A Digital Museum of Real-life Queer Stories

By Siddhi Jain

Real-life stories of queer dating and experiences inhabit a museum of queer swipe stories, accessible digitally, which is the perfect place to be this Pride Month.

An initiative of online dating app Tinder and Gaysi Family, The Museum of Queer Swipe Stories showcases LGBTQIA+ swipe stories. Launched early this year, it is a curated archival project that seeks to collect the many moods, experiences, and complexities of queer dating.

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"#SwipeStories are all based on real-life Tinder stories that started with a Right Swipe as heard directly from our community. They highlight the universality of human connection and how it is culture, intent, gender, and sexuality agnostic. Tinder is for everyone and empowers all kinds of people to make new connections, but we also know that we may lack expertise in gender and sexuality – which is why we partnered with Gaysi Family for their invaluable insight and to help us be better allies," Taru Kapoor, GM – India, Tinder, and Match Group told IANSlife in an email.

Tinder had previously expanded gender identities on their platform to be more inclusive for everyone, introducing sexual orientation so members have more say in how potential matches are ordered and Traveller alert which appears when the app is opened in countries that have laws criminalising LGBTQIA+ status.

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Founder of Gaysi Family, Sakshi Juneja says, "Queer folks have rarely had a chance to engage in the popular idea of dating, friendship, and romance. Archiving these experiences that queer folks in desi communities have had is an important task- one that may lead to a better understanding of the nature of human connection and love, and how universal the experience of meeting someone new for the first time is."

Adding, "Through the active search for archiving stories that revolve around connections, we want to be able to curate a space where queer Indians from across different spectrums of gender, sexuality, age, location, and profession can find stories of people that have similar cultural and social locations. Queer Indians have rarely had much representation of their narratives in popular culture- especially stories of love, romance, and all the little sparks in between. The museum seeks to bridge that gap." (IANS)