I was invited to give a 10 minute talk on the evolution of courtship rituals, both traditional and modern, for the JAKETalks in Seattle, on February 21st of this year. The following is a rough transcript of the talk, and the video is also below.

(Looks around at crowd) You are all less than 250 feet away from me. Haha, Scruff jokes.

I’m Michael James Schneider. I’m a writer for PQ Monthly and I write for my own wildly unpopular and awkwardly named blog. I write about a few topics, but lately I’ve been writing a lot about dating apps. In fact, so much so that people have started calling me The Scruff Whisperer. “Pause for laugh.”

In the fall of 2012, I found myself single and almost 40. I downloaded the Scruff app at the insistence of my ex. Now, I’ve been single for almost three years, I think I’ve become a professional spinster. I’ve taken the Buzzfeed “Which classic Dickens character are you?” quiz many times, change the answers I give, but I get Ms Havisham every time. Jokes.

To give you a little bit of background, what is this Scruff thing? A Scruff is a guy thinks he’s fly, also know as a buster. Wait no, it’s a dating app for bearded guys who want more Instagram followers. Wait no, it’s a location based mobile phone application that shows you a grid of available men who tend to skew to the hirsute end of the spectrum. Notice I said “available”, not necessarily “single”. I’m looking for something monogamous and long term. Not everyone is. Some guys are on there looking for friends and “workout buddies.” Me? I’m Alanis Morrisette looking for her next Dave Coulier.

“First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage….” Wait a second. This is a playground song that a lot of us have been taught and learned at an early age, and it’s one of our first heteronormative indoctrinations. It doesn’t really fit for all queer relationships, does it? In fact, even for straight relationships, sometimes the order goes: baby first, then marriage, then love if you’re lucky. But what comes before love, or even lust? Well, courtship.

Courtship, defined, is behavior that results in mating. It can be simple, something as subtle as visual or chemical stimuli, or something very complicated, like a series of progressive actions by two (or more) individuals. No matter where we fall on the relationship spectrum, if you possess sexuality, you have courted someone at one time or another. Animals do it, in their quest to find an ideal mate…or even a mate that’ll “do”. Some tropical birds perform ritualized dances that involve numerous gestures and components to woo a mate. And humans? Well our human courtship rituals can be both more complicated and subtle. We all shake our tail feathers in different ways, we all flaunt our plumage, at one time or another, we’re all the cat laying a dead bird at someone’s feet.

The question isn’t “Does courtship still exist?” Yes, it does, and probably always will, as long as sex exists. The real question is, “If modern courtship is done through dating apps, how is it affecting queer culture?” Besides, of course, the life-changing ability to sext and poop at the same time.

Human courtship is alternately charming and messed up, there’s no way to sugarcoat that. Women from an Amazon tribe expressed sexual interest in their partner by spitting in their face. In the Native American Choctaw tribe, the males would express interest in a female mate by throwing a pebble or a token at her and seeing if she threw one back. Now the African Ibo tribe, those fuckers knew how to party…and exemplify misogyny. If you were a young male of the tribe, and you considered yourself potentially ready for marriage, you would start to broadcast this by showing disdain for helping out with household chores like cleaning and cooking. You would hang with the tribe elders, and your dad more and more. You would distance yourself from childhood treats like finishing the soup at the bottom of the bowl, and you would stop eating grasshoppers.

At some point your dad takes notice. “Hey son, I noticed you’ve been a lot less helpful around the house, a lot more clingy with the older dudes, and not eating as many insects as before. I think you might be a man.” You agree: “Yeah Dad, so…I like this girl a lot.” You would think at this point you would go up to her, ask her out? No, you get your friend to go to her family’s place, and he brings kola nuts and palm wine, and your friend asks her family if she likes you, or if she like-LIKEs you. If she says yes, then it sets off a whole other set of pre-marriage rituals and and palm wine and kola nuts start flying in everyone’s face.

So what’s the modern, dating-app analogue to this, to any of these? How do you let someone know that you find them attractive, that you want to give them your kola nuts? Well, you “woof” at them, or “swipe right”, or “star” them. This is the first tentative step of letting someone know you find them attractive, and then they can reciprocate if they feel a mutual attraction, they can “throw the pebble” back at you. And yes, on Scruff, you woof. Maybe this is rooted in pup culture, I don’t honestly know what makes the noise a dog makes any sexier than say a crow’s caw, or a cow’s “moo”. And sometimes, getting woofed at a lot feels a little annoying, somebody get that dog some chocolate.

