I recently moved to the South, and on Grindr I’m noticing a lot more racist messaging in profiles, sometimes as overt as "no Blacks" and "no Asians." I’m wondering what I can (or should) do as a chat user? Is is sufficient just to block these people? Should I flag their profiles? Or should I message them and ask them to change their profile?

Grinding Endlessly Against Racism

Oh yeah, GEAR, the "just my preference" gays.

JMPGs pop up everywhere in this country, of course, but they're thicker on the ground in more conservative areas. And they have enablers. Just last year, Scruff's founders defended the app's ability to filter people based on their race as a preference and not casual racism that allows guys to block other users based on the color of their skin. (And as Colby Keller demonstrated last fall, it's (unfortunately) silly to think that a person who's into gay sex—and really, really good at it—would find Orange Julius Ceasar's blatant racism disqualifying.)

But first and again and for the record but sadly not for once and for all (for reasons I'll unpack in a moment), here's something I had to say on the subject last year...

A quick word to gay white men: It's fine to have "preferences." But we need to examine our preferences and give some thought to the cultural forces that may have shaped them. It's a good idea to make sure your preferences are actually yours and not some limited and limiting racist crap pounded into your head by TV, movies, and porn. But while preferences are allowed (and gay men of color have them, too), there's no excuse for littering Grindr or Tinder or Recon—or your conversations in bars—with dehumanizing garbage like "no Asians," "no Blacks," "no femmes," "no fatties," etc.

Now on to my theory about casually and/or thoughtlessly and/or maliciously racist JMPGs...

While you can definitely find examples of white gays in their 30s and 40s (and older) doing this kind of crap, it's much more prevalent among younger gay white men. These young guys—often recently out and many from overwhelmingly white areas—get online and start saying dumb, racist shit. So long as they stay in the middle of Kansas or Utah or South Carolina, GEAR, they're not gonna get a lot of pushback. But when a JMPG moves to Chicago or Los Angeles or Baltimore, they suddenly encounter some pushback. Other gay men start to hold them accountable—by which I mean to say, "Other gay men get in their fucking faces," "Other gay men publicly shame them," and, "Other gay men with a lot of time on their hands and more patience than average will slowly explain to them just how shitty they're being."

Decent gay men of all ages and races often despair over this "just my preference" crap because it never seems to stop. That's not true; it does stop—individuals stop. Ideally, after people get in the face of a JMPG, his dormant moral imagination kicks into gear. He starts to think about how would he feel, he recalls what he learned about the Golden Rule back in Sunday School, he makes a few friends of color. Maybe he even takes the time figure out whether his precious preferences are actually his or if he's mindlessly adopted monochromatic preferences assigned to him by porn and racist "beauty ideals." And then he stops being a JMPG. Even if he determines that, yes, he's primarily or exclusively attracted to white guys, he finds a way to talk about his preferences without disparaging anyone.

What happens next... well, what happens next is kinda depressing. Another young and/or dumb gay white man comes along who doesn't know any better to take the place of our ex-JMPG and the whole get-in-his-face/publicly-shame-him/patiently-explain-to-him process starts up all over again.

When you see JMPGers, GEAR, you should say something. Pushback. Be a part of the solution, even if it's slow, one-dude-at-at-time work. With effort we can get out in front of this someday and hit a point of diminishing returns and watch "just my preference" gays go extinct. But for the time being, GEAR, we all have a role to play in combatting JMPG.

Listen to my podcast, the Savage Lovecast, at www.savagelovecast.com.