Carrot on a Stick is a five part blog and podcast series that talks about gay life in the age of hook-up apps, where these apps fall short, what we can do to improve them, and the surveillance economy as a whole.

In a world that seeks to oppress queer people, we find freedom in constructing new worlds that allow us to be ourselves: be ourselves without the constraints of religious oppression, socioeconomic oppression, body standards, and social norms. This method of world building and reclaiming agency is what allows us to exist today. We exist despite every structure around us telling us we should die. These structures tell us that should we decide not to take our own lives and somehow manage to escape persecution from broader society, we should live quietly, taking up as little space as possible away from the world and in the shadows.

This gave way to cruising. The Birmingham LGBT Center defines cruising as: "A gay slang term, [originating] sometime in the early 1960s, as a way for people who knew its meaning to arrange sexual meetings. It was a way to plan sexual encounters without attracting the attention of people who may wish to report them to the authorities, or inflict harm." Cruising existed long before this, with some estimates suggesting that it started in the mid 1800s, but this label helped define the culture and push it forward.

The popularity of cruising gave way to the hanky code, which fashion scholar, J. Raul Cornier, describes as "the first queer sartorial code to simultaneously communicate sexual orientation or identity, sexual availability, and sexual fetishes. The hanky code quickly inspired imagery which became a visual representation of queer masculinity, responded to cultural shifts in the queer zeitgeist, and transitioned as an object for covert communication to an open signifier of queer identity."

The hanky code was a system of wearing different colored bandanas or handkerchiefs to signal to others in the know of your interests, positions, and kinks. We can see the influence of this code in the user experience of apps like Grindr and Sniffies, which (if you're reading/listening to this, you're more than likely aware) offer tags that indicate these interests on a user's profile.

For the decades leading up to and after the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, cruising adapted to technological advacements of the time. Gay men would take out vague ads in the classifieds sections of niche newspapers to signal to others in the know of what they were looking for and where to find them. They also launched personal phone lines, dedicated systems that could match you with someone based on their short voice recording ad.

This system of using newspaper classifieds and phone lines continued into the late 1990s, with the advent of online chatrooms, craigslist, and email. Towards the end of this decade, the first gay dating site, Gaydar, launched and quickly became a huge success - spawning a large group of sister sites and a radio station.

A complete list of downloadable sources will be included at the end of the series :)