Grindr — yes, Grindr — won the WHCD party circuit

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Speaking of parties: The Verge normally wouldn’t do a party report from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner week, also known as “Nerd Prom,” because it’s a bit too much Washington insider circle-jerking for normal people to stomach. (This year was weirder than most, considering that the dinner was targeted by an attempted shooter, it was immediately canceled, and the media insiders kept partying anyway.) But I will make an exception for the party thrown by Grindr — “a midsize tech company that happens to be gay,” as Joe Hack, Grindr’s head of global government affairs — which took place the night before the dinner and can therefore stand on its own. And really, there’s a lot to unpack with this event: In an era of resurgent LGBTQ panic, why did a gay dating app with a reputation for facilitating hookups decide to throw a house party for those Washington insiders? Why did they do it this year, during peak Washington insider social season? And why did they let the media cover it?

Before we answer that question, as always, send any tips, notices, etc. to tina.nguyen+tips@theverge.com.

If someone had said that lobbyists for a publicly traded tech company were hosting a cocktail party on the eve of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, no one would pencil it on the calendar. But when Grindr began sending out invites, Washington immediately convulsed with thirst: Grindr? The “gay dating and hookup app”? Throwing a party? The scandal-hungry TMZ interviewed Hack for a segment and sent their Congress reporters to ask Republican officials for their opinions. The Advocate wrote about the power jockeying inside LGBTQ circles to get a ticket. Writer Josh Barro tweeted that he couldn’t RSVP in time. The Onion wrote an article about the “poppers lobbyists” expected to attend. DC seemed to vibrate with a hope that this party would be somehow different from the usual fare.

But even if they were horny for, well, horniness, they’d be temperamentally incapable of expressing it. Washingtonians, Republicans and Democrats alike, are too afraid to ever break decorum in social settings, because their coworkers, bosses, or James O’Keefe might be lurking around the corner with a camera. (James O’Keefe later insinuated that he sent an undercover mole to the party.) By the time everyone was kicked out at midnight, the most risqué thing I’d witnessed was one passionate kiss (no tongue). The shenanigans were pretty much limited to people thinking about jumping into the pool fully clothed in suits and cocktail dresses — but only, they shrieked, if people put away their cameras. “Please, god, I hope someone jumps in,” muttered a Washington Post reporter with a notebook, as his photographer colleague snapped pictures of the free spirits brave enough to stick their feet in the pool.

Still, this was the Grindr party, the hottest ticket of Nerd Prom, and every journalist, senior administration official, politician, publicist, staffer, lobbyist, influencer, you name it, had been trying to get on the invite list for the past week. For once, the social order was flipped: Sure, a tech company was throwing a party to curry influence in Washington. But this time, influence was begging to be let in. By 9PM, when I arrived, the line was already out the door, and well-connected people arriving in black cars were directed to the end of the street. “We’re at capacity,” the PR assistants at the front told me, frowning at their iPads, and for a moment I wondered whether they were strategically implementing artificial scarcity.

It turned out that the party was at capacity. I just had to do some aggressive name-dropping to get in and go past the foyer.

There’s a general slate of high-end fancy places that party planners fight over for the week— Meridian House! The Four Seasons! The French ambassador’s residence! — but this unassuming Georgetown mansion, built in 1840, was new to the scene. In 2022, a luxury real estate group purchased the mansion for just under $9 million, gutted the 11,000-square-foot Federal-style interior, and reopened it in late 2024 as a high-end rental aimed at the modern, discreet billionaire or Saudi royal: soothing beige walls, designer statement chandeliers, massive tables for huge floral arrangements and pyramids of boxes of burgers and french fries. But the gardens. Oh, the gardens. Somehow, over the past two centuries, the owners had carved out a full half acre of real estate in Georgetown and transformed it into a lush paradise of wandering pathways among boxwoods and trees, burbling fountains and marble statues, terraces enclosed in hedges, hidden greenhouses, and a swimming pool behind ivy-covered walls about two stories tall.

And the gardens were packed with hundreds of DC’s “power gays” (as UnHerd’s John Maier put it) from across the political spectrum, all of whom had been working in Washington for decades and knew the traditional party spots, but had never known this mansion even existed until now.

