diasporas as inherently colonial. For example, Yu and Blain (2019) study the placemaking practices of first-generation Chinese gay migrants in Sydney and Melbourne through their use of local social media and find that these migrants are subject to a racialised and sexualised power regime in Australia in which they are often marginalised.
Yet, the growing prevalence of digital technologies has enabled the diasporas to access a wide range of online services not only from host countries but also their country of origin (Chen, 2020). The latter, however, despite sometimes being touched upon (see Yu and Blain 2019), is rarely deeply explored. Chen and Liu (2021) examine the digital dating experience of both male and female Australian Chinese diasporas with Tinder and its Chinese counterpart Tantan and develop valuable insights into how culturally specific social media can serve as mediators of racialised dating experience or a form of resistance. This study is, however, predominantly heterosexual. Li (2020), writing about Rela, a Chinese lesbian dating app, focuses on Chinese queer women in Australia. She argues that the livestreaming and group features of this mobile app engender various transnational relationships between Chinese queer women in Australia and those in China. Nevertheless, there is no existing study on the negotiation of Chinese gay diasporas’ experience with Chinese gay dating apps. Moreover, studies of the Chinese queer diaspora are predominantly set in Australia, while other contexts, including the UK, remain underexplored.
Affordance in social media studies is an analytical concept in examining how features of technology relate to human practice (Hutchby, 2001). Arguing against context collapse, Costa (2018) points out that affordance has been used to universalise Western-centric accounts of technology-human relations and proposes affordance-in-practice which stresses the role of sociocultural contexts in mediating the socio-technical reality in diverse parts of the world. In this vein, scholars have contextualised social media use on a global scale (Ong, 2017; Miller et. al., 2016; Toledo and Wynn, 2023). However, existing studies still largely focus on global/western social media (e. g. Facebook, Snapchat) in a (non-) Western context, while largely overlooking the transnational capability of locally developed technology.
This research focuses on Blued, a Chinese-developed gay social networking and dating app. Like other location-based dating apps, it lets users browse nearby profiles, chat privately, and connect through photos and personal profiles and specs, but it also includes more overtly social features such as livestreaming and a feed-style environment for sharing content. Unlike Grindr, which in the UK often feels like the default gay app, Blued is predominantly shaped by a Chinese-speaking user base and is widely used by the gay community in mainland China. My research explores the sociality Blued can co-engender with its users in the UK. I ask how is the experience of the Chinese gay diaspora in the UK digitally negotiated with Blued? By using with here I stress the co-construction of my participants’ diasporic experience, construing affordance as both technically and socioculturally contingent. In answering the overarching question, I research into two interrelated sub-questions: Why do some Chinese gay males (still) use Blued in a UK context? And what kinds of social relationships have been (dis)enabled or (dis)facilitated through Blued within the Chinese gay diaspora?
The data for this research consists of five in-depth interviews with (previous) undergraduates and postgraduates originally from the PRC recruited online on RedNote and app users whom I had previously connected with through Blued, supplemented by my autoethnographic accounts. Interviewees are referred to by pseudonyms unless they have explicitly agreed otherwise. My positionality as a Chinese gay diaspora and a user of Blued became an advantage during both the recruitment and interviewing process by facilitating a safe space in which my participants were comfortable sharing otherwise withheld information. Following a non-media-centric approach, I do not isolate Blued as if it exists in a vacuum. Relationships do not stay obediently inside one app but move between Blued, WeChat, face-to-face meetings, and all the other little infrastructures of intimacy. In that sense, I approach this material through a polymedia perspective to gain a holistic understanding of the relations formed, as the online and offline are never separated (Madianou and Miller, 2013; Miller et al., 2016).
In the following sections, I will first explore the various reasons why my participants use Blued by referring to its affordances, and then argue Blued engenders an interpersonal Friend-With-Benefit (FWB) network within the Chinese gay diaspora that negotiates their transnational experience. In both sections, I shall demonstrate how different factors, especially spatial and temporal hypermobility, which I consider to be a distinct social context for UK Chinese gay students are woven throughout this article.
