The business of pleasure meets the seat of power.

Grindr’s Bottom Line

Once “the scariest gay bar on earth,” Grindr is now courting Washington and Wall Street—and selling an ever more expensive route to a familiar destination

By Matt Kapp

Inside the 12,000-square-foot Georgetown mansion, there were raw oysters and caviar-topped ice cream. Outside, black S.U.V.’s, paparazzi, and a line snaking around the block. During White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend this year, one of Washington’s most sought-after invitations came from a company better known for arranging more private encounters: the gay-dating app Grindr. By mid-evening, however, the bar had run out of liquor. “That was not super popular,” Democratic strategist Alex Slater told journalist Tara Palmeri afterward. Even in Washington, there are limits to what the gays will tolerate.

Over the last year and a half, Grindr has spent more than $1.6 million lobbying in Washington on issues including health-care policy and data privacy. “Grindr is not just a tech company or the largest gay company on the planet,” Joe Hack, the political consultant leading its lobbying effort, told Washingtonian in April. “It’s also a public-health company.” A former staffer for the Republican senators Jon Kyl and Deb Fischer—vocal opponents of L.G.B.T.Q. rights—Hack now represents a rather different constituency.