C (12:52)
Okay, back to the grind. Most convention activities took place in the fiserv Forum, which it took about four days to learn how to pronounce. This venue is usually home to the NBA team, the Milwaukee Bucks, and this is where I would do most of my Grindr cruising so I could see other profiles within the radius of the convention area. Every time I walked into the Pfizer Forum, which was multiple times a day for four days in a row, I would find a little corner or a place to sit and discreetly boot up Grindr and refresh my feed to see what profiles were in my proximity. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Grindr, one of its more Terrifying features is the proximity detector telling you what users are near you, whether that be five miles away or five feet away. Every night when I got back to the hotel after recording with Robert and Sophie, I would once again check Grindr to see if any unlucky delegates were put up in the hotels by the airport. The hotel we were staying at was also home to the Idaho and North Dakota delegates. And though I don't believe anyone from our hotel was on Grindr, save for maybe an anonymous profile or two, there definitely were RNC attendees at some of the nearby hotels roughly 1500ft away from my bed. The Grindr proximity detector was quite useful to me in locating profiles active around the footprint of the rnc, as well as when sorting through all my messages back home to confirm who attended the RNC from out of state. Because Milwaukee is about 650 miles away from Atlanta, if someone's distance marker was substantially different from that, I could assume that they were in Milwaukee for the RNC from out of state, even if I wasn't able to confirm through any brief text exchange. I've also done my best to follow up with certain profiles to rule out possibilities of secondary traveling or other random reasons for why their distance markers might not line up exactly, and I think I have it narrowed down pretty well. Okay, you've been very patient. And now I think it's time to read through the highlights from my Grinder inbox. And I gotta say, I think I started off pretty strong. While attending the RNC kickoff party the night before the convention officially started, I got one of the very first messages I received from a 21 year old Republican with the profile picture that's just a close up picture of a dark suit with a dark blue shirt and magenta tie. Already horrendous vibes. He asked me if I was quote unquote with the gop and I said I was attending with friends. And then I got no further response. I saw this guy online throughout the convention and then after the convention was over, he moved like 300 miles away, so I'm pretty sure he was there for the rnc. I got a message from someone who identified himself as a local conservative, quote, but not a hardcore Republican, unquote, and he was excited the convention was in town, hopeful that he would meet my future husband. The first chaser I encountered with the bio, looking for some lady dick to feel in my ass, saw through my cisgender disguise and messaged me cock. I got one other message from a chaser who was pretending to be T4T who asked me if I was in town for for Kitsukon, an anime convention in Green Bay. A nice local messaged me, quote, hope you're finding what you're looking for, smiley face. Which was very nice and just kind of amusing if you consider that he thought I was just a gay Republican looking for some other gay Republican. Another local with the name Older for Young sent me the message, quote, boomer, who will talk politics with you or we can just. I asked him if the quote, unquote, talk politics pickup line works very often, and he replied, quote, less often than I would Hope for on here. 0unquote. He mentioned that he had noticed some convention attendees on the app telling me that they have infiltrated Grindr. He then asked me what exact hotel I was staying at, so that was the end of that conversation. A minority of the Milwaukee locals who messaged me identified themselves as conservatives and were largely excited that the RNC was in town. They vicariously questioned me about how the convention was going, as most were disappointed that they themselves could not attend. One such fella who described Trump's first RNC entrance as electric and a very emotional moment for him and the entire crowd would have liked to attend, but he was busy working at the hospital because they needed, quote, extra staffing just in case. Now, the worst profile picture I found was an older guy wearing a baseball cap and one of those half face skull masks like Adam often used to wear. He said he was from Florida and claimed to be in town not for the rnc but to visit family, and mentioned that Vance had completely sold out his morals for the VP spot. This guy's politics were impenetrable. Maybe this was just like your average Florida independent. Very baffling fella. A younger guy messaged me asking, you're a Republican? And I said, not really putting it lightly, and he never got back to me. I did find a 31 year old chaser named Greg who I do believe was attending the convention and his bio read, quote, anon, come drain me, Trans C D, that's crossdresser, sissy femme to the front of the line. I asked, you like trans? And he responded, yes. We had no further conversation. I did talk with two other people who happened to be covering the convention, including one guy who thought I was with CNN because the Grindr proximity sensor put me near the CNN area when I was actually using Grindr at the Heritage foundation party. And lastly, really, the only guy I saw who openly claimed to be attending the RNC in his public bio was a 32 year old from Shreveport, Louisiana with the username suck me off one word. He described the convention as exhausting but awesome, and told me he was proud to support President Trump and called Trump's speech on the final day amazing. A lot of the RNC speakers, including Trump, talked about Cory Compretor, the man who was killed at the Trump rally during the attempted assassination. So after Mr. Suck Me off talked about how awesome Trump's speech was, I just replied to him, poor Corey. And he messaged me back, cory who? And then he told me what exact hotel he was staying at. Now part of the danger of trying to use Grindr directly in the middle of the rnc, even discreetly, is that even if I'm hunched over on my phone, there is a non zero chance that some passerby or person sitting right above me might catch a glimpse of an unsolicited dick pic that fills my phone screen as I try to check my messages. This is simply a non negotiable part of the Grindr experience. Whatever you do, grainy, unflattering, bizarrely angled photos of some balding 43 year old married man will appear in your inbox. Ordinarily, I would check the profile first to see who might be sending me a photo to weed out the undesirable prospects before even considering to open up a dm. Unfortunately, multiple factors prevented me from doing this. For one, this was research, so I needed to collect the most amount of data possible. But moreover, even if I still wanted to vet for applicable profiles in my DMs, this was impossible without opening up each DM individually and clicking through to their profile from the chat log. Due to one of the many glitches I experienced using Grindr at the rnc about halfway through the week, the app started crashing pretty frequently, but the main glitch I had to deal with, which has since been fixed, is that I could not access anyone's profile from the DMs page. I had to click into each individual chat log to open up a user profile, which meant I had to look at a lot more unsolicited dick pics before even being able to check anyone's profile. So there I was, watching Ted Cruz's speech, sitting underneath about 50 Republicans and right next to both of my bosses, scrolling through an endless stream of dick pics to see who was local and who was here for the rnc, hoping that whatever Republican voter from Alabama wasn't looking over my shoulder at the plethora of dimly lit hog. But I was far from the only one reporting issues with the app during the rnc. Around midday on Tuesday, the second day of the convention, over a thousand users reported a grinder outage in the Milwaukee area on the website downdetector. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote on the final day of the RNC that reports of the Grinder app crashing increased by more than 90% in the past 48 hours across the country. The Down Detector heat map showed grinder outages in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, as well as a hotspot of outages in Milwaukee near the end of the convention, indicating users were experiencing issues with the app, possibly due to an increase in activity. And you will hear more about that activity after this ad break. This episode of It Could Happen Here is brought to you in part by the Challengers soundtrack remix by Boys Noise, which I was listening to as I wrote most this episode while on the plane back to Atlanta. This episode is also brought to you by these products and services.