Following a non-media-centric approach, I also do not isolate Blued as if it exists in a vacuum. Relationships do not stay obediently inside one app. They move between Blued, WeChat, face-to-face meetings, travelling, sleepovers, voice notes, and all the other little infrastructures of intimacy. In that sense, I approach this material through a polymedia perspective (Madianou and Miller, 2013; Miller et al., 2016): online and offline are not separate realms but thoroughly entangled ones.
Why Blued
Chinese comes first
If there is one very simple answer to why my participants use Blued in the UK, it is this: they want to meet Chinese gay men.
Upon posting my recruitment ad on social media, someone commented:
“I hope you discuss why Chinese people, living overseas, still prefer “Asian cuisine”, feeling that the Westerners can’t ‘touch deep into their soul’ stems from a unique understanding of the ‘bitterness’ experienced by East Asians and only East Asians can relate to.”
“Hum, he is exactly talking about me. I like ‘Asian dishes’. I do not like hairy guys, so I will pass the whites and blacks.”
Wen is a taught master’s student. That was what he responded when I showed him the comment above. Maybe not surprising to many, his main reason for using Blued and not so much Grindr is that he prefers Asians over other races. Other races are often attributed with undesirable traits such as being smelly, hairy, unhygienic, and sometimes promiscuous. In many cases, these judgements are made without prior intimate experience with people from other racial groups.
Interestingly, while my participants were themselves navigating racialisation in the UK, they were not outside racial thinking. They carried it too. It is not only that Chinese men are preferred. Chineseness is also imagined as comfort, familiarity, and legibility. These preferences are not purely personal but shaped by broader racial imaginaries. This is similar to what Chen and Liu (2021) found in diasporic Chinese heterosexual men’s perception of white females. These stereotypes, socially shaped and politically loaded, may result from their experience of living in a racially homogeneous China (Dikoötter, 2008), western-imposed racial hierarchy, along with the PRC’s nationalist propaganda (Girard, 2021). Such generalised perceptions of other racial groups is almost a reversed sexual racism in which people are sexualised based on presumed racial attributes and ranked within a hierarchy (Bedi, 2015) except the fact that such sexual racism operates in the peripheral of the dating scene in the UK.
No More English please
A reason identified by all my participants is language and the associated cultural barrier. Raised in China, none of my participants speak English as a first language, and many described feeling awkward, embarrassed, or simply tired when speaking English in flirtatious or intimate contexts. Many of them thus choose Blued over Grindr because it allows them to avoid speaking English and becoming a different, clumsier version of themselves. Culturally speaking, one participant compares the experience of using Grindr and Blued as Whac-a-mole vs. Expansion; “to form connections with foreigners is tiring and requires skills. Sometimes if you are lucky, you get what he is talking about, the memes, the jokes, other times you miss it. While meeting Chinese guys you are expanding your commonalities and knowledge about each other seamlessly.”
Blued can feel less like entering a new social universe and more like extending one’s own. Participants often expected that someone else on Blued would understand things such as coming out, family pressure, education, and the peculiar textures of growing up in China, which my participants believe non-Chinese people can hardly understand.
Hypermobility
“I may go on Grindr more if I were to stay 10 years here. But why would I do that if I only had one year?” Cheng told me. He was a master’s student at Nottingham but has now graduated and gone back to China. “You do not have to leave your comfort zone because it is not worth it. Blued maintained my ‘Asian tooth’. That is cool.”
I use the term hypermobility to describe this condition. My participants were not the kind of gay migrants explored in many other studies who move or have the desire to move to a new place permanently (e.g. asylum seekers); many were students living in a highly temporary mode, always already aware that they might move soon, go back to China, or go somewhere else next. Under those conditions, opening oneself to a new social world may simply not feel worth the effort. To most of my participants who tend to stay in a Chinese circle in nearly all aspects of their social life in the UK, Blued is but another way to maintain their integrity by sustaining a culturally familiar form of desire.
Grindr and Blued, more than a hook-up?
The narratives of those who are/were on Grindr propose a slightly different account of their use of Blued. Using Grindr for them means entering a racialised dating scene. Indeed, they have experienced sexual racism, both exclusion and fetishisation (Bedi, 2015). Some reported low response rates and encounters of yellow fever. In this circumstance, they claim to strategically retreat to Blued. “I am not happy playing your racial game, so I just quit.” In contrast to a queer cosmopolitanism enabled by dating services (Ong, 2017), in this case, using Blued is a form of resistance to a racialised dating scene by retreating to a mono-racial context (Chen and Liu, 2021).