Not that it was a party strictly for the power gays, mind you — but their allies had to be powerful and connected, too. “I had 10,000 people message me about this,” Hack told me (a straight woman) once I got in. The intrigue over a Grindr party may have done a bit of the heavy lifting, but this was supposed to be just a cocktail party, just one stop on the Friday evening party circuit between the Washingtonian party at the Four Seasons and the UTA event at Isla. Except people weren’t leaving. It might have taken five minutes to get a glass of wine, to say nothing of a made-to-order espresso martini, and getting up the stairs required too much crowd navigation. They wanted to stay, even when the liquor ran out well before midnight.

“Obviously there’s a huge number of Democrats in this country who have done a lot of incredible work on behalf of gay rights, and we work very closely with them,” Grindr CEO George Arison told me, yelling over Daft Punk blasting on the outdoor speakers. “But there are also plenty of Republicans we work with as well, and they are both on the Hill and in the administration. It is a fact that there are a lot of very powerful gay Republicans in this administration. If you probably add up them in total, they have more power than gays have ever had. I mean, one of the four most powerful people in the world right now is a gay man.” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — the gay man who “runs the economy,” as Arison described him, laughing — had been invited, and though he didn’t attend, Shane Shannon, one of his senior officials, did show up, according to Hack. In Washington insider terms, that’s basically tacit approval.

When he started planning the event, Hack, a political strategist who’d worked the WHCD circuit for two decades straight, made a deliberate choice: Grindr would not partner with a media organization for the event, bucking the trend of companies collaborating with news outlets for a proper celebration of the free press pretext. Instead, Grindr was celebrating the First Amendment right to freedom of expression, which does count as a pretext to slot the party into Nerd Prom week — but also, Hack emphasized, allowed Grindr’s priorities to take center stage. “I wanted this to be clear that this was our event. I didn’t want to dilute that attention.”

Several Washington outlets published articles focused on Grindr’s political priorities, in the very staid way that Washington outlets tend to do. Vanity Fair reported that Hack, a Republican and former chief of staff to Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE), had built Grindr’s relationships with House Republicans to shape the App Store Accountability Act, which placed the responsibility for age verification requirements on the app stores rather than the apps themselves. Politico noted that Grindr had “poured $1.6 million into its influence operation since it registered to lobby federal lawmakers in April 2025,” and was now working on a slate of hard policy issues beyond the App Store Accountability Act: kids’ online safety within the national AI framework, IVF and surrogacy access, and its biggest goal, federal funding for HIV prevention. (Hack told me that they were about to announce the hiring of his Democrat counterpart.)

But there was more to the party’s objectives than the lobbying disclosures. Without a second brand involved, Grindr had full control of the party’s atmosphere and how to present itself. It was Grindr’s decision to host the party in this mansion, to opt for burgers and oyster shuckers over passed canapes, to curate the guest list and select their invitees and set the tone of the evening: somewhere between networking event and tie-loosening “having a good time,” as one Republican told me, but well short of anything that could give conservatives ammo in the culture wars.

In short: Grindr was a good political partner for Democrats and Republicans, even in Donald Trump’s administration. And while several big names did show up to the party — Don Lemon, Ken Martin, David Urban, Keith Edwards, Jon Lovett (who ribbed the alcohol situation on Jimmy Kimmel Live the next day) — the vast majority of people at the party were arguably more important to win over. It was senior political staffers, journalists, lobbyists, advisers at interest groups, pollsters, and everyone with some hand in drafting the laws before the electeds vote on them.

Was it typical quote-unquote allyship? Not in the public sense, and don’t expect Trump officials marching hand in hand with the progressive caucus during Pride. But Hack emphasized that while Grindr was “in many ways, just another midsize tech company that happens to be gay,” company leadership felt an urgent responsibility to protect their user base. The upfront way to do that was through policy wins and shaping laws, but he also felt like Grindr had to go one step further than other dating apps: “It’s also a moment where you see a lot of corporations stepping back from their commitments to our community.”

Implicit in his statement was a painful reality: After a decade of advances, LGBTQ rights are slowly being eroded across the country. Several Republican states are petitioning the US Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Funding has been stripped from health services for LGBTQ Americans. The federal government is quietly eliminating benefits for same-sex couples. And if certain online safety laws pass and the anonymity of the internet disappears, the possibility of a Grindr user being outed and punished for expressing their sexuality is all but a given.

And that is what the politicking is for. “We feel, I think, even more of an urgent need to have a seat at the table,” said Hack. “There’s an old saying in Washington: that if you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re on the menu.”

The boys were also there: