Image courtesy of Lex.
French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan famously defined love as giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it. Which is to say, love is that which is impossible—it demands more than we believe ourselves willing or able to give. Dating apps—such as Tinder (with a reported 57 million users), Grindr, Bumble and Hinge, and the countless varieties of the same mould—are built upon the opposite framework. They present us with a catalogue of human options, and allow us to make choices based on proximity and aesthetics. They are utilitarian, pragmatic, transactional. Swiping feels like shopping. Surprise in love, like life, creates possibility. But in the context of our data-centric lives, surprise is a disadvantage, and we are training ourselves against it. He looked better in his photo. We had nothing to talk about IRL. And so on.
Of course, it doesn‘t have to be this way, nor was it always. Writing about Craigslist in The Lonely City (2016), Olivia Laing said: “I always found it weirdly cheering. The unashamed display of need, the sheer range and specificity of things that people wanted was far more reassuring and democratic than the preening, exacting profiles that appeared on the more sanitised dating sites.” Now that dating on Craigslist is no more, Tinder is recording and profiting from our personal data, and BumbleBiz exists (inherently depressing, requiring no qualifiers), are there any corners of the internet where our interactions remain unquantified, where pathos and play is encouraged? Enter Lex.
Launched earlier this month, Lex bills itself as “a lo-fi, text-based dating and social app for lesbian, bisexual, asexual, and queer people.” What makes it different is that is a dating app build upon the text-based personal ad framework—advertisements traditionally found at the back of newspapers, sometimes endearingly referred to as ‘lonely hearts’, in which one describes, in condensed sentences familiar to our online generation, who you are and what you are looking for. There is no way to write an indifferent personal ad. It demands that you articulate your desire, your longing, and that you are, in other words, vulnerable. You can, of course, rely on a stolen joke or trope, but it functions better if you don‘t, as browsing the MetOnPersonals hashtag on Instagram will tell you. Specifity is everything (“my knees go weak for moderately dominant-sadistic big butch women,” writes I’M INSAITABLE in On Our Back Magazine in 1989), though humour is good too (“My ex–bf once got me a donut (just a donut) for Christmas, and I’m pretty sure that’s why I’m a lesbian now. hmu, my standards are low! writes MORE THAN JUST DONUTS? in 2019).
Lex grew out of the popular Instagram account, @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y, which photo editor-turned-app founder Kells Rakowski began—as she tells SLEEK—“in an effort to educate myself about lesbian ‘herstory’ and culture” in 2017. While researching in the digital archive of the lesbian erotica magazine On Our Back (the first women-run erotica magazine, and the first magazine to publish lesbian erotica to a female audience in the US) for her Instagram account, Rakowski encountered a wealth of personal ads, and began posting them online. “They were an instant hit,” Rakowski says. The vulnerability, play and performance of the language of the personal ad was relatable to our own queer generation. Here, there were people revealing themselves in a radically open way without shame and worry about how they would be perceived. “I think language is extra important to the queer community,” Rakowski says.
Inspired by the vintage ads she discovered, Rakowski did a call out for personal ads on Instagram, before making a Google Doc form for followers of @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y to write their own personal ads. “I started posting personals on @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y which quickly overwhelmed the account, so I started the Personals Instagram and featured only personal ads. It became unsustainable (posting up to 20 per day) so this led to the idea of building an app.” Early in November, the Personals Instagram account changed to @lex.app. While still maintaining an account on Instagram, Rakowski posted an image on 5 November to say that it would be the “final signoff” from the Personals Instagram as it evolves “into an independent queer dating platform (not owned by Facebook)”.
Rakowski cites examples of cross-country relationships and community building that have emerged from Personals—“There are so many stories! From engagements, marriages, dating, hook-ups, breakups, friendships, sexting, community art projects, protest poster making, The Great British Bake Off watching, and everything in between.” Unlike other dating apps, you don’t begin with a picture on Lex. While you can choose to link to your Instagram, an initial attraction is sparked by a command of language and a knowledge of oneself. Rakowski describes this as “a thoughtful process”. She explains, “there’s time to slow down and reflect on who you are and what kind of relationship you’re looking for. The readers of the personals might relate to and become more open to someone they normally wouldn’t be attracted to, but the beauty of the personal ad is that you don’t judge a book by its cover. The selfies come second.”