“I am more willing to use Blued in the UK because I can filter some low-quality gay guys thanks to the UK government. To be able to study here, whether you are skilled or rich. I think somehow Grindr replaced Blued here for hook-ups, while I use Blued sometimes as LinkedIn for networking beyond sexual purposes.” said Ao, a final-year undergraduate at Oxford.
Class enters the picture here whether one wants it to or not. The kinds of families able to send their children to the UK for study are not representative of China as a whole. Access to UK higher education relies on educational capital and financial support. So, the men on Blued in the UK are not only marked by sexuality and migration but also by forms of privilege. That likely affects how they travel, how they imagine their futures, what risks they can take, and how casually they can treat transnational movement.
Interestingly noted here, Blued has widely been perceived and used as the hook-up app for Chinese gay men domestically (Wu and Trottier, 2021). Wu and Trottier (2021), examining various dating apps gay men use in China, argue that 质量 (quality), a concept highly related to social class and financial status, of the users matters when choosing platforms, and in this regard Blued is infamous due to its large user base. However, in the UK context, for Ao, the niche of Blued as a hook-up app changed with a shifted user base to a higher class and well- educated demographic, while Grindr replaced Blued as a hook-up app in the UK considering its large user base and its normative way of being used in the UK gay community. His intention of using Blued as networking medium is also informed by his perception of Chinese gay students’ hypermobility, including his own.
“I know a lot of them will go back to China soon and some of them may go somewhere else just like I do. I can have connections all over the world no matter where I go.”
Here, hypermobility for him does not function just as current spatial context, but an anticipated temporal future for himself as well as potential connections, thereby facilitating his alternative approach to Blued. Ao’s account captures how the app’s affordances underwent a renegotiation due to a changed demographic and mobility along with the subjective understanding of these social realities. In China, Blued may be associated with one kind of social interaction. In the UK, among a smaller, more specific, and often more privileged user base, it can become something else: part dating app and part networking device.
Constructing a friends-with-benefits network: Sex first, but not only sex
Friends with Benefits (FWB) often refers to “a new relationship style that blends aspects of friendship and physical intimacy” (Owen and Fincham, 2011). In practice, though, what my participants described was more slippery than that. The “benefits” were not always ongoing, and the “friends” part could become more important over time. For this essay, I use FWB broadly to refer to relationships that begin with sexual or erotic contact, even if they later shift into something less sexual and more companionate.
“[…] so, yeah, you are my friend, not about sex.”
“But what if I’m ugly in the first place?”
“Haha, then we wouldn’t meet.”
Relationships developed on gay dating apps are predominantly based on sexual attraction (Wu and Trottier, 2021). According to sexual field theory, people on dating apps are subject to a system of sexual stratification based on appearance, age, style etc. (Green, 2014; Wu and Trottier, 2021). This is also the case for my participants on Blued. In sorting people to connect with, geographical distance which was considered important back in China matters less to my participants in the UK.
“I feel lonely […] population is so small. You flip several times, and you see people outside
London.” said Cheng.
“[…] I think it is ok because we may travel to each other’s city.” said Ao.
The excerpts above show two main reasons why participants find distance no longer a determinant. The user base in the UK, even in London, is small. Therefore, participants cherish each opportunity to form relationships with potential FWB while taking their perception of Chinese student’s mobility within the UK for tourism into account, envisioning future encounters. A match in another city is not necessarily too far away; he may become tomorrow’s sleepover, next month’s guide, or a future contact somewhere else. It works not only in the present but also in anticipation.
