A Gay Hookup App Introduced Me to My Barber. 9 Years Later We’re Still At It

When I moved into my first apartment in Astoria, Queens, in 2015, I had to rebuild my neighborhood essentials from scratch. That meant takeout across various cuisines, quality iced coffee, cheap laundry, and a barber. The barber thing mattered the most.

Barber loyalty is important to me, as it is to many other men—so much so that it borders on legally binding. Growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, my dad, my brother, and I all went to the same Italian barber, Mario, for more years than I can remember. Later, when I started exploring the city on my own, I’d go to Astor Place Hairstylists, a New York institution, and wait for a seat with my guy, Benny. If he was working, I was there. If he wasn’t, I went home and came back at a different time. Trying a new barber has always felt reckless to me. A drink order can be wrong, and delivery can disappoint, but a bad haircut follows you into mirrors for weeks.

Moving to a new borough complicated that. I was newly out, newly living on my own, and newly figuring out what kind of gay man I was going to be. At first, I followed my former roommate Mike’s lead to his barbershop of choice, where a very nice Spanish barber started giving me a hard part shaved in with a razor. At the time, I thought it looked incredible. Looking back, there are photos I would prefer to stay buried for life.

A little later, once I had settled into the apartment, I found myself on Scruff. For the uninitiated, Scruff is like Grindr’s slightly calmer cousin (let’s not pretend it’s akin to LinkedIn). You log in to a grid of nearby hairy men and a few headless torsos, most with the same and very obvious sex-related intentions. Somewhere in that grid was another Sean, spelled the same way, which I chose to interpret as a sign of trustworthiness.

He was handsome, bearded, about an inch or two taller, and had a smile that suggested meeting him wouldn’t end with me starring in a top-rated Netflix crime documentary. We chatted. There may have been flirting. I was still fresh enough out of the closet that a man messaging me back felt like I was doing something right. But instead of asking for nudes, he told me I should come get a haircut.

Sean worked at Otis & Finn in Long Island City, an LGBTQIA-owned and operated barbershop that felt much more aligned with the person I was becoming than the hard-part situation I had accidentally wandered into. It also felt potentially mortifying. Was I really going to meet a guy from a sex app in broad daylight, sit in his chair and let him play with my head (the one above my shoulders) for 40 minutes while we both acted like this was standard customer service?

Yes. Yes, I was.

Sean remembers the initial weirdness during our first meetup too. “It’s always sketchy meeting someone online for a ‘professional’ service,” he says. He knew we’d chatted, but he also had a job to do. As he put it, nothing more could exactly happen in the chair when “to my left was a straight man and next to him was a lesbian.” Still, he admits he thought I was cute.

But once I sat down, whatever flirtation existed took a hard left into something else. “I realized it was more in the friendship zone,” he says. “You didn’t need or want a hookup. You just needed someone to chat to, to give you honest feedback.”

Source: gq.com