How it works
People of the LGBTQ+ community only count for around 5% of the population. This means you have bad odds of finding love or community spontaneously in real life. The only place you have a good chance of finding this is at a gay bar or some other designated LGBTQ+ place.
Join Gaybar’s mission is to improve your odds, anywhere, at any time. So that you very casually just happen to be in the right place at the right time.
Our main feature is a map where you can check in anonymously at all kinds of places. It can be bars, nightclubs, parks, museums, libraries, or mountain lodges. You name it. When you check in, you create a place in the map.
Other users will see this and know that there’s another LGBTQ+ person there right now. They have no idea who it is, but they know that the place is getting colorful. Then 10 more come along and the snowball-effect quite soon makes it a very casual “gay bar”.
The map also shows where there are matches, gold matches and likes. As with traditional dating apps, you can like and match with each other.
But there’s a cool feature here that emphasises our vision of meeting the old-fashioned way. If a match is checked in it will be shown as a cute, little heart in the map. For example, you might see that there are six matches in the park. However, you don’t know who they are yet. The only way to open a match is to physically go to the same place and check in – voila, now you’re in the right place at the right time.
Our hope is that you can walk down the street and see that there are 129 gay men (for example) on the bar to your left. Of those, there are 19 people you have matched with, eight you have gold matched with and 33 you have liked. Tonight, it is a gay bar. Tomorrow, the café on the other side of the street is gay, and next weekend it just happens to be a very colorful party at the beach.
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The best part, and the main reason why this is different from other apps, is that the story of how you met a friend that night, or maybe found love, will never be Join Gaybar. It will not be an app. It will be the bar to the left, the café on the other side of the street, or that crazy party that just appeared on the beach one lovely evening in June. We put you in the right place at the right time. We increase your odds. How you write your story from there is all up to you.
We hope you will enjoy the app -- and that you'll check in a lot!