Ao explained to me how our relationship had help him practically. “I think meeting people from Blued has definitely helped me, like you, my dear sister, so I don’t have to find a hotel tonight”, talking to me, he was sitting on my bed before his flight back to Wuhan the next day. Sleepovers came up repeatedly. They are one of the small but very real infrastructures of this network. One may have FWBs in different cities, forming a FWBs network. If you have FWBs in different cities, you can travel more cheaply, stay over, maybe have sex, maybe not, and still be cared for in ways that are more intimate than ordinary friendship but less demanding than romance. FWBs can also act as local guides, and the shared queer identity can often encourage collective explorations of local queer spaces. Ao, for example, initiated a visit to Vault 139, a London gay cruising club I would not otherwise have heard of or dare to visit. These ties can travel beyond the UK; I once bought a camera for an FWB while I was in Japan.
What all participants described, in one way or another, was a sense that shared Chinese gay identity plus physical intimacy could generate trust. Because you had crossed bodily boundaries, you could also cross emotional ones.
“Sexual contact is the fastest way to form intimacy,” said Ao. “Because you have seen my most private part, there is nothing much to hide, even if we do not have (sexual) thoughts anymore.”
Indeed, Ao and I initially met out of sexual attraction but soon found ourselves incompatible sexually, yet we stayed as FWB (in this case, no intense sexual contact existed thereafter) and added each other on WeChat. According to participants, adding WeChat often only happens with good face-to-face encounters after which they cease using Blued as a main communicative device. A communication shift to WeChat suggests a transformation of relationship from semi-strangers to FWBs.
“Because we shared a gay identity and had intimate contact, I would share my experience regarding of my gay identity, topics that I cannot share with other friends because of privacy. But with you I can because I feel relaxed.”
Reported by all participants, the trust that emerges out of a shared Chinese gay identity along with sexual contact often opens up a safe space, online and offline, for them to freely discuss culturally or morally sensitive subjects away from heteronormative, homophobic, and conservative Chinese/heterosexual context, may that be coming out, shame, sex, loneliness, fear, and the general mess of trying to live a gay life across different social worlds. In that sense, FWBs could provide queer emotional support.
However, this deep intimacy is the very reason why the FWBs network largely remains on an interpersonal level instead of community. “If I added someone after you from Blued and found you guys are friends, I’d feel awkward because I do not want to become gossip in someone’s mouth.” said Wen. His concern arises directly from the intimate nature of the FWBs network. Because he realises how close this relationship can be, he assumes that the same discussion of private topics would happen between his FWBs’ FWBs in which himself may become the subject of discussion. To avoid that, he intentionally avoids strong connections with more individuals, thereby diminishing the possibility of forming a wider gay connection in the UK.
The network exists, but people do not always want it to become too networked. The very thing that makes FWBs valuable, privacy, select intimacy, discretion, emotional safety, also makes wider collectivisation difficult. What Blued seems to foster here is not exactly community in the warm political sense but more interpersonal. It is a loose network of ties that are caring, useful, intimate, and sometimes slightly awkward.
Conclusion
Following Costa’s (2018) idea of affordances-in-practice, I have explored why Chinese gay men in the UK use Blued and what kinds of sociality it helps produce. Blued’s significance lies not simply in its technical features, but in how those features are reshaped by language, cultural familiarity, racialised dating, temporary migration, and classed mobility.
For my participants, Blued is not just a dating app. It can be a comfort zone, a retreat, a filter, a networking device, a travel infrastructure, and sometimes a very efficient route into friendships. What it seems to engender is a friends-with-benefits network that often begins in attraction but can become practical and emotional support systems across borders.
At the same time, this network remains mostly interpersonal rather than communal. It does not necessarily produce a wider Chinese gay community in the UK, partly because the intimacy it relies on also makes people more cautious.
Through this article, I demonstrate one possible way in which Chinese gay diaspora’s experience in the UK is digitally negotiated with Blued, a gay dating app that emerged from a Chinese context. Questions remain, however, around agency. Upon ending my interviews, I asked about their general experience of living in the UK. The unified response was “out of place, but feeling ok”. I keep returning to that. Although FWBs networks enabled a tourist form of self-exploration or, arguably, liberation by exploring queer scenes, at the societal level, this is very much peripheral to any social change. Similarly, one may ask whether retreating to a Chinese dating app can be considered a form of resistance if there seems to be no power against the oppressive racial paradigm? But at the same time, the community members themselves are feeling ok. Does that suggest we should care less about what the big words mean (race, queer, etc.) but focus on how to live happily as a whole? I leave that open for further contemplation.
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