Akhil Katyal has an extended emailed interview with founder of the hugely popular gay dating website PlanetRomeo who reveals his motivations for the site, his experience with PR and internet dating so far and the latest merger with Guys4Men.
A small part of this story begins in London. In 2002 a young German man came to stay in the city and, like most urban migrants, tried to find new networks of friends and lovers for some good times. Jens found that the easiest way to search for other men ‘of his ilk’ was the internet. Soon enough, he sets about trying his glass slipper on every Cinderella in town who’s logged in. A few days into it, however, he faces a problem. He finds that most dating portals, apart from being a great deal unnavigable, weigh heavily on his pockets. He has to shell out a few extra pounds every time to avoid abrupt closures of chat windows.
By the early years of this last decade, the same time as Jens began his searches, online romance had already become a big business; U.S. consumers alone were spending close to $500 million on personals/dating content in 2003, up by nearly fifty percent from the year before.
By the early years of this last decade, the same time as Jens began his searches, online romance had already become a big business; U.S. consumers alone were spending close to $500 million on personals/dating content in 2003, up by nearly fifty percent from the year before. Our protagonist’s problem is not at all surprising; it is a part of what had already been memoed by Saskia Sassen at the turn of the century, that the internet, in its brief history, has already entered a fourth phase, a phase organized mainly under the sign of e-commerce and all the internet’s backbone softwares are chiefly linked to billing, identity-verification and trademarks protection. Love and sex were no exception to this rule and could be the best of billed items.
Love, which the French phrase for love at first sight – coup de foudre (literally ‘a blow by lightning’) suggests, happens suddenly, almost hitting you when it does, could now be slowly scoured for on the web. Thunderbolts could be arranged. It now becomes only a matter of going about the search the right way. Jens says later in this interview that ‘you may miss on the ‘love of your life’ simply because you haven’t put the right criteria in your search’. That’s some pressure!
Love is after all at once a secular and a sacred feeling. All romantic self-help of the last hundred years tells you that you have to work for love to happen and to last, but when it does happen and when it does last, it’s likened to magic or miracles. Love is approached as labour but received as a gift. Even Adrienne Rich, the American poet, turned coats within two consecutive poems in her 1976 collection of love poems: ‘The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle’ (poem 18). ‘Or in this poem, there are no miracles…if I could let you know…two people together is a work, heroic in its ordinariness’ (poem 19). And that’s the strange thing about love. When only passion does not guarantee you longevity, you spin stories to make it last. Even love at first sight is in that sense a story. In it, what is actually a moment is already understood as a beginning. What is only an enthrallment is afterwards recounted as an opening scene geared towards something else, a shared story. Or if we say that most people, practically speaking, do not believe in love at first sight, that they are far more realistic to do so, then we are asking a question about love which is always already a question of form – a question of realism like in a novel or in all that modern romance self-help or myth like in medieval epic romances or in the greeting cards churned out by romance industry giants that trade in all the talk of soul-mates and love-for-life. Love has to last despite the fact that enthrallment never does. This is why Jens, as you read below, is confused when escorts look for their ‘great love’ or a ‘partner for life’ through their escort profiles. Jens thinks it’s wacky – this very combining of the business of immediate attraction and sex to the elaborate game of love too sacred to be touched by money.
Anyway, our lad’s money crunch in London had given him an idea. Earlier in spring that year, he had already chosen to ride the e-market brainwave and had started a website with a friend/business partner that aimed to relocate a section of the prolific urban escort/client trade from dirty magazines’ back pages to the web; this was done by the name of Erados.com (now fully integrated into PlanetRomeo). Cobbling together the programme codes from this website, Jens and Manuel sprung the first version of ‘GayRomeo’, a ‘gay’ dating website, onto the internet by the October of that year. Before the year had ended, ‘the good old gay grapevine,’ they say, had worked and there were already 3000 free registered users.