Any of these modern cues, including the woof, aren’t exactly subtle, but courtship it seems has never been about subtlety. Take cruising for example. In the early to mid 20th century, there was a need to keep queer sexuality a secret, and cruising subtly for gay sex in often public locations emerged from this. Even using the word “cruising” in certain contexts of conversation would cue another gay listener to the speaker’s hidden sexuality. Yes, I and probably you have heard our gay brethren talk about being “old-fashioned”, and maybe even heard some whispered slut-shaming…but when you think about it, doesn’t that smell like privilege? Make no mistake about it, whether you love it or loather the idea, cruising was an act of bravery and necessity in its time, and we should all be thankful for the pioneers who came before us, when that furtive, affectionate, rough grapple in a public restroom was as much an act of beautiful human sexuality as it was an unintentional political protest.

So what next? What comes after the thrown pebble, after the “swipe right?” This is the point where more information is found out. “Where are you from?” “How old are you?” “What are you into?” But it’s not always verbal. As we approached the latter half of the 20th century, and the United State’s sexual repression loosened its grip a little bit, other, more overt nonverbal indicators of ones preferences emerged. Yes, I’m talking about the Hanky Code.

Totally unsubstantiated rumor has a sort of bandana code popping up as early as post Gold-Rush west coast, where the lack of women in mining communities meant the local men had to improvise at square dances. The men wearing blue bandannas, either around their arm or in their pocket, took the male role in the dances, and the men wearing the red handkerchief took the female role. Other queer folklore has a writer for the Village Voice in New York in the early 70s jokingly suggest that men indicate their preference with different colored hankies hanging out of their back pockets. Gay men took it seriously.

A black handkerchief in the right pocket could mean you’re into being the dominant role in S&M, while green in the left pocket meant you could be had…for a price. Red, yellow, there were as many codes as there were variations on your particular kink.

photo by David Albright

And now? Well, now in the world of dating apps, there’s not a lot of subtlety, but maybe that’s a good thing. With so many people looking for so many different things, maybe it’s a good thing that we can see whether or not we’re compatible in the ways that count, in the ways that are dealbreakers. Yes, mystery and nuance will always be sexy, but they’re not inherently essential to courtship. Would I rather know if the guy I’m crushing hard on is a bottom, before we go out? Yeah. Do I need to see a picture of his lumpy butt in a jockstrap? Probably not.

So now what? We’ve throw the pebble, and he’s thrown the pebble back. Well now, comes meeting up. Now, here’s the thing. This next part has become less and less black and white through the years in Western civilization. If you’re in Japan, there’s a time-honored tradition of Omiai. While on the surface it’s an arranged marriage, it’s a bit more complex. Still practiced a bit today in upper classes, Omiai originated during Japan’s feudal era, mostly for political alliances. Arranged marriages are practiced in many cultures, but they obviously bypassed queer culture. So it’s safe to say that if you’re practicing Omiai in Japan, you know it’s a date.

In contemporary Western culture, it’s not so clear. The consequence of having so much variety in what we’re looking for, means there’s a still a bit of mystery to be had when you decide to meet someone for the first time in person. There’s a trend lately to refuse to call anything a “date”. We’re just “meeting up”, “grabbing a beer”. I’m looking for a “workout buddy.” On the surface this can be frustrating, it can lead to misunderstandings, it can lead to hurt feelings and even heartbreak. This is where the waters are muddied, but maybe in the best way. Hear me out.

In modern Western queer culture, we’re largely rejecting what came before, since those relationship models didn’t fit what we knew we were looking for, exactly. We’re creating our own sets of rules, our own forms of love, our own courtship rituals. I’ve made a career about writing on my blog about my own frustration with dating, about my search for love. I’m not the only one. Television shows, articles, webseries about the difficulty of romance and courtship in the modern queer world are as numerous as there are people in this room. But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe, these are just the natural growing pains of the emerging queer dating culture, distinct from heterosexual dating culture.

Maybe, just maybe, this is what it looks like when a part of society that’s been marginalized for so long, starts coming into its own. The woof, the poke, the swipe right? These are our own pebbles we throw, but they’re much more than just that. They’re our emerging language of queer courtship. No, not every gay person is on apps by a long shot, but millions are, and maybe in the year 2115, some hologram standing here will be talking to the JAKE talks audience about the ancient 21st century practice of “woofing”. And maybe, the future of courtship sounds less like a suitor at your door with flowers (doorbell chime sound), and more like (Scruff “message notification” sound).

Thank you.