Out of the closet and onto your phone: the rise of Blued and China’s gay community

Geng Le is not his real name. But the online persona was an important protection when, 14 years ago, he started an under-the-radar website as a much-needed online community for gay people in China. But now he’s out in the open as Ma Baoli – and his new startup, a location-based dating app for gay men called Blued, is making noise and gaining attention as one of China’s most interesting new apps.

Blued launched in 2012. Its progress in that short time – it now claims to have 15 million registered users – shows that China’s stance on homosexuality has changed a lot since it was effectively decriminalized in the late 1990s.

This is Ma’s first proper startup, and he’s confident that it has arrived at the right time for gay people and culture in China. “It is better now than the past, and I believe it will have a good future,” he says. The app has managed to grow, he believes, because the nation’s “gay communities have a close network between them. They will talk with each other to share their opinions about the app, so Blued can be very popular among them.” His role in Danlan, an online community that’s still open after all these years, has also given the dating app a strong degree of credibility.

The app has helped China’s still reticent gay men to have a space of their own, says Kenneth Tan, managing editor of Shanghaiist and a long-time China watcher. “The LGBT community in China has experienced more change in the last 10 to 15 years than their counterparts in more developed societies have in decades,” he explains.

Tan continues:

They’ve moved from meeting in parks, public bathrooms and newspaper stands, to meeting in bars and bathhouses, to meeting through online dating platforms and mobile apps. Whereas in the West, gaybourhoods and other gay spaces are in decline with growing acceptance of LGBT people in mainstream society, in China, these spaces never got to reach their full potential.

Instead, mobile social networks have created a safe zone. He adds:

The proliferation of online platforms and geosocial dating apps like Blued and Zank means many more spaces where gay people feel safe enough to come out. For decades in the West, gay bars functioned as fundamental building blocks of gay community and gay culture. That never really was the case in China — mobile technology came along before the gay community in China was able to build highly visible urban gay spaces. For many, the comfort of staying within online gay ghettoes means they never really need to ‘come out.’ The closet has now grown so big that most don’t know they’ve never really stepped out of it.

Gay gaming?

Blued’s emergence has happened in parallel with Momo, a straight flirting app with well over 100 million registered users. That has stirred up a huge amount of investor interest in niche social networks in China beyond the predominant Weibo and WeChat.

Blued last month secured US$30 million in series B funding led by DCM. Ma (pictured above) says the money will be put into new talent, new features, and more marketing. “We’ll focus on profits in 2015, but we will also focus on users’ needs and provide them more services.”

“Because we have a huge number of active users, it is not hard for us to make money. For example, O2O, gay games, and service for users can help us make money,” he explains.

For the ladies