Over the next few years the website moved its offices from London to a little room in a backyard of a building in the Friedrichshain district in Berlin and to more roomy quarters in the ‘wild, wild’ east side of the German capital by 2004. By the means of a chargeable Plus account, over and above the usual free user account, money had begun to flow in and the website, now a limited company (as all ventures seem to become!), grew both in numbers and web reach. However, the strict provisions of the German Act for the Protection of Young Persons and Minors, which effectively required that every user be personally verified through rigorous identificatory softwares like PostIdent or Schufa (the German credit protection agency) meant that either GayRomeo had to close shop or remove all its users’ ‘hardcore’ photos. This personalized checking was both expensive, complicated and smacked of unfreedom. The company chose a third option and, in the summer of 2006, happily exiled itself to Amsterdam where the courts were lax, and as they hoped, so were the morals.
In March 2009, by when GayRomeo (also by then, called Planetromeo) had more than 900,000 profiles from just about every country on the planet, it chose the familiar corporate strategy of merger to expand its business. Merging guys4men that was already popular in Asia and America, with Planet Romeo that hoarded most of the European ‘gay internet sector,’ meant that it became the biggest portal online for men seeking out other men for friendship, sex or romance. By this time, they had already begun seeing facebook and myspace as competition.
As of the beginning of 2010 there were about fifty thousand Indian user profiles hosted on the website. This short history of PR – that jumps from the lonely hearts in the highways of London to east side Berlin, to the Dutch capital, while it keeps on exploding onto the thousands of computer screens around the world, including south Asia – is already a big transnational tale. It sets the stage for all the talk of the worldwide ‘genuine gay community’ that the PR team constantly bandies in its publicity material. Indian users of PR, befitting this tale, use a heady mix of references. It is not surprising at all to find photographs of Brad Pitt and Shahrukh Khan or Daniel Radcliffe and Shahid Kapoor used as profile pictures by people in Raipur or Meerut in India, references to the San Francisco ‘bondage scene’ or the Chilean Pokemon subcultures among Kolkata users, or citations from Ghalib and Robert Frost and Timberlake or Sultanpuri jostling with each other in the same profile. PR, like most of the internet, is so relentlessly an impure space that it always keeps on quoting too many (sources) and too much (information) at the same time. Men here look for everything from love and friendship, ‘family-friends’ and travel-buddies, ‘fun and masti’ (the phrase is done to death!) and mazaa, even a sense of belonging and a chance to escape.
I talk here with Jens, one of the founders of the website. The interview was carried over emails sent back and forth between him in Amsterdam and me in London in January earlier this year. (Also, if at some points Jens’ replies sound like a PlanetRomeo ad, it is only a sign of how issues of ‘gay community’ are often plugged in the ways capital flows in our worlds! He can’t just talk of the website without promoting it!)
AK: As you would know, the first personal ad ever to be published was by
a spinster in Manchester – Helen Morrison – who placed it in ‘The Manchester
Weekly Journal’ in 1727. Within four weeks, the mayor had committed her to a
lunatic asylum. We seem to have come a long way from then with millions of
lonely hearts personals floating on the web. Has love become a more
‘searchable’ item lately? Or are we mad enough to go on?
Jens: It’s a little bit of both. It is true that nowadays with the advent
and rapid expansion of the internet, love has become a bit of a commodity,
especially when love means dating and sex. You can go online and shop for
a husband, a sex partner, a ‘slave’, a ‘master’ and the list goes on and
on. On the other hand, gay people are mad enough to persevere, especially
since coming out and going out hasn’t always been an easy thing to do and
for a lot of gays still isn’t an easy thing to do.
AK: The trigger that got Planet Romeo started was loneliness of a boy in London, an
inability to meet the ‘right’ guy, the perfect Cinderella fit. In some
sense Planet Romeo sells that which is the common dream of our times that in
our lives we will find a special person who will salvage us. Has the website
made this search easier or messier?
Jens: Although internet can never really replace physical contact, it is
a great jumping board to make acquaintances. So PR makes it easier
to make the first step and put yourself out there. That has definitely
been made a lot easier, since its rather anonymous and you can turn it off
any time you want. On the other hand, it has made the search perhaps more
complicated too. With more than 1 million active users of the website
worldwide and around 90,000 guys online simultaneously on our website it
is likely that you can’t keep track of everyone and you may miss on the
‘love of your life’ simply because you haven’t put the right criteria in
your search.
AK: ‘Planet Romeo’ was started by you, German guys based in London who
then moved back to Berlin to expand the company till legal restrictions made
you guys shift base to Amsterdam? So you guys have moved around a lot. How
has it been?
Jens: It’s been quite stressful because we were basically chased from our
old place. For example, the move from Berlin to Amsterdam was necessitated
because of changes in German law. On the other hand, moving a lot is also what made us who we are. Quite a lot of our users go on GayRomeo to find friends from in other places and
countries. Because we had first-hand experience on that, we know exactly
how to facilitate cross-countries encounters in a more productive and safe
way. One example is our Travel Ads system through which you can ‘advertise
yourself’ in the city or region which you are visiting.
AK: Most of the users on the website are in some sense looking for a
miracle, for someone who will suddenly overwhelm them by being the perfect
match; some of the bywords for this phenomenon on ‘planetromeo’ profiles are
‘if it clicks’, ‘chemistry’, ‘spark’, ‘tuning’, ‘someone special’,
‘compatibility’ etc.. Don’t you find it strange that people should put so
much effort looking for something that in their own words happens suddenly,
effortlessly, and almost miraculously?
Jens: ‘The search for the one’ is something that remains important for a
lot of us. And as said before, that is not only regarding finding a ‘life
partner,’ it can be and also often will be a search for a person for
special experiences, for a short or longer period, sex-related or not, or
a search for a guide or a club or interest-group. So, people don’t only search for fairy tales. Our users
are much more aware of the fact that fairy tales don’t really happen,
unless you want to see it that way. All these words you mentioned, ‘if it
clicks,’ ‘chemistry,’ show the opposite of what you claim. They show that
our users are much more cautious. When you meet someone outside, you’ll
know quite instantly if it clicks or not. When you want to meet people
online, you need to set some criteria. Next to your fact-based stats and
rigid information about someone’s life and physical appearance, our users
need to factor in other parameters too, more vague ones. Chemistry is one
of them. It’s also a good built-in exit strategy. Some users look great
‘on paper’ but when you finally meet them in person, there is no magic. In
that case you can simply say: ‘Sorry, there is no chemistry’. Our users
are aware of the restraints of internet dating. And, for some people,
having a profile on GayRomeo takes a lot less effort than going out to
bars and clubs every night.
AK: Earlier this year two biggest ‘gay’ personals sites on the web joined
hands when Guys4men merged into Planet Romeo. Tell us the story
behind that merger. Do you think in terms of a world wide ‘gay community’?
Jens: Even before the merger we were thinking in terms of a global
community. And that is thanks to the great potential of the internet. The
web collapses distances and gives us a (new) sense that we all live in one
place, in a virtual portable homeland we call: the world wide web. At
GayRomeo we want to realize that potential of the internet and in a way
unite our users under a platform that will make them feel at home,
where-ever they are. Additionally by highlighting gay rights issues with a
global perspective and by providing community and health information, we
try to reinforce the sense of community among our users, the sense that we
are all ‘on the same boat’ and that we need to work together if we want to
prosper as a social minority. We are not just a contact site. Sense of
belonging to a community more than just mere sex hunting.
AK: How profitable is this business of love and sex?
Jens: We’ve been doing ok so far. We have managed to keep the services
free for users, without the need for any external investment. That’s
important if we want to stay truly independent.
AK: What are the wackiest personals you’ve ever read? Something that
stayed with you.
Jens: Some Escorts looking for their ‘great love’ or a ‘partner for life’
through their escort profiles.
AK: Lastly, there are many complaints you guys receive from users for
banning fakers, people with disability, fat people, ‘unattractive’ people
etc.. If there is one growth industry on online forums it seems to be that
of complaint and hatred. What do you write back to these people?
Jens: We want to keep the balance between freedom and respect for all. We
don’t want to police anyone’s thoughts and ideas and we also don’t want
to give voice to prejudices and hate speech. Juggling with these two
concepts is sometimes rather difficult. We aim to provide an environment
where people will treat each other with respect. We do sometimes get
complaints about ‘no fat guys’ type statements and mainly we advise people
not to take it personally and simply to accept it as a rather
unimaginative indication of sexual preference. But if a statement is more
overtly insulting or racist we do take action.
